I'm a Stranger Here Myself (29 page)

My father was a sportswriter who flew a lot for his work in the days before it was common to do so, and occasionally he would take me on one of his trips with him. It was exciting, of course, just to go away for a weekend with my dad, but at the heart of the experience was the thrill of getting on a plane and going somewhere.

Everything about the process felt special and privileged. Checking in, you would be one of a small group of welldressed people (for in those days people actually dressed up to fly). When the flight was called, you would stroll across a broad tarmac to a gleaming silver plane, and up one of those wheeled staircases. Entering the plane was like being admitted to some special club. Just stepping aboard, you became a little more stylish and sophisticated. The seats were comfy and, for a small boy, commodious. A smiling stewardess would come and give you a little winged badge that said “Assistant Pilot” or something similarly responsible sounding.

All that romance has long since vanished, I’m afraid. Today commercial planes are little more than winged buses, and the airlines, without detectable exception, regard passengers as irksome pieces of bulk freight that they consented, at some time in the remote past, to carry from place to place and now wish they hadn’t.

I cannot begin to describe in a space this modest all the spirit-sapping features of modern air travel—the routinely overbooked flights, the endless standing in lines, the delays, the discovery that your “direct” flight to Dallas actually involves stops in Scranton and Nashville and involves layovers of ninety minutes and two changes of planes, the near-impossibility of finding a friendly face among the gate agents, the being treated like an idiot and a cipher.

Yet in the oddest ways airlines continue to act as if it is still 1955. Take the safety demonstration. Why after all these years do the flight attendants still put a life vest over their heads and show you how to pull the little cord that inflates it? In the entire history of commercial aviation no life has been saved by the provision of a life vest. I am especially fascinated by the way they include a little plastic whistle on each vest. I always imagine myself plunging vertically toward the ocean at 1,200 miles an hour and thinking: “Well, thank gosh I’ve got this whistle.”

It is no good asking what they are thinking because they are not thinking anything. I recently boarded a flight from Boston to Denver. When I opened the overhead storage compartment, I found an inflated dinghy entirely filling the space.

“There’s a boat in here,” I breathed in amazement to a passing flight attendant.

“Yes, sir,” said the flight attendant snappily. “This plane meets FAA specifications for overwater flights.”

I stared at him in small wonder. “And which body of water do we cross between Boston and Denver?”

“The plane meets FAA specifications for overwater flights whether or not overwater flights are scheduledly anticipated,” was his crisp reply, or something similarly inane and mangled.

“Are you telling me that if we go down in water, 150 passengers are supposed to get into a two-man dinghy?”

“No, sir, there’s another flotation craft in here.” He indicated the bin on the opposite side.

“So two boats for 150 people? Does that strike you as just a little absurd?”

“Sir, I don’t make the rules, and you are blocking the aisle.”

He talked to me like this because all airline employees eventually talk to you like this if you press them a little bit, and sometimes even if you don’t. I feel safe in saying that there is not an industry anywhere in which the notions of service and customer satisfaction are less regarded. All too often the most innocuous move—stepping up to a counter before the check-in clerk is ready to receive you, inquiring why a flight is delayed, ending up with no place to stow your coat because your overhead locker contains an inflated boat—can lead to snappishness and rebuke.

Mind you, with the notable exception of me and a few other meek souls who feel a certain commitment to orderliness, most passengers these days deserve what they get. This is because they take on bulging suit bags and wheeled carryons that are at least twice the officially permitted size, so that the overhead bins fill up long before the flight is fully boarded. To make sure they get a bin to themselves, they board before their row is called. On any flight now you will find perhaps 20 percent of the seats filled by people whose row numbers have not been called. I have watched this process with weary exasperation for some years, and I can tell you that it takes roughly half as long again for an American plane to get boarded and airborne as it does anywhere else in the developed world.

The result of this is a kind of war between airline employees and passengers, which all too often redounds on the innocent in a way that cries out for justice.

