I hate airports with a passion. They’re so full of suck that my intuition says they should collapse in on themselves and form small black holes—little, tiny microcosms of inescapable suck. Airports are the only inorganic thing that I hate more than printers, which for the record were created by Satan to increase the homicidal tendencies of computer geeks.
Allow me to explain: In case you hadn’t been reading the bylines or deduced it from my writing, I’m an engineer. You may have heard that engineers have this thing about efficiency. Specifically, we like it. It’s practically an aphrodisiac, actually. Wooing a female engineer? Plan an efficient date! I’ll leave it to you to determine the metric for efficiency. (Caveat: this does not actually work, apparently.)
Conversely, inefficiency drives us crazy, and not in a kitten on catnip sort of way. While small inefficiencies can be viewed as an opportunity for an improvement, gross inefficiencies are a frustratingly hopeless cause. Imagine you are my Writing 20 professor and I turned in an essay which I composed by pouring alphabet soup into a funnel and writing down the letters as they emerged. You would not view that as opportunity for improvement.
Whatever your ideal model for efficiency is, airports are the antithesis of that. Whatever you don’t need exists in opulence, whatever you do want is scarce and whatever simple process you can think of requires at least 16 times as much effort to accomplish in an airport.
Let’s suppose the first thing you want to do at the airport is check in. At least in some cases you can do this beforehand online, so I’ll give some credit there. In many of the airports I’ve been through, you can check in at these automated kiosks near the desk, which is a pretty neat way to avoid human interaction I guess. Those work pretty well unless you want to, God forbid, check a bag.
This is the part that kills me. I can check in, pay for my baggage and print my boarding pass with these kiosks. Then I have to go to the person at the desk to actually get my luggage tagged and sent off to be inspected for the WMD’s I keep in my pajamas.
Literally all this person does is put the (automatically printed) tag on my bag and take a cursory glance at my ID, which never elicits any reaction despite looking nothing like me. I’m reasonably convinced it could depict a colorful Galapagos lizard and no one would care so long as the name matched.
Once you get past security, which is a separate adventure I’ll leave out in the interests of faux patriotism, you’re in the concourse—or, as I prefer to call it, the Land of Frivolity. Now I won’t pretend to understand the complexities of the air travel economy, but it seems like there’s a teensy bit of wasted money here.
Take a look at the directory for RDU (it’s online). There’s a shoe shine and spa in both terminals. There’s a shop for golf miscellany, which I imagine has everything you need to get a birdie on Flight 1647. Brooks Brothers might be useful for the business traveler who forgot to pack business attire and can’t stand the prospect of paying less for it in an honest-to-goodness store in his or her destination city. Rosetta Stone software is perfect for international travelers. It’s just a little late for that by the time you get to the airport, unless you happen to acquire languages in mere hours. Taxco Sterling, a jewelry store: Honey, I bought you this necklace at the airport!
Are any of these things near the top of my list of needs? Not so much. Try finding a power outlet, though. I’ve got better chances of getting a second date. The eco-conscious would quickly point out that this scarcity is a good thing, but I’m confident that it wasn’t by design as that would imply some level of foresight.
Also, if saving power is a concern, how about those conveyer belts you can ride in the concourses? How much energy is being wasted because people are too lazy to walk a whopping forty yards? I especially enjoy the ones with the broken record voice cautioning us to “watch your step as you exit.”
Supposing that you manage to survive until boarding without your head exploding (I keep waiting for it to happen), you might discover that your flight has every seat equipped with satellite radio. This is a somewhat admirable technological feat. It’s just that I’ve never actually seen anyone use it in lieu of a portable music player. Personally I’d trade the radio for a square inch or three of leg room.
So, to conclude, I love airports. They’re awesome. I think I’ll get married in one, maybe even to one. It’s a good thing there’s a chapel in RDU!
Jeremy Walch is a Pratt junior. His column runs every other Tuesday.
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