Alain De Botton wrote a great book called “A week at the airport”. I say great because he managed to make the airport experience exciting when most of us who have to use those facilities find them dull to terrifying with every other negative emotion in between.
I used to spend a lot of time in airports before the global financial crisis put a stop to business travel and heralded the dawn of video conferencing. This is pretty impractical as it’s hard to read body language and therefore difficult to hold a normal conversation. But it does at least allow the sad sacks who work in Financial Services to pretend that they are on telly.
My time at airports now is driven by the fact that I live in a City that is so far from any other centre of civilisation that the only way to get anywhere is to fly. My most recent trip was to the land of the long white cloud. We brought our baby daughter on her first flight. She was there to visit her kiwi relations including her one hundred year old great grandmother, who was quick to point out that she had no responsibility for the sinking of the Titanic or the start of World War One, even though she was around at the time.
Our daughter seemed to enjoy her odyssey through the international terminals of Melbourne and Auckland airports, but I enjoyed them less. Years of travelling has not inoculated me to the trauma of queues, suspicious looks from officials, crap food and endless waiting.
Queuing is my biggest complaint. Airports are designed to shuffle you from one place to another like cattle making their way through an abattoir. It starts at check in when you are made to snake through a cordoned off maze while staring at the empty on-line and business check in queues. This process seems constructed to make you plan to pay for an expensive ticket or print out your boarding pass at home next time.
After check in you have to queue to get through security. This is when the first pangs of anxiety kick in. Hardly any of us are terrorists, but the system makes us all think we are. Staff here are usually soulless automatons ready to pounce on the smallest infraction and unwilling to yield to logic or fairness. You can take ten containers of a murky liquid onto a plane along with a large empty bottle to mix them in (they’ll sell you large bottles of vodka in duty free which are perfect for the purpose as well as offering a sharp object when smashed. And you can down the contents to work up the courage to become a jihadist before hand). This is providing no individual container holds more than 100ml. But god forbid you try and bring a half empty tube of toothpaste onto a flight and argue that if the tube holds 120ml when full, then it holds about 60ml when half full.
These people spend their entire working life confiscating toiletries and soft drinks and yet don’t seem to know that 100g is not the same as 100ml and whether jam is a solid or a liquid. But that’s the subject of a completely different blog.
After the scanning machine, you usually meet a steely eyed gentleman who pulls some people aside for a random check, apparently to check for explosives. It’s supposed to be random but for some reason they always seem to pick on me. I must fit some profile on international security systems. I’m guessing it’s because of the scruffy knapsack I carry with me when travelling, which has now been checked for explosives more often than a Kabul backpacker.
This is where Auckland airport first impressed me. The guy wielding the magic stick knew that he was performing a useless task so he spiced up his day with a little humour and actually treated me like a person.
After security you have to queue to get through immigration. This really should be called “emigration” but I wouldn’t recommend pointing this out to the humourless customs officers who man these posts. I have travelled all over the world with my passport in a protective see through plastic cover with no issues. But every time I pass through an Australian airport I’m asked to remove it as though it was covered in cow poo. Being surly is an obvious requirement for employment in the Australian Customs service.
The final queue you will stand in is the messiest. Getting on a plane used to be simple; you waited for your block of seats to be called and then strolled down the gangway to your seat. Now airlines charge extra for checked in baggage, so passengers typically carry everything bar the kitchen sink as hand luggage. This creates storage wars and makes everyone want to get on the plane early to get first dibs on the overhead lockers. Parents with kids and old people needing assistance are allowed on first. This is widely flaunted however so that children can be as old as 37 and old age pensioners seem to begin at 39.
Anxiety normally increases for me at this point. People join the queue from the side which annoys me mainly because I’m too shy to verbally abuse them. When I eventually make it onto the plane, I think my waiting is over,but I’m usually stalled by a middle aged businessman who stands in the aisle while he sorts out the contents of his briefcase, turns his blackberry off and makes a final call to his secretary. All the time ignoring the forty people waiting to get past. And then you’ll sit on the plane on the tarmac for longer than you’ll actually be in the air.
Perhaps Mr De Botton enjoyed himself at the airport because he never actually went anywhere.
