Airport Brain Damage

Having spent most of yesterday in planes or airports I have noticed a disturbing trend in the incredible upswing in the number of people with severe brain damage.

These people with abnormally low abilities to use critical thinking skills are everywhere. There are literally thousands of them in the airport at any one moment! The worst part is though, they look perfectly normal. In fact, if you saw them on the street you might not even guess that at some point in their lives they experienced some sort of massive head trauma. However, the true extent of the damage becomes more and more clear the closer these people get to aircraft aluminum or metal detectors.

You can spot these poor disadvantaged souls at two key locations, both of which will be detrimental to your scheduling. The first place is at security.

These very normal looking people who you may have been in line with earlier as witnessed check-in are not normal. As soon as they are presented with plastic containers for there possessions to go through the X-Ray and big signs and security people shouting what you can not take with you or must put in a basket to scan things change. They go from happy people able to follow clear direction to barely functioning idiots who have a bottle of Gatorade, a heavy coat on, still have their shoes on, and refuse to accept the need to place their laptop in a separate tray. They then stumble back and forth through the metal detector in awe of the fact that it beeps in such a cute way. Luckily past this point the damaged people are fairly easy to spot. Especially once you get on the plane.

If you missed a brain damaged person in security you will not miss them once they get close to the plane. The most damaged people have hearing problems. When business class is called they somehow hear “section 3 is seating” and promptly argue the point with the flight crew. After all, isn’t being louder than other passengers the equivalent of having your ticket upgraded?

Once on the plane things get worse. You know how they allow about 20 minutes for people to walk in and sit down on the plane? That seems like a reasonable amount of time walk single file into any place, find your seat, and not screw up at sitting down. However, the brain damaged people come with baggage; most of their baggage to be precise.

When did carry-on item become “all your worldly possessions”? I see people with 2-3 rather large bags taking up entire overhead bins. Somewhere between check-in and security they managed to forget that important step of checking their bags in. Now instead of sitting down they have to wander up and down the one aisle, that all the normal people have to use, and look for new places to put their luggage. If you happen to be reading this and are saying (probably out loud) ‘Hey! I need that those bags!’ you should remember that you can send close to a hundred pounds of your crap that will still go right with the same plane you’re on. That’s right, the big hollow tube thingy has space just for your stuff that doesn’t need to be within line-of-sight at all times.

I’m so happy I get to meet more brain damaged people in three days. I hope they wear orange vests next time though, a truck might be able to confuse them as safety cones that are fun to hit.

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Comments (1)

ParallaxOctober 23rd, 2007 at 1:38 pm

Glad to hear you made it safe, despite the abundance of the stupid about.

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