I am not a frequent flyer any more.
When I concluded my six-year tenure as a member of the Board of Directors of the American College of Emergency Physicians, I suddenly had much less reason to travel, and the airlines are interested only in how much you have flown lately, not historically.
Once one is not a frequent flyer, all the little things one took for granted disappear: the shorter line (when there is one) at TSA Security Theater (acknowledgement to a lovely colleague from Georgia who calls it that); an earlier boarding zone; no extra fee for checked bags; and an upgrade once in a chartreuse moon (blue moons happened more often than upgrades for me).
So, bereft of all those little perks I had come to take for granted, I was not surprised that changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare, the nation's second busiest airport, was not the least pleasant thing about this trip.
However, as much as I think the airlines, and TSA, and the folks who run the airports could all do things to make air travel less of an ordeal, especially for those of us who are not "preferred" on any airline, this trip made me realize that there are things we can do to make life better for each other.
Repeatedly I found myself wondering whatever happened to civility.
Examples of its disappearance abounded. There was the fellow who saw that I was taking longer than he would like to get my stuff into those plastic bins at security - and believe me, I'm very efficient, having done it so many times that even someone my former-schoolteacher mother would have called a slow learner could do it with blinding speed. So he looked at me, heaved a loud sigh of exasperation, and made a great show of barging past me to put his own stuff on the conveyor ahead of mine.
As a result of this, he got to wait for the tram to the gates 30 seconds longer than I did.
Then there is the waiting for the tram. At the Pittsburgh airport, the people exiting the tram get out first, from the other side, before the doors open for those boarding. Some inexperienced travelers don't know this, and so they stand back from the doors to allow room for exiting passengers. I watch in amazement as some who know this isn't necessary slide right in front of them to take positions that will allow them to board the tram first. The line from the movie "Norma Rae" comes to mind: "You must be from New York."
At the gate, I am not flying Southwest, the only airline that organizes boarding in very small groups, thereby minimizing the rush and confusion attendant upon all other boarding schemes, in which all 14 thousand people in Zone 2 want to be the first of their group to board. If you fly, you've seen it: some passengers behave as though they are boarding in Zone 1, only to hang back toward the end, then pause - revealing they aren't holding boarding passes for Zone 1 at all - before stepping briskly forward to begin boarding as soon as the gate agent reaches for the microphone to announce Zone 2. I am convinced there is some prize for being the very first to board in one's zone that I've just not heard about yet.
Why are people so eager to get onto the plane? Why do they want to sit in seats just large enough for elementary school children any longer than they must? You see, space in the overhead bins for carry-on luggage is limited. The sooner one boards, the more likely it is that there will be space available. Being in a later-boarding zone and finding that the space is all full is quite frustrating, as one tries to work one's way back forward in the plane and hand the bag off to a flight attendant to be checked with all the luggage that people will be waiting for at baggage claim (for one of life's longer versions of eternity).
Walking down the aisle of the plane I happen upon yet another example of incivility. I see a young man smartly hoist his carry-on bag into a space in the bin directly over row 8, where I am going to sit, and then keep walking down the aisle. I then see that there is no more space left in an overhead bin anywhere near row 8. So I keep walking, and eventually locate space above row 22. Guess who's sitting in row 22? Indeed! The same fellow whose bag is now above my seat. As I place my bag in the bin above him, I realize I will now have to make my way back forward while the flow of boarding passengers down the aisle, barely wide enough for one person, is moving in the opposite direction. As I'm doing my impression of a salmon swimming upstream, I wonder why he thought this was a good idea. Did he really think all the space in the bins closer to his seat would be full? No, I'm pretty sure he didn't. I'm pretty sure he didn't think at all, about anything other than grabbing the first space he saw, and that was probably not thought but a reflex, something from our reptilian ancestors. Yes, that's it. No thinking at all, because "thoughtless" is the word that best fits his behavior. And at the end of the flight, I will have to wait for nearly all of the passengers to disembark (I cannot bring myself to use the absurd "deplane") before I can head back to row 22 to retrieve my bag. Fortunately, I do not have a tight connection at O'Hare.
