People do weird things. This is especially noticeable when they are doing something outside their normal routine, like traveling.
I was at Cape Town airport on Sunday to catch a flight to John’s Beg. The new terminal is well-appointed with bars, bookshops, restaurants, tea rooms and even has free Wi-Fi on offer. It also has enormous, giant, huge plate-glass windows through which it was hard not to notice the oil-stained, empty tarmac where our aeroplane was supposed to be parked. When boarding time came, however, that did not stop people from forming a long queue at the gate, like cows waiting to be milked.
Why? Surely the most dim-witted traveler knows that it is not possible to board an absent aircraft. Even if it arrives right now, the arriving passengers have to be disembarked and the cleaners go through the plane on their chicken parade before you will be allowed to board. And it may not come right now; in fact, it may never come at all. So why stand for an indeterminate length of time in a queue when you could be enjoying a glass of wine at the bar, or browsing in the bookshop, or tucking into some delicacy in a restaurant, or look! there are comfortable armchairs and sofas in which you are permitted to sit and chat or just daydream.
Once in the air the idiocy continued. As soon as the seatbelt signs were extinguished a whole bunch of passengers stood up to form another queue at the plane’s toilet. People, there are plenty of toilets at the airport, and they let you use them free of charge. So why wait until you’re on the plane where you are going to clog up the aisles with your horrible carcasses and prevent the flight attendants from doing their duty, which is serving me drinks. It’s only a two hour flight and I require prompt service if I’m not to have to rush the last of my three dinkies of wine and give myself heartburn.
I’m a bit deaf so when the entire passenger complement stood the instant the plane came to a stop at the terminal I thought perhaps the national anthem was being played. But no, it was just another manifestation of weirdness. It’s quite comical to see a hundred-odd people leaping to their feet and standing bent over beneath the overhead lockers like a mass audition for the part of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, when they could be sitting down comfortably for the few minutes until the door is opened and they can disembark.
___________________________________________________________
Whilst waiting for the delayed plane to arrive I did a quick informal survey of the laptops that came within eyeshot of my barstool. There were: 5 Macbooks, 4 PC notebooks (3 Windows and 1 Linux).
Out of 9 machines only 3 were Windows? Granted, this isn’t a very big sample, but could it be that people are starting to recognise Windows for the steaming, malodorous, maggot-heaving pile of crap it is? Or were the Windows users the ones standing in the queue waiting to board the non-existent plane?
Grumpy Old Man by Mark Widdicombe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.
Posted by Mark Widdicombe 
Grumpy Old Man 