The Escalator

I’m not a huge fan of flying. It’s not being in the air, or occasional turbulence. It is the lack of control, the waiting, the feeling of being in a bus in the sky, and, more than anything, having to deal with the general public.

Something happens when people, masses of people, get to an airport, at least in the United States. They seem to lose all common sense.

My biggest pet peeve of flying is traversing the airport. Most airports do everything they can to expedite your travel from wherever you were dropped-off to whichever gate you need to board your plane. There are trams, shuttles, escalators, and the human conveyor belt/moving sidewalk.

Despite these modern improvements, the general public finds ways to slow themselves, and everyone else, back down to a crawl.

In other countries I have visited, when people are too lazy or incapable of climbing the escalator while it moves, they stay to the side. In the US, however, they elect to stand in the middle of the escalator, spread out their luggage, and make certain no one else is able to pass, as they stare into space, or, more than likely, at their phone.

The same applies to the moving sidewalks. While the overall mission of all these devices is to speed the process, to get us from one place to another more quickly, the people continue to defy logic by using them to stand still and slow things down.

Possibly the worst part of this, is watching people who are truly in a hurry as they try and negotiate these aimless cattle, who apparently have no timeline and are just here at the airport with the same sense of urgency as a teenager at a mall.

As these poor souls try to go by and, hopefully, make it to their flight on time by having to say “excuse me” or “can I squeeze by” about a million times, the people in the way react in indignation, shocked at the idea of having to stop blocking the entire pathway and allow someone to move forward.

This entire situation drives me insane. Instead of “getting over it” as my wife continually pleads with me whenever we travel together, the opposite happens. It gets under my skin more and more each time.

Which brings me, to my flight home this morning. On my way from the rental car drop to the security line, I was forced to take an escalator. I typically avoid these at all cost and use the staircase, which is always quicker, but, unfortunately, there was no staircase in sight.

Just before I got on the escalator, the boy in front of me - probably about 10-years old - fell down. He literally toppled over backwards from the weight of his bags as the escalator transitioned into stairs and made him lose his balance. Not only did he fall, but as he regained his feet, his luggage wedged itself sideways on the escalator, causing the safety mechanism to kick-in and the escalator to stop.

All in, it probably took 60-seconds to help this poor kid to his feet and then yank his luggage free.

Sixty-seconds is a pretty decent amount of time. Sometimes people share YouTube videos with me and I cannot even make it through the full 60-second clip without being bored or wanting to move on to my next task.

Sixty-seconds is even longer if you are the completely embarrassed kid whose sister is laughing at him and telling him how he stopped the entire escalator for everyone. It felt long enough for me, and I was just the guy trying to dislodge his luggage.

The astonishing part of all of this is what happened once I freed the bag and looked-up to climb the escalator, now turned staircase.

As I looked-up from the bottom, I saw the escalator was still full, all the way to the top. Not one of these people had climbed the stairs and gone on with their life. They were all standing there, looking toward the top of the escalator, content to wait until it began moving again.

Absolutely, ridiculous.

Luckily for me, I was traveling alone and did not have to worry about embarrassing my wife with my disgust for these mental midgets when I loudly announced, “You are going to have to walk. You know, like a staircase, because it is not moving.”

The sheep began shuffling up the stairs, baa’ing at having to actually bear the weight of their own luggage.

A new low for my opinion of the general public.