Being rather obvious
Mar. 18th, 2011 08:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
desperanceI'm home, yes. I'd rather not be. This morning I was in California, but that was yesterday.
Unslept, unbathed, fed at curious times on curious foodstuffs: not, I think, making much sense. Also I had a teenage boy fall at my feet in mid-air. Blessedly, not from anything serious, as far as anyone could tell: dehydrated, unused to altitude, stood up too fast and passed out, basically. At, as I say, my feet. I am not, of course, a doctor, but I've spent a lot of time hanging out with them, and also with teenage boys; I can fake it pretty well. So I did all the emergency stuffs that you do, put him in my seat with his head between his legs, asked if he'd taken anything he shouldn't, sent one of his friends for water and another for an actual trained cabin crew to take over and do actual things that weren't fake. Like that.
Otherwise, the flights were just flights and the airports were just airports. Dallas/Fort Worth may be the nicest and the most user-friendly I've been in thus far; they have a Lovely Train! That whisks you from gate to gate, all around the vast circle that the airport is! And by contrast, if an airport is fundamentally about moving passengers efficiently to where they need to be and keeping them quiet when they're not actually moving, then Heathrow may be the worst I know. Getting from T3 to T5 is just catastrophic: the escalator debouches you into the middle of the queue, in a cramped unpleasant little lobby where the back of the queue is halfway up the stairs already, and other people going to other terminals have to push through that same queue, and the automatic door doesn't work with people and there are always people and outside is a nasty grim alley for the buses, and that's only a forerunner of the nasty grim drive that it is. And then you meet security again, even though you're already airside and utterly secure. Failed on all counts, basically. I know there are all sorts of logistical problems inherent in an airport that's been expanded and expanded rather than rebuilt from scratch, but surely to Ghod they can do something better than this? Design, people. Thought, consideration. Planning.
And then I came home and was surprised by a cat-sitter's father; so we took his dog for a walk and talked about the pros and cons of moving to California. And now it's nine o'clock and I really did mean to sit up until sensible bedtime, but I'm just grimy and exhausted and I want to have a bath and go to bed. So I think maybe I will. And if I wake up at a stupid hour, so be it.
Unslept, unbathed, fed at curious times on curious foodstuffs: not, I think, making much sense. Also I had a teenage boy fall at my feet in mid-air. Blessedly, not from anything serious, as far as anyone could tell: dehydrated, unused to altitude, stood up too fast and passed out, basically. At, as I say, my feet. I am not, of course, a doctor, but I've spent a lot of time hanging out with them, and also with teenage boys; I can fake it pretty well. So I did all the emergency stuffs that you do, put him in my seat with his head between his legs, asked if he'd taken anything he shouldn't, sent one of his friends for water and another for an actual trained cabin crew to take over and do actual things that weren't fake. Like that.
Otherwise, the flights were just flights and the airports were just airports. Dallas/Fort Worth may be the nicest and the most user-friendly I've been in thus far; they have a Lovely Train! That whisks you from gate to gate, all around the vast circle that the airport is! And by contrast, if an airport is fundamentally about moving passengers efficiently to where they need to be and keeping them quiet when they're not actually moving, then Heathrow may be the worst I know. Getting from T3 to T5 is just catastrophic: the escalator debouches you into the middle of the queue, in a cramped unpleasant little lobby where the back of the queue is halfway up the stairs already, and other people going to other terminals have to push through that same queue, and the automatic door doesn't work with people and there are always people and outside is a nasty grim alley for the buses, and that's only a forerunner of the nasty grim drive that it is. And then you meet security again, even though you're already airside and utterly secure. Failed on all counts, basically. I know there are all sorts of logistical problems inherent in an airport that's been expanded and expanded rather than rebuilt from scratch, but surely to Ghod they can do something better than this? Design, people. Thought, consideration. Planning.
And then I came home and was surprised by a cat-sitter's father; so we took his dog for a walk and talked about the pros and cons of moving to California. And now it's nine o'clock and I really did mean to sit up until sensible bedtime, but I'm just grimy and exhausted and I want to have a bath and go to bed. So I think maybe I will. And if I wake up at a stupid hour, so be it.