Gate Expectations

 You paid £400 for a ticket, and somehow you're still doing the airline's job for them. This week on Gate Expectations: printing your own boarding pass, wrestling a suitcase into submission at the Cage of Shame, and the eternal mystery of whether your laptop needs to come out of the bag. It's Gate Expectations, and today, we fly." 

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Am I out of touch? Is the world weird, or is it just me? You know you're an adult when the most stressful part of your week isn't your job, isn't your relationship, it's a machine at gate 14 that won't recognise your own face. Welcome to Gate Expectations, the podcast for anyone who has sprinted through a terminal holding their belt, their laptop, and their last shreds of dignity. I'm Alison and today we're talking about airports. Specifically, the modern miracle of paying £400 for a ticket and then being asked to do every single job the airline used to do for you. Because I remember, I remember a version of air travel where a human being took your bag from you. A legend, a golden age. Now you print your own boarding pass at home, on your own paper, using your own ink, which by the way costs more than a litre of fuel, and then you print your own bag tag. Fold it yourself, attach it to your bag, which you are then personally hoisting onto a conveyor belt while an airline employee stands two feet away watching you do their job, occasionally saying, just pop it on there for me. Pop it on there for me. Thanks so much for checking in your own luggage, really appreciate it. Big help. And can we talk about the self-service bag drop machines specifically? The ones that scan your bag and then just reject it. For no stated reason, please remove item and try again. Remove what item? It's a suitcase, it's one item, it's the whole item. It's basically a slot machine at this point. You put your bag in, you pull the lever, and you find out if you're flying today. Okay, but let's go deeper because the bag drama doesn't even start there. It starts at home, the night before, on the bedroom floor, the cabin bag size ritual, where you measure your hand luggage against the airline's official dimensions, which are apparently a closely guarded state secret that changes by airline, by aircraft, and possibly by the mood of the gate agent that day. 56 by 45 by 25. No weight, that's a different airline. That one's 55 by 40 by 20. Yeah, and that one wants your bag to also weigh less than a house cat. And there's always that metal frame at the gate, the little cage of shame, and everyone's doing the same pathetic dance, pretending to casually stroll past it while surreptitiously checking their bag definitely fits. Because if it doesn't, you're not just paying a fee, you're paying a fee publicly, in front of a queue of strangers who are all thinking, thank God it's not me, the public bad shaming fee. And this is why otherwise reasonable adults now travel wearing four jackets and cargo trousers with 14 pockets in the middle of July. I've personally seen a man wearing a coat with a laptop, two paperbacks, and what I'm fairly sure was a family-sized bag of crisps distributed across his person like a hostage situation. He wasn't smuggling contraband, he was smuggling a personal item. The personal item, the most philosophical, confusing object in modern travel. Is it a bag? Is it a bag inside a bag? Can it become a second suitcase if you just call it a tote? Nobody knows, it's the Schrdinger cat of luggage. Alright, fast forward. You survived check-in, you've survived the cage of shame, you're through security, where you've now taken off your shoes, your belt, your jacket, removed your laptop, your liquids, and basically stripped down to your soul in front of 40 strangers. For a process that changes rules depending on which airport you're in. Liquids in a bag, no liquids out of the bag. Shoes off, shoes optional. Laptop out, laptop can stay if the bag has one of the new scanners. How am I supposed to know which airport has the new scanners? There should be a sign, a big flashing sign. This airport has evolved. You may leave your laptop where it is. Instead, you just have to guess. And if you guess wrong, you get the look, the security officer look, the one that says, I've been doing this for 11 years, and you, madam, are the reason I'm tired. And then finally, finally, you're at the gate and boarding begins. And this is where humanity truly reveals itself. Gate lice. For anyone who doesn't know this term, it's the airline industry's actual real term for the crowd of people who swarm the gate the second boarding is even whispered about. Despite being in a group six of nine with a seat they already have that is not going anywhere, they will still be there in 11 minutes. They don't want to board, they want to stand near the door emotionally. Okay, you're on the plane. Now we enter