Air Travel Travails

I really shouldn’t allow my mind to wander into this territory again – travel travails. My mental health would be better if I’d stay off this track. But…

The first time I flew was Tucson to Harrisburg, PA via Chicago O’Hare, probably in December of ‘69. It was wonderful. In those days we still (sort of) dressed up to fly and the airlines matched our ‘Sunday best’ with service and professionalism. That trip was over Christmas and there were school choirs singing in the airport in Chicago. One of the first jumbo jets – the 747 – was parked in between two concourses and people were crowding the windows to get a look at it. All very exciting and festive.

This last time, I was crowded into a single square foot of space – middle seat (due to the fact that morning snow had meant that I’d missed my connection and had to be shoehorned into a later flight) between two large men who automatically took over the shared arm rests as well as their own seat space and some of my leg room. (Not that there was really a lot of that either!) The person in front of me put her seat back as far as she could as soon as she was able, thereby reducing my air space to just over 6 square inches.

And then they came around and offered garlic-seasoned ‘snacks.’ Who says the airlines don’t have a sense of humor?

We used to get a full hot meal on flights that happened around lunch or dinner time – or if the flight was over 2 hours. Now we get a 1 ounce packet of carbs. Seasoned. We shouldn’t have complained about airline food for all those years. You can buy a ‘lunch box’ on United these days – but they were odd combinations of things that I didn’t think I could actually eat. I didn’t actually eat the garlic crackers either. There is still some semblance of consideration to others that I can’t quite give up, even when thus provoked. Although in retrospect, of course, I realize that I might have reclaimed a little of my territory if I’d managed to acquire extremely garlicky bad breath. Oh well. An opportunity lost.

And then there’s ‘airport talk.’ This is a sub-dialect that is practiced by people who have to say the same thing over and over again, in the form of announcements to passengers, and are so bored with it that they start playing with emphasis and accents and sentence structure enough to make their announcement completely unrecognizable. (That is assuming, of course, that the airline employee actually speaks English, which is an irresponsible assumption, I admit.) The emphasis is always placed on the insignificant parts of speech – articles and prepositions, for example: ‘Welcome to flight 575 WITH service TO Seattle. Now a normal person would have thought that the key words in that sentence – the ones that would matter to the ‘audience’ – would have been the flight number and destination. But ‘airport talk’ understands that the important things are cadence and obfuscation, in this case ‘with’ and ‘to.’ Oh well.

Imagine how enjoyable each flight is going to be when they start allowing cell phone conversations during flight time.

I have two words for you: Road Trip.