I have been feeling the urge to write something.

07:10:2003
Usually I find it hard to drag myself to the keyboard and tap something out (don’t we all?) but if I leave it too long words start flying around in my head.

If left longer the words start forming themselves into phrases of a highly non-sequitous nature until I start feeling like a madman while out shopping and suddenly the phrase ‘beginning to feel like the future’ surfaces for no reason whatsoever as I am staring at the avocados (note to amateur psychoanalysts: piss off).

Anyway, It’s hard for me to corral these thoughts and words in an orderly fashion as I finally get some time to write. The best stuff comes as I am drifting off to sleep and I am too tired to get up and write it down. Often I tell myself to remember it in the morning and subsequently fail even to remember that there was anything I had to recall. On the rare occasions that I have managed to jot down an idea it has invariably proved to be rubbish in the cold light of morning. So I conclude the Brain’s delta wave state just prior to sleep is not a creative goldmine that throws up some great material but just a lowering of one’s standards to stoner level where every silly idea seems to be brilliant.

Enough introspection. There's a new sniffer machine at Heathrow Airport called an Ionscan Sentinel. According to the label it’s made by a company called Smiths. It’s unlikely to be the same company that makes the crisps because they’ve been taken over by Walkers, however at this stage nothing would surprise me. The Smiths Ionscan Sentinal is a gleaming white cubicle about the size of a photo booth. Certain passengers are selected to stand in it one by one and with several short hisses jets of air are fired all around them. I think it is trying to sniff out bombs. I’d like to see what happens when it detects something suspect. Probably the thing seals the person inside, administers a knock-out gas, sprouts legs and runs off to some detention area.

At Vienna airport they go for a slightly more basic approach. Selected passengers (mostly of the darker tinted skins, I've noticed) are led to a portable metal rack and as they stand in front of it a frantic dog sniffs them all over from the other side (I am not making this up). The dog clearly loves its work. In fact I spotted a backup dog in a large plastic crate nearby and it was making pitiful whimpering noises, as if desperate for its turn to sniff Arabs.

I know I’m not the first one to point this out, but air travel in general has become worse since the you-know-what. It’s not the presence of heavily armed troops everywhere which is fine by me because it gives you something to look at while waiting for the check-in. It’s the attitude of the regular ground staff which has changed. As one flight I made a few weeks ago (alone) was boarding they announced that due to new security rules all passengers must present their passports already opened to the photo page along with their boarding cards.

I was just about to go through when my mobile rang and I answered it. (it was an important call and I cut it short as I knew I would have to switch the phone off in a minute). Placing my boarding card in my passport at the photo page so the gate people would be able to open it easily at the right place, and carrying my bag with the other hand while crooking the mobile against my ear with my shoulder, I hobbled towards the front of the line. I finished my call just before I gave my documents to the woman at the gate and she pulled the boarding card out of the passport without opening it, thereby losing its place.

It’s not hard to find the photo page on an EU passport -it’s inside the back cover- but this bitch started on at me about how I was supposed to be holding the fucking thing open at the photo page as per my orders which I ‘probably didn’t hear because I was talking on the phone’. This was delivered with maximum frostiness. Normally my mood goes two stops darker in airports but this really pissed me off. I decided to make this woman hate me even more by stopping and arguing my position. One: I had heard the announcement and had placed my boarding card and passport in a conveniently accessible configuration. Two: She had failed to take advantage of said configuration so it was her fault that she had the tricky task of opening the back cover of a sodding passport Three: while it was true that I had been talking on my phone before I got to her, this was manifestly none of her bloody business.

I am quite proud that of all the times I have quietly absorbed other people’s bullshit in a Zen-like manner which may cause me to have a heart attack later in life, this time I gave as good as I got. She accused me of holding up the queue and I accused her of the same but I could see that my point was made and at this point all she wanted to do was get rid of me so I moved on.

The point I’m working towards is this: Since the what-have-you, there has been a significant shift in the balance of power between airline staff and its paying passengers. Not only have they been weighed with the partial responsibility for preventing something like that happening again but they have been given the power to finger anyone they don’t like the look of for whatever reason and have them barred from the plane and detained by the security services.

Now I won’t deny that this power has its uses and may even save lives, but some of these people are taking the piss. Just the knowledge that they can fuck up your whole trip, a knowledge shared by both Airline staff and passengers, has put the passengers on the back foot status-wise. Now we must all be meek and accept whatever bullshit they want to hand us –all in the name of ‘Security’.

Because most of it is bullshit. It is bullshit in the name of Security when it is really in the name of money. Take the holding-your-passport-open thing. How exactly will it make for a more secure flight the way we hold our passports as we get on the ‘plane? If anything, it will lead the ground staff to skim over the details even quicker and potentially miss out on any discrepancies. It is obviously the speed-of-boarding that BA are looking at. I’ll be willing to wager real money that some systems analyst stood at various gates with a stopwatch and measured how fast they could process a flight with and without the open-passport thing. Then BA (or BAA) fed the details through a computer and it worked out that they could cut the turnaround time sufficiently to fit one more flight per day on that gate. One more flight equals more profit. The ground staff have less work to do and the only inconvenience is borne by the passengers, who are cowed by the fact that they could be fingered as troublemakers if they don’t comply and kicked off the flight.

I will not comply with their nonsense. I will hold up my end of my contract by paying my fare and not hijacking or blowing up the plane I am travelling on, and I will expect them to hold up their end by not using their new responsibilities and powers to treat us like shit.


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