A lot that goes into air travel is routine. Once you get into doing it more often, everything becomes second nature. How you pack your bags, the timing you set to get to the airport and, of course, the airport itself is just one routine after another. You just really don’t have to think much about anything which makes the process much less painful and it makes you a more efficient passenger.
Although there a plenty amount of good that can come out of routines, having situations arise that break them up can cause serious anxiety. Things can always go wrong; there’s no way around that. Issues with transportation, delayed flights…yada, yada, yada…all can mess with your grand plan and throw you into a spiral. But it’s the times when you, yourself, could possibly cause the routine to collapse are the ones that seem to be the worst. This is what makes me bring up the idea of judgement calls and how sometimes your routine can go to hell!
There are plenty of judgement calls an individual will have to make during air travel. Some big, some little. Do you order a salad or the colossal burger with fries? Little. Do you take the stall with the broken lock because you don’t want to wiggle you and your luggage out to find another one? Again, little. Do you inform the proper authorities that a potential terrorist attack may be about to happen? Yeah, let’s call that a big one.
As you can imagine, I’m writing about something that recently happened to me before a flight. On this particular occasion, I get to the airport like usual and go through all my, and the airport’s routines before getting to the gate. I find my usual preferred seat; always facing the gate agent and never around children (don’t you judge me!) and then go about my other routine of getting out my iPad and wasting some time on Reddit before boarding.
This day, I happened to look over by the window and I saw a piece of luggage sitting all by itself. Usually I wouldn’t notice something like this but the bag was the brightest shade of pink you could possibly imagine. You couldn’t miss it. The best way to describe it would be if Hello Kitty vomited and some genius decided that this would be the perfect color for a carryon set. Anyway, it was sitting at the end of the aisle with no one evenly remotely nearby. Immediately my mind went into panic mode thanks to the media/politician fueled rhetoric, force feeding us the idea that another attack is imminent. That and I couldn’t help but think, if ISIS was to blow up an American airport terminal, of course they would use a pink suitcase.
So here is where the judgement call comes to in play. Do I…a responsible citizen and frequent visitor to the airport…tell someone what I’m seeing or do I ignore it and go about my own business? Now, I know what you’re thinking, “hey Dr. Dumbass…tell someone. You’ve seen the billboards (if you see something, say something), there are lots of people around and you will obviously be deemed a hero if you thwart a nuclear detonation” (not that the hero thing matters to me…). But you don’t know the whole story. I was in Indianapolis…in January. It was 12 degrees outside. If I tell someone that the suspicious looking pink bag could turn this place into an ash-filled crater, I’d probably have to go stand outside for at least an hour. You see where I’m going with this?
Therefore, my options are, A: Report the bag and freeze my ass off. Or, B: Risk being blown to smithereens and…well, I guess that is about the worst that can happen here. I mean, it couldn’t be that bad, right? Given my proximity, the percussion shock would probably kill me instantly and I really wouldn’t be facing some blazing inferno (that would’ve been Terminal A…they’d been screwed). So, am I wrong to do nothing? Well in this case, my conscience got the best of me and I set off to find the nearest whatever officer. I didn’t even have a scarf and knew this was going to suck but better to be safe than sorry.
As I made my way down the terminal I looked over and noticed a young woman, sitting by herself with a backpack the identical shade of pink as the TNT filled roll aboard near the window. I stopped and asked her if that was her bag. She looked at me as if I had told her that monkeys were crawling out of her ass and in an almost inaudible tone, responded “uh huh.” In my head I gave her the public berating of a lifetime and shamed her into finally turning into an active participant in this little thing we call a society…but I didn’t. Instead, I gave her the look of “alright stupid” and walked away relieved by the fact that I was neither going to freeze to death or be splattered into a million pieces across southwest Indianapolis.
The moral of the story is, my good judgement along with my heightened peripheral vision saved the day even though nothing actually needed to be saved. Plus, my overall airport routine was not disrupted too much so win, win! Let’s just hope that next time I’m faced with the possibility of being the person between mass causalities and a happy ending, that we at least have good weather!
-DPW
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the PEOPLE you see in AIRPORTS 