Engines turn
Mar 15, 04, 4:39 pm
It is a sad fact of life that traveling by scheduled airlines has only some of the glamour of shopping at the Red Square branch of GUM (the store, not the Guam airport) during the late Gorbachev-early Andropov years.
Among the comparisons:
Quality of service: You can get excellent service from airport personnel, but GUM certainly had more consistent service. Most GUM matrons looked like Andy Rooney in drag and acted like Andy Rooney going through an episode of PMS. Some of the better employees carried out their duties like Andy Rooney asleep. It was antithetical to the whole purpose of the Soviet state to have an employee of the month program, you see. In contrast you should not generalize about the looks and intellect of airport employees. Many are smarter than your average CEO, keeping in mind that the average CEO has been indicted for putting his trophy wife's pet miniature donkey on the company payroll. The only exception is that anywhere you have more than a dozen TSA employees present, one of them will wait until after you have passed through the metal detector without setting it off to advise you to go back through, take off your belt and shoes, put those through the xray and pass through the metal detector again.
Food: Having seen the blue chips served on JetBlue, I can now say that both GUM and the airlines use the same color palette. Airline food is better but you could never beat the prices in GUM's food hall, a clever melding of Harrods and the civilian commissary during the battle of Stalingrad.
Seat Comfort: I wouldn't introduce this seemingly purposeless comparison if GUM couldn't win it. GUM had some Barcelona-style sofas designed by Mischa van der Rohski where you could rest your feet. Better than anything short of one of those first class AA office suites.
Lines (or as Martha Stewart used to say before she realized that if she didn't change her image she was going to be the plaything of the girls in Cellblock D, Queues): The full employment concept of Soviet shopping dictated that in order to make a retail purchase, you had to wait in three separate lines. The first was to pick out your item, the second was to pay for it and the last was to pick it up. None of this cash and carry business. Given the intellect and work ethic on display (see above), these lines did not move quickly. The line for payment actually moved the quickest despite the fact that instead of a cash register, the clerk used an abacus. (Digression: Many people don't realize that George H. W. Bush had been shopping at a Smolensk home furnishing mall to redecorate the White House in peasant chic the week before he discovered the use of bar-code scanners in a US supermarket).
I have waited in long lines in my life. Like most of you, I got numerous driver's licenses and other documents from my state's Department of Motor Vehicles. This used to be used as a profit center by selling all the dead skin cells that fell off people waiting in lines as filler to a pet-food company. I have been caught in a line behind three people, two deaf and one mentally unhinged, shopping for bacon in a kosher supermarket. I have patiently waited to be cleared by immigration in such with-it places as the good old USSR, Chad, Paraguay, Burkina Faso and the Cayman Islands before they discovered tourism. My stoicism has been on display while waiting for treatment in an emergency room at 11:30 PM on St. Patrick's Day. United Airlines once oversold a 777 out of Sao Paolo by 74 people, and all of them showed up to check in 4 hours before departure, whereas I foolishly waited until the 3-1/2 hour mark (but I had a seat assignment). That, my patient friends, was a line.
None of them compared to the infinite void of an eternity (to steal a thought from Winston Churchill) that was GUM. I used to think that GUM was periodically launched from earth at nearly the speed of light, for I would spend what seemed like weeks waiting in line inside the store, only to step out into Red Square and find I'd only aged 6 or 7 hours. I would patiently wait in a 90-minute line at Lenin's tomb so I could silently pray in his presence, thinking his spirit could intervene with the clerks who retrieve your goods and give them the power of sight.
All of this, I now realize, was nothing compared to the criminally insane people who run the West Palm Beach International Airport. Apparently this institution is now run by the same person who figured out that the solution to overcrowding on the Tokyo subways was not to buy more trains or add tracks, but to hire people to shove the maximum number of riders into each car.
You might think that my view of the situation is tinged by my nostalgia, for I do remember when the main terminal at PBI was a ramshackle single-story affair and baggage claim was in a Quonset hut. This is not the case. Perhaps the local congressman has decided to pack the airport to the gills so the next time the government takes a census, they will count the people in the terminal as local residents, thereby increasing the county's share of federal spending.
This is more likely the result of some idiot in charge of planning, who decided that turning over gates from the "3 flights a day and punt" major airlines to the "hire an auctioneer to make gate announcements" budget airlines wouldn't result in any more people using the facilities.
Guess what: it doesn't work! The situation has been getting progressively worse for a few years, but it has now reached epic proportions in two places: the security checkpoints and the ladies bathrooms.
Yesterday I waited in line at the C concourse checkpoint. The interesting thing about this line is the people you meet while waiting thereon. I list them in reverse order, since I took the time to introduce myself while walking towards the back of the line:
- Diners at the Sam Snead restaurant in the terminal. Nice older folks wearing loud clothes. A few younger golf fans wearing their hats with the brim flipped up, Jesper Parnevik-style
- Shoppers in the "Pure Palm Beach" store. Some were confused by the abundance of 60/40 cotton/poly blend T-shirts and the absence of Lily Pulitzer attire
- Airline personnel directing people to the end of the line for the D concourse. See description above
- Refuelers for the general aviation wing of the airport
- Patrons of the Palm Beach Kennel Club (a/k/a the dog track, across the street from the airport)
- Teddy Kennedy, cavorting in his 60/40 cotton/poly blend T-shirt by his pool (I've learned not to look to see if he was wearing underpants)
- Jesper Parnevik, with his brim flipped up, lining up a 3-iron at the Palm Beach Gardens PGA Championship course, in the last round of the Honda Classic
- Some very nice women lined up for the bathroom in the C concourse. Whereas my line had gone east from the airport, their line had gone directly west until we met up again...
Eventually I made it through the security checkpoint, down the concourse and out the gate--NEVER TO RETURN AGAIN!
