I know the layout of the airports very well and I know exactly where I'm going. Which means I end up elbowing people out of the way as they stand and dither. I know what the process is like. And even though I know it's completely unreasonable, I'm vaguely contemptuous of people who don't.
Sunday night I was flying out of Melbourne on Tiger. My flight down on the previous day had cost me $28, which however you slice it is pretty good. $28 for an hour and a half is cheaper than psychotherapy, tennis lessons, a massage or piano lessons. After checkin, you wait in the usual line to go through security. They scan your bags, you walk thru the x-ray thing or whatever it is.
The line was long, about 30 people, and moving slowly. Every couple of minutes there'd be an announcement, saying that you had to place any metallic objects you were carrying (keys, phone, belt, whatever) in the trays provided. Laptops were to be taken out of cases. Some palaver about aerosols and umbrellas. The usual...
But almost without exception, people who'd been in this line for 15 to 20 minutes - who'd heard all the these announcements, and had even watched as the people before them (and the ones before them, and so on..) took off their watches, emptied their pockets of coins, unzipped laptops - these people when they themselves got to the business end of the queue seemed to be completely taken aback by the whole thing. They'd appear surprised at the idea of putting their phones and their coins into a little tray thingy. They'd walk though the metal detector with spoons or metal bars or whatever in their person, and appear genuinely surprised that the buzzer would go off and the security guys would explain again about metal objects.
We got through all that, then started boarding the plane. One fun thing about flying Tiger out of Melbourne is that they don't have a terminal. It's just a shed. Then, you walk from the shed to the plane. It's quite agreeably primitive. Anyway. We got almost the plane, we were about 100 metres from it and we could see it through a wall of grimy plastic sheeting. And then we stopped. A nice young woman from Tiger closed the gate and told us we had to wait, there was a medical emergency and they were waiting for an ambulance.
After about 20 minutes an ambulance showed up, during which time the Tiger woman (as I'll call her) explained to us that there was a passenger still on the plane, and we all agreed that a medical emergency is a pretty big deal, especially with an ambulance, and that under the circumstances waiting wasn't all that bad. (But why did it take the ambulance so long to show up? I thought airports had all that sort of thing on hand. On those fly-on-the-wall docos on airports there's medical emergencies all the time - women having babies, a drug mule inadvertently overdosing as the cocaine-stuffed condom in their stomach is worn through by gastric acid and so forth).
We watched the medics get the guy off the plane, and we all couldn't help noticing that he appeared quite sprightly, even walking down the steps to the ambulance unassisted. Then an announcement, which I'll try render as accurately as possible "Tiger Airways wishes to apologise to the passengers on TT688 for the late boarding of this flight. This was due to a passenger in the arriving flight being unwell". Unwell? Is that all it was?
2 comments:
I know that this blog is really your alter ego, so I'm assuming you only think about elbowing people out of the way at the airport.
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