the Etiquette Olympics. Event one, the shoe removal. Look, I understand comfort, I do, but there is a fine line between I'm getting comfortable for a long fight, and I'm now sharing my socks with everyone in row 23, especially the ones who go one step further and just don't wear socks. We don't need to see that. Nobody boarded this flight consenting to seeing that. Event 2. Obviously the seat recline, the great class war of the skies, fought two inches at a time. You feel it before you see it, the slow, silent, creeping betrayal of the seat back moving towards your kneecaps like a very polite glacier. And there's supposedly an etiquette to it. You're meant to look behind you first, check if there's a laptop, a coffee, a baby. Nobody does it. Nobody has ever done that. It's the indicate before turning of air travel. Technically the rule, spiritually a myth. And then you're the person behind, now with a seat three centimetres from your face for six hours, and you have two choices accept your fate or become the villain who pointedly, aggressively taps the seat back while pretending to type. I'm not kicking your seat, I'm just an enthusiastic emailer. Now let's talk about the children. I'm not anti-child, children are wonderful, children are the future. Children on an aeroplane at cruising altitude, with popping ears and no ability to regulate their emotions, are a fire alarm that has gained sentience. But honestly, it's not their fault. Their ears hurt, they're stuck in a metal tube, and frankly, that's a very honest response to the situation. I've wanted to scream on a plane too. They are just braver than me. The child crying at 35,000 feet is the only person on that flight being emotionally honest. The rest of us are just internally screaming behind a small bag of pretzels and a polite smile. Speaking of a small bag of pretzels, let's discuss the meal. Ah, yes, the tray table origami challenge. You get a tray about the size of a hardback book, and on it the airline expects you to fit a main course, a bread roll, a butter pat that requires industrial machinery to open, a small salad, a dessert, a drink, and your own two elbows. And the cutlery. The past the plastic cutlery that bends before it cuts. You're not eating chicken at that point, you're wrestling chicken. With the spoon that identifies as a knife, I've seen grown adults defeated by a bread roll. Just staring at it, I can't open this. I have flown here from another continent and I can't open this roll. And your elbows are pinned to your body the entire time because the person next to you is fighting exactly the same battle. So you're both eating like little T-Rexes, elbows tucked in, hunched over your trays in silence. Competitive, silent T-Rex dining at altitude. Now, the true final boss of air travel etiquette, you are in the window seat, you have a full bladder, both of your roomates are asleep. The window seat toilet dilemma. This is genuinely a modern moral crisis. Do you wake them? Do you attempt the gymnastic climbover? One hand on the headrest, praying you don't put a knee in someone's lap, or do you just wait? Calculate how many hours are left and decide, no, actually, I can hold it. I will simply become one with this seat. I am the seat now. There is a whole silent negotiation that happens. The little tap on the shoulder, the apologetic wince, the aisle passenger doing their over-exaggerated, no trouble at all, while the soul quietly leaves their body because they just got comfortable. And the aisle seat holds all the power in that moment, and they know it. It's the only real power any of us have on a plane. You may not pass, well, you may, but I will make you feel it. A few more observations before we land this thing. The turbulence prayer, the moment of mild bumpiness where an entire cabin of confirmed atheists suddenly rediscover religion. I don't believe in anything, but also please, anything, keep this plane up. The overhead bin Tetris, where one wheelie bag positioned diagonally by a stranger with no spatial awareness, single-handedly removes 40% of the bin storage capacity for the entire flight. The applause on landing, which I love, because it happens on exactly one type of flight. Never a normal domestic hop, always the slightly turbulent holiday charter where everyone's had two gin and tonics and feels the pilot has personally saved their life. Well done, pilot, whom I've never met for doing your one job. The recycled cabin air smell, that specific combination of jet fuel, hand sanitizer, and somebody's microwaved pasta from three rows up. And finally, the captain's announcement, always delivered in exactly the same tone, regardless of content. Ladies and gentlemen, we're beginning our descent. Same tone as unfortunately we'll be circling for 45 minutes. Same tone as there is a small issue with the left engine. Nothing can shake that voice. That voice has seen things.