Thursday, August 10, 2006

Badmintoned!

I wanted to retell this story before it slipped out of consciousness, although it happened close to two weeks ago at this point.

Mornings at Sydney Int'l are exercises in chaos. Several international flights all arrive within an hour of one another from places such as Japan, South Korea and the States. These are massive flights carrying several hundred people each and when they all hit the fan at the same time, the airport gets gridlocked.

A bit of a back story here. My wife, the doctor lady, travels quite a bit for work and is of privileged company with United Airlines. She frequently gets upgraded to business class on international flights, sometimes leaving me to fend for myself amongst the commoners in coach.

The SFO to SYD flight for our trip home last month was looking to be a horrible one from the outset. United's computers were down at the terminal, leaving all seat assignments to be done at the gate. Cut to gate 78, where five hundred people were all milling around without confirmed seats for a 14-hour jump. Peggy and I positioned ourselves just off to the left of the counter and when the agent arrived a half-hour later: we jumped. Peggy somehow talked him into upgrading my ticket to her already upgraded business class seat, pulling off one of the great all time moves. Meanwhile, as she was getting those golden (not just your standard blue) tickets spit out from the machine, about fifty people caught on that you had to be aggressive to get on that flight and forcibly lined up behind her. We enjoyed (almost too much) watchin each passenger go through their personal trial and tribulation.

Fourteen blissful hours of cheese and crackers, wet hand wipes and personally programmed Queen Latifa movies later, we touched down in Oz again refreshed and relaxed. We knew that this was a bad time of day to land, but didn't expect such bedlam to ensue. As mentioned, multiple flights arrived at the same time, filling customs and baggage claim with masses of people. We navigated these two mazes, but finally met our demise when trying to clear quarantine.

To declare or not to declare, that was the question. Neither line looked any shorter than the other, so we played it safe and declared the enchilada sauce we had in our bag. The quarantine line was essentially a doorway with two lines splitting in opposite directions from the arch. Each line wrapped and wrapped multiple times, often intersecting with the baggage claim queue. We pushed our cart into one of these myriads and prepared for the worse.

After about an hour, we noticed that people were getting pulled from the line that had goods out of their bag and shown to quarantine officials. Take note, whenever in that situation, pull the safest item that one would even think of declaring and hold it out to anyone wearing an airport uniform. Janitor, pilot, doesn't matter. Soon enough, a quarantine official will see your harmless jar of pickles and advance you straight past go. If we'd known that, what happened next might have played out differently.

After about an hour and a half (the time gets longer every time I tell this), we were just about at the front of the doorway, where the two lines meet. All of the sudden this girl comes out of nowhere and starts to push her cart right 'up the gap' and bypassing hundreds of people. Giggling and looking embarrassed, she inches her way closer and closer into a perceived spot of legitimacy. I had enough by this point and went over there to confront her. She was with a group of thirty-somethings, all wholesome looking people. I take my baseball hat, which I was wearing forward at the time, and flip it around backwards like a manager storming out of the dugout to argue with an umpire. Getting up in the personal space of this girl, I first notice that she was really, really cute, her long blonde hair in pigtails with the doe like blue eyes. But I wasn't falling for no Bambi routine, dammit! I was pissed!

I start admonishing this girl like a five year old girl, shaming her and saying that she was an embarrassment to herself. I even tried the 'you are a better person than this' line, to which she replied, 'no I am not' much like the immature five year old I was pinning her to be. After a few rounds of this, one of her friends steps in and says that she doesn't want to talk to me anymore. This guy was my level and holding a leather bag rather ominously at chest level towards me. I didn't process it at the time, but all of the group was wearing the same outfit, black fleece tracksuits with the New Zealand silver fern on the front. So now guy with funny leather bag starts to feel the wrath and I argue with him. In the five minutes I am trying to quell this infringement of queuing etiquette, another fifty people line up behind the argument making the illegitimate line suddenly much much longer. Although it was never that close to coming to blows, Peggy stepped in and separated me from this guy, at which point he had a look of fright, thinking I could actually have done something to him (I couldn't). We shuffled past them towards our quarantine agent and eventually the exist, but realized that this group of antagonists was actually the New Zealand badminton team on tour. Not the most intimidating sports organization in the world, finishing a close second behind the New Zealand rugby squad in terms of 'teams you'd least like to get into a fight with'. This whole encounter did give birth to the phrase 'he badmintoned that line'.

posted by ncawthon at 9:49 AM