Cursed Tongue: Loading and Unloading

Posted by CursedTongue on August 29, 2006

Flying the friendly skies is not what it used to be. Of course, that could be because as I’ve gotten older, I’ve filled in the seat a little more. But experiencing the joy of having my knees shoved into my neck by the drooler who can’t manage to sit upright for three hours is about as much fun as shoving splintery toothpicks into my crusty, dried-out-by-the-germy-nasty-recirculated-air tear ducts. But I probably won’t ever find any splintery toothpicks on airplanes anymore, because they could be considered weapons.

A Tale of Two Screenings: In line at U. S. airport security, everyone fumbled with their shoes. There was not a chair in site. Now, I don’t need a chair to take off my shoes, but I suspect when I’m in my 70s, I will. Either that or I’ll have to bear the disgrace of sitting on the floor and being peeled off of it by a porter. If it’s a $5 tip for lifting a bag, how much is it for lifting an old bag?

Of course by 2048 giving someone a $5 tip will probably be like giving them a quarter now, and anyway, hopefully they’ll have perfected beaming technology by then, making air travel obsolete. So I am borrowing trouble, but it surely explains why Nana and Pop-pop won’t set foot in the airport, even to visit their darling little me.

In the security line there was a family ahead of us – a man and a woman with three kids and a baby, who might have been able to walk, but mostly sat on the floor looking abandoned. (If that kid had been a backpack they would have blown her up.) The mom and dad were getting the stroller, and diaper bag and various luggage onto the belt. Their three children were running around like chickens in the company of a rabid weasel and the baby was smack in the middle of the space, sitting on the floor. I sucked a ragged horror of horrors breath down the back of my throat.

How easy it would be for that baby to be crushed by a foot or slammed by a rolly-bag of someone so anesthetized by past abuse at the hands of the nonsensical, ineffective TSA that they had already slipped out to lunch and were dining in their pre 9-11 happy place. Safely on the other side of the screening area, I scooped my purse out of a bin and stepped in gum. The in-flight “Mile High Mojito” was purely medicinal and worth $3.

German security has the screening process down. There wasn’t much of a line. There weren’t any frazzled parents trying to juggle their children, their children’s stuff and the luggage. There wasn’t compulsory removal of footwear for everyone. There was a luggage x-ray, a metal-detecting archway, and a man and a woman with metal-detecting wands. Everyone went through the arch. Everyone was swept over with the wands. The security screeners with wands would briskly and unapologetically frisk anyone who set them off.

Even though they didn’t spend as long on each person, the German screeners caught things that the TSA didn’t. Like a perfectly innocent metal hair clip shaped like a stabbing instrument in my carryon. That’s called efficiency. And why officials at the TSA aren’t taking all-expense-paid trips (courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer) to Germany to learn how to make going through security more fun than root canal, and more productive than picking out bellybutton lint, I really couldn’t tell you. I would be enthusiastically willing to contribute my tax dollars to make air travel more secure and easier. I’d even be inclined to throw in souvenir lederhosen.

I can honestly say I prefer being groped to going through U.S. airport security. But the indignity of submitting to the incompetent will of the TSA sets the tone for air travel: the harsh, bellowing, headache inducing, dissonant tone of pipe organ music in a dank underground lair.

Once strapped down and sealed in a plane I can never help but feel like a sardine in a tin that happens to be airborne. On this particularly trying trip, my husband proposed they call it Slave Boat Class instead of Economy. And it is so comforting to be flying around in a plane with ashtrays in the lavatory, meaning that it is at least 16 years old. (While on the flight, I thought that smoking was banned on flights for longer than 16 years, but apparently there wasn’t a complete ban until 1990. And still the air quality is still not much improved.)

Between broken audio, being trapped by refreshment carts, the one man who was unsuccessful at target practice in the lavatory, and parents, traveling with tiny, adorable, wailing children, who haven’t learned about the magic of Benadryl, it’s no mystery why air rage has become an issue. I can’t speak for other passengers, but I didn’t pay hundreds of dollars for an in-flight blood clot.

If that isn’t bad enough those ridiculously rich, snobby frequenting-flying first class travelers, which the airlines march all of the human-chattel coach passengers by, in the front of the plane have wiggle room, slippers, hot towels, and food that doesn’t look like warmed over vomit. Near the end of the flight I always take comfort in the knowledge that if the plane goes down, they’ll probably die first. (And really, besides look down their noses, what did they ever do to me?)

We need security screeners before getting on the plane, and I think we need mental health screenings when we disembark. Of course, it would also be nice to be deloused and otherwise decontaminated, as I sniffle and wheeze my way through this article, having caught the generously offered, complimentary in-flight flu.

- Sarah Letnes

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Tags: airplanes, humor, travel

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