UPFRONT:REMEMBER THOSE halcyon days when airports were glamorous places, full of scarf-tossing jet setters and fond embraces? Granted, those were the days when most of us didn't get to use them, but doesn't that make it worse? Now that so many more of us can afford to fly, they've gone and made it infinitely less appealing. Why does making something more commonplace necessarily have to make it so much less pleasant?
If only we could get the democratisation of travel right without bringing dehumanisation along with it. By which I mean the bit where you are shuffled like a passport-clutching lemming past miles of retractable belt barriers, through security-checks and identity checks, as any remaining excitement about your trip leaks out of you like air from a slow puncture.
It makes you nostalgic for the days when you aimed to be at the airport an hour before the flight, and even that was more of a courtesy, really. Mind you, that was back when you handed over your physical, flickable airline ticket and a person – a real live person – ripped off one of its delicate carbon leaves and issued you with one of those soon-to-be-extinct sole-purpose cardboard boarding passes that reminded you that something different, even special, was going on. It’s the kind of feeling that’s hard to replicate when you’re clutching a ripped A4 print-out instead, but I digress.
These days, you are required to arrive at the airport before your airplane does, and even then you’re not guaranteed to get on it. So now, although you’re encouraged to check yourself on to the plane and skip all that laborious check-in nonsense, you have to spend more time than ever in the airport. And what a treat for the senses that is.
Granted, check-in has been replaced by bag and tag, which in some places has been similarly replaced by the time-saving, tag-your-own-bag measure. Which takes longer than your common-or-garden check-in does because nobody can use the little machines.
But all this is not what the long lead-in time is for. No, that’s for shuffling around the snakey lines at the departure gates, until you finally get through the swishing door to find another, longer, grumpier line on the other side leading to the dreaded security check. This is the bit where you empty your pockets and take off your shoes and are asked to walk beltless and stocking-footed through an X-ray machine that invariably beeps just so you can suffer the further ignominy of being touched up by a weapons detector. Glamorama.
Then, when you’ve finally repacked your carry-on after the inevitable spot check and are on your frazzled way to your gate with a zip-lock bag of lipstick in one hand and your A4 print-out in the other, you are shepherded through the root of all evil that is the duty free.
You may have somehow absorbed that everything you’ve just gone through was for your own personal safety, but surely shoving demoralised and highly vulnerable travellers through a funnel of cheap alcohol and cigarettes à la duty free is at cross purposes with such an objective.
Let’s say you make it through the duty free with just a Toblerone or two, propelled perhaps by the sudden realisation that your flight is boarding (Gate closing! Gate closing! It says it on the screen! The screen is connected to a computer! Machines don’t lie!). You might even break into a jog at this point, down endless airport corridors, because the whole building is designed so that the gate that you’re flying out from actually recedes as you approach it, a little like the horizon but without the view.
But you must get there before the gate closes, because otherwise you’ve been through all those winding lines and naked security checks for nothing. Plus, they stole your water on the way in. They cannot win this one, too. You run like the wind, laptops and lipsticks and second bottle of water flying, and arrive breathless at the gate to find the gate has changed. But only those who had telepathic connections to the airline knew about it. Sorry Bud.
Not to be defeated, you sprint undaunted to the newly-assigned gate, and arrive panting, addled, soaked in sweat, minus your boarding pass and any shred of dignity. But guess what? They were pulling your leg. They’re not really boarding at all. Oh there’s a queue at the gate, alright, but that’s just because everyone is so used to standing in formation at this point, it’s their natural instinct. They haven’t even opened the gate yet, never mind closed it. Sucker.
And you know what? After all that running, and stripping, and queuing, and printing and running, you are not indignant, nor even peeved to find that the airline made you run further than you expect them to fly you, although they still haven’t started boarding your plane. Oh no, on finding all your fellow passengers trudging into line at the unopened gate you are relieved. This is how they get you, see? Gratitude.
Gratitude that we get to fly at all – because that’s what all the glamour years did for us. They made us covet something we didn’t have, even though back then aircraft reeked of cigarette smoke and probably not everyone looked like Clark Gable and the ticket cost a month’s wages. Sure, the seats were bigger, the people smaller and better dressed, and alcohol was free flowing on board, but would I go back there if I could? Damn skippy. At least I could have kept my shoes on.
fionamccann@irishtimes.com