------------------
...or passengers swim.
[This message has been edited by Engines turn (edited Mar 15, 2004).]
Among the comparisons:
Quality of service: You can get excellent service from airport personnel, but GUM certainly had more consistent service. Most GUM matrons looked like Andy Rooney in drag and acted like Andy Rooney going through an episode of PMS. Some of the better employees carried out their duties like Andy Rooney asleep. It was antithetical to the whole purpose of the Soviet state to have an employee of the month program, you see. In contrast you should not generalize about the looks and intellect of airport employees. Many are smarter than your average CEO, keeping in mind that the average CEO has been indicted for putting his trophy wife's pet miniature donkey on the company payroll. The only exception is that anywhere you have more than a dozen TSA employees present, one of them will wait until after you have passed through the metal detector without setting it off to advise you to go back through, take off your belt and shoes, put those through the xray and pass through the metal detector again.
Food: Having seen the blue chips served on JetBlue, I can now say that both GUM and the airlines use the same color palette. Airline food is better but you could never beat the prices in GUM's food hall, a clever melding of Harrods and the civilian commissary during the battle of Stalingrad.
Seat Comfort: I wouldn't introduce this seemingly purposeless comparison if GUM couldn't win it. GUM had some Barcelona-style sofas designed by Mischa van der Rohski where you could rest your feet. Better than anything short of one of those first class AA office suites.
Lines (or as Martha Stewart used to say before she realized that if she didn't change her image she was going to be the plaything of the girls in Cellblock D, Queues): The full employment concept of Soviet shopping dictated that in order to make a retail purchase, you had to wait in three separate lines. The first was to pick out your item, the second was to pay for it and the last was to pick it up. None of this cash and carry business. Given the intellect and work ethic on display (see above), these lines did not move quickly. The line for payment actually moved the quickest despite the fact that instead of a cash register, the clerk used an abacus. (Digression: Many people don't realize that George H. W. Bush had been shopping at a Smolensk home furnishing mall to redecorate the White House in peasant chic the week before he discovered the use of bar-code scanners in a US supermarket).
I have waited in long lines in my life. Like most of you, I got numerous driver's licenses and other documents from my state's Department of Motor Vehicles. This used to be used as a profit center by selling all the dead skin cells that fell off people waiting in lines as filler to a pet-food company. I have been caught in a line behind three people, two deaf and one mentally unhinged, shopping for bacon in a kosher supermarket. I have patiently waited to be cleared by immigration in such with-it places as the good old USSR, Chad, Paraguay, Burkina Faso and the Cayman Islands before they discovered tourism. My stoicism has been on display while waiting for treatment in an emergency room at 11:30 PM on St. Patrick's Day. United Airlines once oversold a 777 out of Sao Paolo by 74 people, and all of them showed up to check in 4 hours before departure, whereas I foolishly waited until the 3-1/2 hour mark (but I had a seat assignment). That, my patient friends, was a line.
None of them compared to the infinite void of an eternity (to steal a thought from Winston Churchill) that was GUM. I used to think that GUM was periodically launched from earth at nearly the speed of light, for I would spend what seemed like weeks waiting in line inside the store, only to step out into Red Square and find I'd only aged 6 or 7 hours. I would patiently wait in a 90-minute line at Lenin's tomb so I could silently pray in his presence, thinking his spirit could intervene with the clerks who retrieve your goods and give them the power of sight.
All of this, I now realize, was nothing compared to the criminally insane people who run the West Palm Beach International Airport. Apparently this institution is now run by the same person who figured out that the solution to overcrowding on the Tokyo subways was not to buy more trains or add tracks, but to hire people to shove the maximum number of riders into each car.
You might think that my view of the situation is tinged by my nostalgia, for I do remember when the main terminal at PBI was a ramshackle single-story affair and baggage claim was in a Quonset hut. This is not the case. Perhaps the local congressman has decided to pack the airport to the gills so the next time the government takes a census, they will count the people in the terminal as local residents, thereby increasing the county's share of federal spending.
This is more likely the result of some idiot in charge of planning, who decided that turning over gates from the "3 flights a day and punt" major airlines to the "hire an auctioneer to make gate announcements" budget airlines wouldn't result in any more people using the facilities.
Guess what: it doesn't work! The situation has been getting progressively worse for a few years, but it has now reached epic proportions in two places: the security checkpoints and the ladies bathrooms.
Yesterday I waited in line at the C concourse checkpoint. The interesting thing about this line is the people you meet while waiting thereon. I list them in reverse order, since I took the time to introduce myself while walking towards the back of the line:
- Diners at the Sam Snead restaurant in the terminal. Nice older folks wearing loud clothes. A few younger golf fans wearing their hats with the brim flipped up, Jesper Parnevik-style
- Shoppers in the "Pure Palm Beach" store. Some were confused by the abundance of 60/40 cotton/poly blend T-shirts and the absence of Lily Pulitzer attire
- Airline personnel directing people to the end of the line for the D concourse. See description above
- Refuelers for the general aviation wing of the airport
- Patrons of the Palm Beach Kennel Club (a/k/a the dog track, across the street from the airport)
- Teddy Kennedy, cavorting in his 60/40 cotton/poly blend T-shirt by his pool (I've learned not to look to see if he was wearing underpants)
- Jesper Parnevik, with his brim flipped up, lining up a 3-iron at the Palm Beach Gardens PGA Championship course, in the last round of the Honda Classic
- Some very nice women lined up for the bathroom in the C concourse. Whereas my line had gone east from the airport, their line had gone directly west until we met up again...
Eventually I made it through the security checkpoint, down the concourse and out the gate--NEVER TO RETURN AGAIN!
------------------
...or passengers swim.
[This message has been edited by Engines turn (edited Mar 15, 2004).]