Hurry up and wait

In this episode we explore one of the most characteristic experiences in every airport

(I’m travelling this week, so I have to apologise that this episode is necessarily short, and late. But relevant to almost everyone’s experience of travel, though…)

If there’s one experience that perhaps most typifies the un-joys of air-travel, it would be this: hurry up and wait…

There are a lot of stages in the airport process from arrival at the airport to departure on the plane. First there’s check-in, and optionally the baggage-drop for checked-baggage. Then there may be a gap before we go through all of the security-stuff between land-side and air-side: identity-check, ticket-check, visa-check for internationals, security-check and and the scan for passengers and their carry-on baggage. Then another gap, during which there may be a gate-change, forcing passengers to move in a hurry from where they were told to go to where they now need to be. And at the gate, there’ll be the boarding-queue, the boarding ticket-check, the carry-on baggage size-and-weight check, and then the final crush to get on the plane with space enough to store that carry-on baggage so it doesn’t get dumped into checked-baggage with all the drama and doubts about whether it will be available on time at the other end.

And for almost every passenger, almost every stage of that process will induce high levels of stress, alternating between near-panic and mind-numbing boredom.

The reason why this so easily becomes so stressful is that there’s an absolute deadline - that flight is scheduled to leave at a set time - but there can be huge variations in how long each of those steps may take. They tell us to get to the airport an hour ahead of time, or ninety minutes ahead of time, or three hours ahead of time. On some days, at some times, we can breeze straight through the whole lot so fast that there’s nothing to do but wait and wait and wait; on others, every step can drag on and drag on, long queues here, bewildering delays there, until at the end we’re sprinting down the passageways in the desperate hope that we might just make it in time before the gate is closed. And there’s no way to make it predictable, or certain, or sane. Madness… hurry up and wait…

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Airports are probably the worst example of this, but there are all too many other contexts where the same dread experience will play out. One my least happy memories is of watching the tail-lights of the last train for the night passing the far end of the platform just as I’d struggled my way through the station barriers, with nowhere to stay and nothing I could do but wait there until the morning. Queues in the checkout lane at the supermarket - easy to get everything we need from the shelves, only to be stalled for seemingly forever whilst the insanity of the money-system takes its toll. The long wait at the doctors’ for every increasingly-impatient patient; and so on, and so on, and so on. Hurry up and wait: oh well…

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