I have spent quite a bit of time in airports as of late. For those of you who are poor and have never been to an airport before, consider yourself lucky. Imagine a place where the lines are long, the employees are not only unhelpful, but intentionally trying to frickin ruin your life. And once you make it through all the bullstuff, your prize is sitting in a giant tube for hours in uncomfortable seats, breathing in recycled B.O. air. It’s a little bit like mixing the lines of the DMV, the inefficiency of state governments, and the gorilla-based anal rape of, well, gorilla-based anal rape.
It’s been discussed at nauseam how the price of tickets are going up and how the airports are taking every single opportunity to totally fudge you out of your hard-earned American dollars. Here’s a privileged white-person problem for you: I went to Tanzania for a month and paid $2500 for my ticket, and they still charged me $75 to check a bag. It’s important to note that it cost that much money because my bag was 53 pounds. That is apparently 3 pounds heavier than I am allowed to bring without getting charged. Like those 3 extra pounds were going to cost that much more in fuel (approx. $75 worth). Selfishly of me, I had packed too much sunscreen (I’m very fair-skinned and Irish) and malaria medication to meet their arbitrary requirements.
Me shortly after checking my bags
I think it’s important to preface this by saying airports are the bane of my existence. There are no redeeming qualities about them. Not one. So, here’s a list of the top 5 (of literally hundreds) reasons why I would rather spoon Snooki than travel through the airports.
I’d have to be poppa spoon, though
5) The Customers
Jesus Christ, it’s Osama Bin Laden! Get him!
The patrons at an airport range from mildly annoyed to teeth-grindingly pissed off. One irrefutable fact is that no one is happy. Guaranteed. Here’s the best part of all this anger: it has to be bottled up, because if you start bitching about how you don’t want to take your shoes off, welp, you’re a terrorist. I don’t need an airport to tell me that anybody who doesn’t want to take their shoes off is a member of the Taliban. Everyone knows that.
The only time anyone really cracks a smile while walking around the airport is when they arrive at their destination and they know that they are literally minutes away from exiting the worst place in the entire world. When I die and am burning in hell, I am going to be flying from airport to airport, with no destination, just connecting for all of eternity. I’ll have to interact with every employee at the airport and I am going to have to do math on the flights.
4) The Employees
“This is your captain speaking, we’ll be taking off as soon as I am goddamn good and ready.”
The airport features an eclectic mix of some of the worst, most apathetic people in the entire world. I don’t want to sound too extreme or anything, but if you work at the airport and you’re not a pilot, please just kill yourself immediately. Or unless you work at Brookstone, because that place has to stay open. I had one particularly unpleasant experience in the Rome airport while desperately trying to make a connection flight to make it to my brother’s wedding. I’d rather barter the cost of my life with Somalian pirates than ever have to talk to another person in the Rome airport. First off, she barely spoke English, I mean, what the hell was that all about? Secondly, I was 59 minutes early for my connection flight back to the land of the free, home of the brave and I hustled my balls off to get there due to a stuff connection to Rome.
There was not a SINGLE human being in line except for me, and this worthless sack of human told me I had missed my flight and told me to go to customer service. She refused to explain herself, just that I was not to be on that flight, no matter what. Also, I am pretty sure these customer service people are not capable of speaking in complete sentences (language barriers aside, I have had this problem in US airports too), like it’s too much to throw a verb, noun, maybe even an adjective in there. While arguing in vain, she would turn to the other employee and no doubt talk stuff about me in Italian (what’s the phrase for “butt American”?). This was WHILE we were having an argument. To which I had no choice but walk away and see the other customer service rep, who was considerably less of a twat.
3) Food Selection and Price
“Your total comes to…fudge you.”
Do you love fruit parfaits? Rhetorical question, everyone loves fruit parfaits. Do you love getting a fruit parfait at a normal price? Then the airport isn’t for you. I feel like the airport food courts are the black market of dining areas in that if I went through normal channels (i.e. anywhere in the world that isn’t an airport), I’d be able to enjoy my fruit parfait without that feeling of getting a midsize gourd shoved up my ass.
I prefer mine blended with a mint leaf on top.
If you don’t like selling your soul for a delicious parfait (look at that…yum), then you can wait until you’re on the plane for food, right? Right, with a small caveat: you have to love preservatives so much that you’re willing to eat chicken with a shelf life of nearly 145 years. There have been numerous studies that eating two full packages of cigarettes (including the wrapper), and washing it down with half a bottle of Popov is far and away more healthy that eating the “Chicken Alfredo” on any given plane (citation needed).
2) Security
“Sweet Fancy Moses, it’s a bomb! Take cover!”
I could stop right there: Security. I think we can all agree that the TSA is second in worst agency ever created only to the Taliban. Al Qaeda is a close third. The TSA is a federally funded harassment program. All you need to do is read the story about the lady who got her cupcake in a jar taken away at security under suspicion of contraband.
Pick up your TSA applications here!
It should be noted that the people of the TSA are arguably the biggest butt morons in the airport. This is amazing to me. The TSA should be the 2nd smartest employees as far as I am concerned (second to the pilots), yet, the TSA makes their very own system somewhat unusable because of the worthless excuse for humans they place in these positions. Add to that the fact that they search thousands of people who don’t need the pat-down-finger-up-your-keester-search and the worst attitudes I’ve seen since that show “Real Housewives of New Jersey,” TSA is about as helpful as well, a TSA agent. There isn’t really anything stuffty enough to compare to.
1) The Ride
Frankly, I don’t want to meet the person who doesn’t have this statue
If I had a choice between having unprotected, very risky sex with 5 meth-head women at once and taking another “economy-class” flight from here to literally anywhere, the junkie intercourse would win by a landslide. You know you run a hogstuff business when the very best part of your entire trip is flipping through the SkyMall catalog asking yourself “Who would ever buy this stuff?” while subconsciously thinking “hm, 6-foot tall bronze yeti statue would match that outdoor dinette set perfectly!”
And may God have mercy on your soul if the person in front of you reclines.
My least favorite part about air travel just so happens to be the travel part of it. In the air. That is like hiring a babysitter and having the babysitter just beat the living stuff out of your kids. They fail on the most fundamental basis of customer satisfaction. I can kind of see the airport, employees and the like as being somewhat ancillary to the whole experience of flying, but somehow, airlines figure out a way to fudge that up horribly. I’m 6’2, and about 235 pounds, so sitting in a plane seat isn’t exactly comfortable to begin with.
Now with all the corners airlines are trying to cut on frivolous things such as comfort, convienence and basic human rights, the airlines are making it virtually impossible to enjoy your flight without an Ambien or a first class ticket. I’ve never been to China (because I’m not a commie), but I can imagine that feeling of being so cramped that you’re not sure whose thumb’s in your ass is similar to being on a plane.
