Airport Angst It must come as a result of my unholy familiarity with travel, but I’ve always disliked flying. If the beauty of travel lies not in the destination but in the deed itself, then I desire my travels to be ugly and dirty. Give me a bicycle any day. It’s not really airplanes which I hate. They’re nothing but bigger, noisier buses with better service, a worse environmental record and more sophisticated ways of peddling goods to passengers. The in-flight films can be fun, and the food these days is not nearly as bad as their vomitive reputation says. Though the main course is all right, it’s really the entrée and dessert that I dread. For all my frequent nomadic impulses I am a sedentary minded man (a trait that seems to get stronger as I grow older). Airports rub me the wrong way. More and more often I find myself dreading the airport experience, like a child paying a visit to the dentist. I deem them as non-places; soulless fibreglass stopovers, a midpoint but never a destination. I dislike their sterile insipidity, their fluorescent lighting, their criminal prices. It is people who make this world, and it’s usually people who make it unpleasant. Airports tend to be packed with people –busy, disgruntled people, brought together by a single common wish: to leave as soon as possible. Strangely enough, the larger part of airport angst does not flow directly from the travellers. One has to speculate about the friendliness of underslept people rushing from gate to gate over several terminals in a panicked frenzy (especially when you yourself are also underslept, rushing and in a panicked frenzy). But experience has shown me that, for better or worse, there will always be a talkative character on the neighbouring seat, ready to spill his life into a warm ear. There is also the amiable lady who will be willing to look after your bag while you find a rubbish bin. It's perhaps the feeling of camaraderie that spawns off mutual frustration. Misery emanates mostly from the staff. Starting with unfriendly immigration officers to irritable security personnel to the road-raged midnight janitor who will chase you around on an electric cart, it is a rarity to find an airport worker who is not so jaded with his job that he fails to treat passengers like mildly retarded sheep. Despite the dreadful uniformity of airports everywhere, they all have numerous ways of dealing with their universal fed-upness. Most of the time they will take on the less obvious cultural traits of the place, making a transit through an international airport seem like a field trip for sociologically-inspired psychologists. Take what I call the Napoleon complex (Animal Farm, not Waterloo). Think of being downtrodden all your life and then suddenly given absolute power over your oppressor (and his look-alikes). Oh the possibilities! O’Hare airport in Chicago is mostly operated by runts who use the opportunity to give their society a taste of their own medicine. People are shoved into security checks like Jews into cattle trains, and officers will not hesitate to scream like gulag masters at anyone who fails to follow instructions. Overworked staff will dodge any queries, which usually ricochet from one person to the next until it returns to the passenger unanswered. The lady at the information desk ignores a queue to comment to her friend on her lucky sister’s tax break due to her terminal illness (I wish I was making this up). The same road-raged janitors come close to shoving mop sticks up the ribs of napping travellers. Contempt doesn’t even begin to describe their attitude. Japanese airports, on the other hand, are dubbed with the asinine courtesy and anally-retentive passion for order of their people. The bureaucrats are just as surly, but at least they pretend to be nice, fanfaring their misanthropic ways with a flurry of honorifics and bows aplenty. (I still haven’t made up my mind whether I prefer blatant hypocrisy over barefaced rudeness, but shifting from one to the other is always a satisfyingly shocking experience). Discrimination toward passengers here is exercised through the characteristic Japanese talent for passive aggression. Thus, a traveller (usually a young male foreigner) may be gently ushered into a side room for a full cavity check and kept aside for several dozen minutes, all the while being offered an unending stream of apologies. Authority is bestowed in a strict but benevolent manner (Japan’s time-honoured answer to political repression). Nanny will spank you if you’ve been bad, but it’s all for your own sake. Nanny cares. And she particularly cares about who walks her immaculate halls. Immigration at Heathrow airport in London is not known for its leniency toward non-EU visitors, and their preferred method of abuse is somewhere in between the US and Japan: not overtly rude, but stern and hopelessly mistrustful. A typo in an official document might be enough for them to deny you entry. They will smile, all the while someone else checks your baggage for hidden bombs. But if the English will suspect you behind your back, the people at Frankfurt airport will not go to any lengths to mask their suspicion of anyone born below the equator. They are prone to checking and rechecking a passport, sometimes in groups and for a considerable amount of time, even when everything is in order. In a hurry you say? Ve vill ask ze questions. Airports in Poland, Hungary and Indonesia like to scare off their passengers with military personnel walking around with machine guns. Miami International likes to greet visitors with the double chill of sarcasm over air-conditioning at full blast. Provincial Chilean airports like to douse passengers with toxic pesticide sprays. Not all is bad, of course. I’m almost sure most of the Scottish immigration authorities I’ve met were high. The Irish, never prone to self-inflicted bother, have an even better way of dealing with their herds of tourists: they are seldom there at all. If hell is a state of mind, airports are the products of a hellish state’s mind. Tougher immigration policies make up for stress, which is often taken out on visitors by overworked airport staff. And who can blame them? They have to spend a considerable amount of their lives in there. At least the passengers know they’re leaving soon.

To my One reader

Yes, you, the deranged loon with too much time on his/her hands. I haven't updated for donkey's years. I know. I've been distracted, and probably too drunk and stoned to write anything coherent. Not that my usual stuff is any better, but at the moment my thinking skills are little better than that of a cactus.

So go do something useful with your time. Go to www.answers.com and educate yourself in random trivia knowledge. Play the Wikipedia game (choose an obscure subject, click on random article and see how many clicks it takes you to get to your subject of choice). Surf for some more porn. Alternatively, call somoene up and have a real human conversation. Then, when you get bored and cranky and remember why it is you log on to the internet so much, come back here. Hopefully I will have updated by then.