Losing my Virginity in Shanghai

Time was when "disruption" was considered a bad or negative thing. The disruptive pupil in class sent to sit on the naughty step, for example. Or the brilliant, yet disruptive, athlete excluded from the team for undermining collective morale.

Then along came Al Qaeda, with their cheap and brutally effective philosophy of asymmetric warfare -- disruption incarnate -- and suddenly disruption was being touted by charlatans and Banksters everywhere, anxious to give their spiel and misdemeanours a patina of justification and cool.

Today the media world is awash with cover stories and profiles of so called "disruptors", hurry-come-up business folk who were once perfectly happy to be labelled entrepreneurs.

Nothing particularly wrong with that, I hear you argue. And I'd agree. Every generation is entitled to define itself.

But now we've got traditional business tycoons, not content with their excessive billions, trying to jump on the disruptor bandwagon -- among them Richard Branson, a man who's never been backward in coming forward, whether it's over music, ballooning or negating the rules of cricket.

Like him or loath him, Mr Branson is undoubtedly very good at self-promotion. And I'm sure that his 10-million plus LinkedIn followers will be over-joyed to hear that his hijacking of the "disruptor" moniker has been spectacularly successful, mostly notable with his pet airline Virgin Atlantic.

My journey on Virgin, just completed, from London to Shanghai was the very exemplar and stress-inducing essence of "disruption".

From the senior check-in staff, who were adamant that I needed a China visa to transit Shanghai on my way to Tokyo; who insisted, despite my protestations, on checking my bags through to Japan -- even though I was changing planes to a non-corresponding airline; who found it impossible to say "hello" and even mouth a hypocritical "have a good day"; to the cabin crew who were more than happy to sell me whiskey but not give me a tomato juice, because "there wasn't enough room on the trolley", Virgin and its staff in their tawdry red uniforms were wrong, wrong, wrong. Or should I say disruptive, disruptive, disruptive?

Luckily I kept my cool. For I was far too busy marvelling at the unbounded brilliance of Mr Branson's new business strategy of "disruption".

Fortunately, one can lose one's virginity only once. Losing mine wasn't particularly pleasant, not at all what it's cracked up to be; an experience I'm sure I share with many others.

Seduced by the "great disruptor", I guess you could say I was shanghaied.