I admit it, I’ve been spoiled.
Flying for the past ten years around Asia had lulled me into a kind of weary contempt. Planes that take off as advertised, cabin attendants who at least pretend to experience human emotions, brisk boarding and deplaning procedures, movies that are still showing in the cinemas, business class amenities that are actually amenities, food and drink that doesn’t stop until you raise your trembling hand and cry ‘Enough!’.
All these things I had taken for granted… How does that saying go? ‘You don’t miss your water til your well runs dry’?
My well went totally arid on my adventure to Tampa. It all began with the flight out of Taipei on China Airlines.
There I was with my Business Class boarding pass in my hand, proudly escorting my wife whom I’d assured ‘No way are we doing the flight to the US in economy, honey. All those boarding queues? Those terrible seats?
I’d rather be anesthetized and packed in a doggy travel crate. Business Class is the only sane way to go. Let me introduce you to real flying…’ And we had dressed accordingly.
There I was standing there in my dark sports coat, with dark blue shirt, my wife alluringly clad in designer casual-wear purchased for the occasion, watching an endless line of wheelchairs being assembled at the boarding gate.
“That’s a lot of wheelchairs,” I said for the third time.
‘People going to the US for medical treatment,’ said my wife.
‘Sure, I understand that,’ said I, deflating at the sight of twenty six grizzled, wrinkled, nodding, comatose, unhappy-looking Mayo Clinic addressees, “but it’s still a fucking lot of wheelchairs, and all of them boarding before us. Doesn’t seem right.”
It got worse. Next came the announcement that the flight was delayed and Business Class passengers should retreat to the lounge and await further notification.
‘Delayed? Retreat? What the hell is this?’
We set off for the lounge only to be told when we arrived there that the plane was now ready for boarding.
Ha ha, I thought, just a little tease.
When we returned to the gate the twenty six wheelchairs were out of sight and things seemed to be moving back to normal. Smiling attendants waved slim Asian hands towards the upstairs cabin, more smiling attendants waved equally slim Asian hands at rows of empty Biz Class seats and we resumed our high-powered businessman and chic wife portrayals and settled down for further delights.
The plane was a 747, possibly one of the first ever produced, because it lacked the high-tech ambience of let’s say, Cathay Pacific Biz Class. Specifically it lacked fully reclinable seats and a modern AV system.
By the time I’d checked out the movies I’d learned that a) they didn’t have anything more current than the 1990s, and b) the viewing experience was going to be similar to watching a well-worn tape on an early model VCR. Hmmm. This wasn’t right.
When the man in front of me experimentally reclined his seat my wife was trapped against the window.
I tried to recall other flights on China Airlines and couldn’t remember if this was the norm. If it was it shouldn’t have been, that’s all I could say.
Anyway, all of these minor points were just portents of what was to come.
What I realize now was that they were preparing me for the horror of flying in the USA.
After takeoff the attendant came and stood over me studying a sheet of paper. Was she going to announce that we had been upgraded to First Class due to our sartorial elegance? No, she was trying to work out how to pronounce my name.
She handed me a menu in Chinese and asked what I wanted for supper?
I was deeply disappointed, but in retrospect I realize that what she should’ve said was, ‘OK you can relax. We’re just joking. This nightmarish experience you are having right now is just our way of giving you a foretaste of what is to come.
You are flying to the US where you will be treated like a sociopathic idiot cousin by every type of personnel you encounter.
Your flights will be delayed, you will sit waiting for your fellow passengers to find their clearly numbered seats, and it will seem like the plane will never take off. But eventually it will.
Then you will sit in the dark for hours listening to loudmouthed people saying inane things like, ‘You know what? I think I’ll just sit here in this seat saying inane things at the top of my voice.
You know what? Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m just going to sit here and say something else inane at the top of my voice.
You know what, I think I’ll lean back in my seat now and say…’.
If you get hungry you will have to pay for the meal service. If you want a beer to ease your mind you will have to pay for that too.
Then some time later the plane will land and you will sit waiting for your fellow passengers to come to the realization that they have arrived at their destination and should leave by the clearly designated exits.
You will have the sense of important minutes, even hours of your life passing into a huge galactic time drain and that your son’s intensive study of zombie behavior was not as off the wall as you’d thought.
After you deplane you will have to run to the gate for your connecting flight which will either a) have just taken off or b) was just cancelled or c) is about to take off, whereupon this dispiriting process will be repeated for however many connections your dim travel agent has managed to complicate your itinerary with. Enjoy.’
After we took off from Dallas-Ft. Worth, one hour and forty five minutes late I pondered the strange boarding ritual I’d just witnessed; a process that should’ve taken maybe fifteen minutes at the most, but had been prolonged by the slow trudging gait of the passengers, and their apparent indifference to the concept of fitting finite objects into complementarily sized finite spaces – why for instance was this man trying to fit a suitcase the size of a family freezer into a luggage compartment that already had a small family sized freezer filing it?
Couldn’t he see there is no room there even for a paperback?
The cabin attendants stood at the back of the plane watching this distressing testament to humanity’s intellectual decline with sardonic smirks on their carefully made-up lips.
Finally with the air of someone about to perform a mercy killing one of them leaned off the wall and said, “You know what, sir? That family-sized freezer of a suitcase you have there isn’t going to fit into a space too small for the latest Tom Clancy novel.
Why don’t I just take it down the front and put it in that big, roomy closet you passed on your way in?
You know what? How about I do that?”
The passenger behind him nodded in sage agreement – and then started trying to jam his own family-sized freezer of a suitcase into the same space.
Am I seeing some sort of dietary phenomenon, I asked myself? Is there some connection with the vast signature buttocks and this irrefutable evidence of mental debilitation?
Could one mathematically correlate butt size to IQ with the latter decreasing in adverse ratio to the former?
These were vicious, politically incorrect thoughts that I recall now with shame and I’ll never know the answer anyway.
All I really remember now of those internal US flights was the sense of being in some vast sit-com where the actors just wandered about without a director saying inane things at the top of their voices as if they were making public service announcements while time itself became the villain of the plot.
It was a great relief to board the flight from Taipei to Kaohsiung on the way home.
We all enplaned in minutes, behaved sensibly and deplaned in minutes on arrival. Ah, I thought, this is how it should be.
The attendants bid us a cheery farewell, with a smile that said ‘Welcome home and try not to think too much about what you have just experienced.”
I hope I can.