I particularly recall an experience of a few years ago when my wife, children, and I boarded a flight in Minneapolis to fly to London and discovered that we had been allocated seats in six different parts of the aircraft, up to twenty rows apart. Bemused, my wife pointed this out to a passing stewardess.

The stewardess looked at the boarding passes. “That’s correct,” she said and started to move away.

“But we’d like some seats together please,” said my wife.

The stewardess looked at her, then gave a small, hollow laugh. “Well, it’s a little late
now,
” she said. “We’re boarding. Didn’t you check your boarding passes?”

“Only the top one. The check-in clerk”—who was, let me interject here, a disagreeable specimen herself—“didn’t tell us she was scattering us all over the plane.”

“Well, there’s nothing I can do now.”

“But we have small children.”

“I’m sorry, you’ll just have to make do.”

“Are you telling me to put a two-year-old and a four-year-old off by themselves for an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic?” my wife asked. (This was an idea that I believed I could warm to, but I made a grave face, in solidarity.)

The stewardess gave an elaborate, put-upon sigh and, with an air of undisguised resentment, asked a kindly white-haired couple to exchange seats, which allowed my wife and the two youngest to sit together. The rest of us would remain separated.

“Next time look at your boarding passes before you leave the terminal,” the attendant snapped at my wife in parting.

“No, next time we will fly with someone else,” my wife replied, and indeed ever since we have.

“And one day, I’ll have a column in a newspaper and I’ll write about this,” I called after her in a haughty voice. Of course, I didn’t say any such thing, and it would be a terrible abuse of my position to tell you that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shabby and inexcusable way, so I won’t.

I have finally figured out what is wrong with everything. There is too much of it. I mean by that that there is too much of every single thing that one could possibly want or need except time, money, good plumbers, and people who say thank you when you hold open a door for them. (And, entirely by the way, I would like to put it on the record here that the next person who goes through a door that I’ve held open and doesn’t say “Thank you” is going to get it in the kidneys.)

America is of course a land of bounteous variety, and for a long time after we first moved here I was dazzled and gratified by the wealth of choice everywhere. I remember going to the supermarket for the first time and being genuinely impressed to find that it stocked no fewer than eighteen varieties of incontinence diaper. Two or three I could understand. Half a dozen would seem to cover every possible incontinence contingency. But eighteen—gosh! This
was
a land of plenty. And what a range of choice they offered. Some were scented, some were dimpled for extra comfort, and they came in a variety of strengths from, as it were, “Oops, bit of a dribble” to “Whoa! Dambusters!” Those weren’t the labels they actually used, of course, but that was the gist of it. They even came in a choice of colors.

For nearly every other type of product—frozen pizzas, dog food, ice creams, cereals, cookies, potato chips—the choices were often literally in the hundreds. Every new flavor seemed to have pupped another flavor. When I was a boy shredded wheat was shredded wheat and that was it. Now you could have it coated in sugar or cinnamon, in bite-size morsels, with slices of genuine bananalike material, and goodness knows what else.

And this applies to everything. You can now choose, apparently, among thirty-five varieties of Crest toothpaste. According to
The Economist,
“The average supermarket in America devotes 20 feet of shelving to medicines for coughs and colds.” (And never mind that of the 25,500 “new” consumer products launched in the United States last year, 93 percent were merely modified versions of existing products.)

After twenty years in England this copious abundance was, as you might imagine, almost intoxicating. Lately, however, I have come to suspect that perhaps you can get too much choice. I found myself edging around to this view recently when I was at the airport in Portland, Oregon, standing in a line of about fifteen people at a coffee stand. It was 5:45 A.M., not my best time of day, and I had just twenty minutes till my flight was to be called, but I really, really needed to get some caffeine into my system. You know how it is.