Did I mention - yes, I think I did - how busy an airport O'Hare is? I have time enough to grab a bite to eat and a drink. I'm pretty sure I can find something far better than what will be "available for purchase" on the flight from Chicago to Seattle. (No complimentary meals nowadays, although thoughts of such things are great when one is in a nostalgic mood.) But it is early evening, and O'Hare has meal facilities that are adequate for the number of passengers changing planes there at 4 AM, not 5 PM. After considerable searching for a restaurant with seats, I give up on that idea and notice - joyfully - a place that is selling decent-looking sandwiches with a line short enough that I should get to the cash register before my flight is boarding, with perhaps a nanosecond to spare.
On the flight from Chicago to Seattle, I know I will be in my child-sized seat for about four hours, and I realize I should use the time to get some work done on my notebook computer. It's a 15-inch MacBook Pro - not the smallest choice, but not overly large, either, and I've paid the extra money for a seat in the part of the plane United calls Economy Plus, which means my knees are not pressing into the back of the seat in front of me.
The plane reaches cruising altitude, and we have been given permission to use our electronic devices - as long as smartphones are in airplane mode, so you can use them only to play games and do other things that don't involve sending and receiving signals. I don't quite understand this, because I'm pretty sure there are no signals to receive at 30,000 feet, and I'm also pretty sure I cannot use my smartphone to direct the plane to land in Tahiti instead of Seattle.
Now it's time to take out my computer and get to work. Then I notice that the fellow in the seat in front of me is reclining. This means I can open my computer just barely far enough to see the screen and have room to get my fingers onto the keyboard to type. To make the effort more interesting, every so often, he repositions his body in his seat, hurling himself against the seatback, during his flopping-fish imitation, with sufficient force to cause me to snatch my computer off the tray and pull it all the way back against my chest to keep it from being damaged by the shockwave.
This mystifies me. By "this," I mean two things. First, why are seats built to recline, when the only thing that does is make the passenger immediately behind even more miserable, while changing the angle of the seatback far too little to make a difference in the ability of the person "reclining" to fall asleep? Second, why does the person who wants to move the seatback to that useless angle not realize this, and think, "Oh, that won't help me, it will only torture the passenger behind me, so I won't do it."
I have a personal rule. I rarely think of reclining my seatback, but if it crosses my mind, I do it only if the seat behind me is unoccupied. If that seat is occupied, I do not look around and ask the occupant if s/he minds if I recline. Doing that would put my fellow passenger in an awkward position, having two choices. First would be to lie: "No, I don't mind at all if you put your seat back, reducing my personal space when I hoped it was already at an irreducible minimum." Second would be to say, "Well, actually I do mind, and I would rather you didn't." A fellow passenger may not tell the truth and pick option 2 for fear of being perceived as a jerk. So, my thought on putting the seat back: it is an act of hostility, something one does only because one delights in torturing the person seated directly behind.
I'm trying to soft-pedal this. Notice I called it an act of hostility, not an act of war. Those familiar with the language of geopolitics will see the difference. I didn't call it an act of war, nor did I - tempting though it was - call it a war crime. I did think about calling it that. You see, I am convinced that, were they evaluating the practice of placing coach passengers in those tiny seats for flights lasting longer than an hour or so, Amnesty International would declare it torture. And so, a passenger who deliberately makes it worse for the person directly behind may, indeed, be committing a war crime.
By now you know how much I enjoyed my transcontinental adventure. And I was flying United Airlines - you know, that airline that uses theme music from George Gershwin (who, I am quite certain, would strongly disapprove) and the slogan "Fly the Friendly Skies." Friendly? What is the appropriate response to that? I think a guffaw fits rather nicely, don't you?
But if we want the skies to be friendly, what say we begin with each other?
No comments:
Post a Comment