On What the Charlotte Airport Can Do to Itself
Tomorrow at this exact time I will be at Charlotte Douglas International airport, and I will be in a hurry to get from one gate to another, and blocking my way will be great gobs of humanity using the only between-gate transportation offered at the Charlotte airport: a series of narrow conveyor belt people movers. These people (who run the entire gamut of perceived wealth, class, race, creed, body type, etc, but okay are mostly white people because this is Charlotte we’re talking about) will not be walking, or even standing to the right so that others might walk, and they will be almost to a person, every year, unbelievably, stuffing their faces with french fries. I know all this because it happens, without fail, every single year, the one time of year I fly through Charlotte to my hometown of Tallahassee instead of Atlanta because US Airways’ $700 ticket is cheaper than Delta’s $850 one.
When I (and the few others in my predicament of wanting to get to our gates efficiently) try to get past them, it will either be impossible - so completely camped out (and sometimes even sitting OR LYING DOWN ON their luggage!) will these people be, or if I dare to try to pass them on the left, as is my right according to the signs that these people either cannot or choose not to read, I will face angry, put-upon faces, french fries dangling, as if I, the one who is using the people mover correctly and not as some kind of lazy-river-ride-slash-motel-room, is the one breaking the social order here. One year I actually missed my fucking flight. (But never again: I will push past them, I will let them spill their fries, I will do anything to get out of Charlotte as fast as I possibly can. And by the way, fuck the “charming” white rocking chairs: get a real gate-to-gate transportation system, Charlotte.)
Anyway, I wrote this admittedly hateful but totally necessary Tumblr post because tomorrow at this exact time I will be resisting the urge to text a friend (or I guess Tweet) about the frustration of The People Mover People and exactly what I think should happen to them (imaginatively cruel, yet too unspeakable to utter here), resisting not out of any kind of Christmas cheer or compassion for those afflicted with the corporation-created, advertising-supplemented disease of fast-food-addiction combined with a more unsettling ignorance of People Mover etiquette, but because I did send that very text back in ‘06, and spent the ensuing extremely-turbulent ride in a tiny commuter-connection plane absolutely convinced that my snobby hate-text would turn out in fact to actually be my last words.
Anyway, on those people movers? You’re still supposed to fucking walk.
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