A Week at the Airport (4 page)

5 A few zones of the check-in area remained dedicated to traditionally staffed desks, where passengers were from the start assured of interaction with a living being. The quality of this
interaction was the responsibility of Diane Neville, who had worked for British Airways since leaving school fifteen years before and now oversaw a staff of some two hundred who dispensed boarding cards and affixed luggage labels.

It was never far from Diane’s thoughts how vulnerable her airline was to its employees’ bad moods. On reaching home, a passenger would remember nothing of the plane that had not crashed or the suitcase that had arrived within minutes of the carousel’s starting if, upon politely asking for a window seat, she had been brusquely admonished to be happy with whatever she was assigned – this retort stemming from a sense on the part of a member of the check-in team (perhaps discouraged by a bad head cold or a disappointing evening at a nightclub) of the humiliating and unjust nature of existence.

In the earliest days of industry, it had been an easy enough matter to motivate a workforce, requiring only a single and basic tool: the whip. Workers could be struck hard and with impunity to encourage them to quarry stones or pull on their oars with greater enthusiasm. But the rules had had to be revised with the development of jobs – by the early twenty-first century comprising the dominant sector of the market – that
could be successfully performed only if their protagonists were to a significant degree satisfied rather than resentfully obedient. Once it became evident that someone who was expected to wheel elderly passengers around a terminal, for example, or to serve meals at high altitudes could not profitably be sullen or furious, the mental well-being of employees began to be a supreme object of commercial concern.

Out of such requirements had been born the art of management, a set of practices designed to coax rather than simply extort commitment out of workers, and which, at British Airways, had inspired the use of regular motivational training seminars, gym access and free cafeterias in order to achieve that most calculated, unsentimental and fragile of goals: a friendly manner.

But however skilfully designed its incentive structure, the airline could in the end do very little to guarantee that its staff would actually add to their dealings with customers that almost imperceptible measure of goodwill which elevates service from mere efficiency to tangible warmth. Though one can inculcate competence, it is impossible to legislate for humanity. In other words, the airline’s survival depended upon qualities that the
company itself could not produce or control, and was not even, strictly speaking, paying for. The real origins of these qualities lay not in training courses or employee benefits but, for example, in the loving atmosphere that had reigned a quarter of a century earlier in a house in Cheshire, where two parents had brought up a future staff member with benevolence and humour – all so that today, without any thanks being given to those parents (a category deserving to be generally known as the true Human Resources department of global capitalism), he would have both the will and the wherewithal to reassure an anxious student on her way to the gate to catch BA048 to Philadelphia.

6 But even true friendliness was not always enough. I observed a passenger running with shoulder bags towards a check-in desk for a Tokyo flight, only to be courteously informed that he had arrived too late to board and would have to consider alternatives.

Yet his 747 had not already departed – it would sit at the terminal for a further twenty minutes, its fuselage visible through the windows. The problem was a purely administrative one: the airline had stipulated that no passenger, even one awaited by a bride and two hundred guests, could be issued with a boarding card less than forty minutes before departure.

The presence of the aircraft combined with its unreachability, the absence of another seat on a flight for forty-eight hours, the cancellation of a day of meetings in Tokyo, all these pushed the man to bang his fists on the counter and let out a scream so powerful that it could be heard as far away as the WH Smith outlet at the western end of the terminal.

I was reminded of the Roman philosopher Seneca’s treatise
On Anger
, written for the benefit of the Emperor Nero, and in particular of its thesis that the root cause of anger is hope. We are angry because we are overly optimistic, insufficiently prepared for the frustrations endemic to existence. A man who screams every time he loses his keys or is turned away at an airport is evincing a touching but recklessly naïve belief in a world in which keys never go astray and our travel plans are invariably assured.

Given Seneca’s analysis, it was ominous to note the direction that the airline was taking in its advertising. It was promising ever more confidently to try its very best to serve, to please and to be punctual. As a result, in an industry as vulnerable to disaster as this one, there were surely many more screams to come.

7 Not far from the incautiously hopeful man, a pair of lovers were parting. She must have been twenty-three, he a few years older. There was a copy of Haruki Murakami’s
Norwegian Wood
in her bag. They both wore oversize sunglasses and had come of age in the period between SARS and swine flu. It was the intensity of their kiss that first attracted my attention, but what had seemed like passion from afar was revealed at closer range to be an unusual degree of devastation. She was shaking with sorrowful disbelief as he cradled her in his arms and stroked her wavy black hair, in which a clip shaped like a tulip had been fastened. Again and again, they looked into each other’s eyes and every time, as though made newly aware of the catastrophe about to befall them, they would begin weeping once more.

Passers-by evinced sympathy. It helped that the woman was extraordinarily beautiful. I missed her already. Her beauty would have been an important part of her identity from at least the age of twelve and, in its honour, she would occasionally pause and briefly consider the effect of her condition on her audience before returning to her lover’s chest, damp with her tears.

We might have been ready to offer sympathy, but in actuality there were stronger reasons to want to congratulate her for having such a powerful motive to feel sad. We should have envied her for having located someone without whom she so firmly felt she could not survive, beyond the gate let alone in a bare student bedroom in a suburb of Rio. If she had been able to view her situation from a sufficient distance, she might have been able to recognise this as one of the high points in her life.

There seemed no end to the ritual. The pair would come close to the security zone, then break down again and retreat for another walk around the terminal. At one point, they went down to the arrivals hall and for a moment it looked as if they might go outside and join the queue at the taxi rank, but they were only buying a packet of dried mango slices from Marks and Spencer, which they fed to each other with pastoral innocence. Then quite suddenly, in the middle of an embrace by the Travelex desk, the beauty glanced down at her watch and, with all the self-control of Odysseus denying the Sirens, ran away from her tormentor down a corridor and into the security zone.

My photographer and I divided forces. I followed her airside and watched her remain stoic until she reached the concourse, only to founder again at the window of Kurt Geiger. I finally lost her in a crowd of French exchange students near Sunglass Hut. For his part, Richard pursued the man down to the train station,
where the object of adoration boarded the express service for central London, claimed a seat and sat impassively staring out the window, betraying no sign of emotion save for an unusual juddering movement of his left leg.