It used to be if you wanted a cup of coffee that’s what you asked for and that’s what you got. But this place, being a 1990s sort of coffee stand, offered at least twenty choices—plain latte, caramel latte, breve, macchiato, mocha, espresso, espresso mocha, black forest mocha, americano, and so on—in a range of sizes. There was also a galaxy of muffins, croissants, bagels, and pastries. All of these could be had in any number of variations, so that every order went something like this:

“I’ll have a caramel latte combo with decaf mocha and a cinnamon twist, and a low-fat cream cheese sourdough bagel, but I’d like the pimento grated and on the side. Are your poppyseeds roasted in polyunsaturated vegetable oil?”

“No, we use double-extra-lite canola extract.”

“Oh, that’s no good for me. In that case, I’ll have a New York three-cheese pumpernickel fudge croissant. What kind of emulsifiers do you use in that?”

In my mind’s eye, I saw myself taking each customer by the ears, shaking his or her head slowly eighteen or twenty times, and saying: “You’re just trying to get a cup of coffee and a bread product before your flight. Now ask for something simple and scram.”

Fortunately for all these people, until I have had my first cup of coffee in the morning (and this is particularly true during hours in single digits) all I can do is rise, dress myself (a bit), and ask for a cup of coffee. Anything else is beyond me. So I just stood and waited stoically while fifteen people placed complex, time-consuming, preposterously individualized orders.

When at last my turn came, I stepped up and said: “I’d like a large cup of coffee.”

“What kind?”

“Hot and in a cup and very large.”

“Yeah, but what kind—mocha, macchiato, what?”

“I want whichever one is a normal cup of coffee.”

“You want americano?”

“If that means a normal cup of coffee, then yes.”

“Well, they’re all coffees.”

“I want a normal cup of coffee like millions of people drink every day.”

“So you want an americano?”

“Evidently.”

“Do you want regular whipped cream or low-cal with that?”

“I don’t want whipped cream.”

“But it comes with whipped cream.”

“Look,” I said in a low voice, “it is 6:10 A.M. I have been standing for twenty-five minutes behind fifteen seriously selective people, and my flight is being called. If I don’t get some coffee right now—and by right now I mean
right
now—I am going to have to murder someone, and I think you should know that you are on the short list.” (I am not, as you will gather, a morning person.)

“So does that mean you want low-cal whipped cream or regular?”

And so it went.

This abundance of choice not only makes every transaction take ten times as long as it ought to, but in a strange way actually breeds dissatisfaction. The more there is, the more people crave, and the more they crave, the more they, well, crave more. You have a sense sometimes of being among millions and millions of people needing more and more of everything, constantly, infinitely, unquenchably. We appear to have created a society in which the principal pastime is grazing through retail establishments looking for things—textures, shapes, flavors—not before encountered.

The last time I went for breakfast, I had to choose among nine options for my eggs (poached, scrambled, sunny side up, over easy, and so on), sixteen types of pancake, six varieties of juice, two shapes of sausage, four kinds of potato, and eight varieties of toast, muffin, or bagel. I have taken out mortgages that involved less decision-making than that. I thought I had finished when the waitress said: “Do you want whipped butter, pat butter, butter-margarine blend, or butter substitute?”

“You’re joking,” I said.

“I don’t joke about butter.”

“Then pat butter,” I said weakly.

“Low-sodium, no-sodium, or regular?”

“Surprise me,” I answered in a whisper.

To my astonishment, my wife and children love all this. They love going into an ice cream parlor and being able to choose among seventy-five flavors of ice cream, and then seventy-five types of topping to put on that ice cream.

For my part, I find increasingly that I miss the simplicity, the almost willful paucity, of the English way of doing things. Confronted with a glass case filled with twenty-seven types of pizza or a food court stand offering 126 possible permutations of pretzel, I just wish for a nice cup of tea and a simple, virtually flavorless bun, but I’m afraid I am the only person in the house who feels that way. I trust that my wife and kids will eventually grow sated by all this, but there is no sign of it happening yet.

Still, looking on the bright side, at least I am well-fixed for incontinence diapers.