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I slept in.
I walked with M.
I have been addressing holiday cards. I am through “J”, and am optimistic I will finish tonight. Woot!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/12/13/gate-lice-plane-boarding-line/
The travel article is a discussion of people who line up near the gate before their group is called. Apparently, people working at the gate refer to them as “gate lice”. I don’t know if that is true or not — I only just read this article. Also, “full” is in quotes with respect to overhead bins and people having to gate check bags only to learn that there is space in the overhead bins when they board.
So much to unpack here!
I tried RyanAir over the summer, and won’t do that again because Aer Lingus isn’t that much more expensive and their policies are friendlier. I discovered after buying the tickets that I wouldn’t be able to rent a car at that time at that airport and wound up having to fly into a different airport and thus buy different tickets. Oh well! However, I will note that everyone on RyanAir was incredibly well-behaved in line even tho there was a long wait for a variety of reasons, and everyone’s bags were compliant etc. There is some well-established social science research on how unstable social hierarchies are the most stressful and violent. The nature of most airlines and the changes over the last decade-ish have created unstable social hierarchies at boarding. It’s not like things were great before — don’t get me wrong! But there’s all kinds of confusion and uncertainty and variable expectations and so forth. Mathematicians keep promising clever new ways to board that will “fix” the boarding problems, which of course fail because mathematicians keep getting confused about the existence of family groups with members who require assistance and thus cannot board individually but do not necessarily think of themselves as belonging in the “disabled or otherwise needing extra time to board” category. For that matter, if we taught everyone who should be using the “otherwise needing extra time to board” category to use that group, everyone else on the flight would decide “well if they can why can’t I”.
I do think it is interesting that people keep bringing up the whole Just Let Us Check a Bag Dammit or whatever in the comments because you know, you still can if you pay. And often the most expensive tickets (first or business, extra room, etc.) are among the last left to buy on a full flight, which suggests that a component of what is going on is straightforward fighting over that last penny/resources/wtf.
Still, calling your paying customers “lice” feels like a bad sign.
ETA: Having everyone check bags obviously won’t fix the problems either, especially given 2022 checked baggage woes.
I walked with M.
I have been addressing holiday cards. I am through “J”, and am optimistic I will finish tonight. Woot!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2023/12/13/gate-lice-plane-boarding-line/
The travel article is a discussion of people who line up near the gate before their group is called. Apparently, people working at the gate refer to them as “gate lice”. I don’t know if that is true or not — I only just read this article. Also, “full” is in quotes with respect to overhead bins and people having to gate check bags only to learn that there is space in the overhead bins when they board.
So much to unpack here!
I tried RyanAir over the summer, and won’t do that again because Aer Lingus isn’t that much more expensive and their policies are friendlier. I discovered after buying the tickets that I wouldn’t be able to rent a car at that time at that airport and wound up having to fly into a different airport and thus buy different tickets. Oh well! However, I will note that everyone on RyanAir was incredibly well-behaved in line even tho there was a long wait for a variety of reasons, and everyone’s bags were compliant etc. There is some well-established social science research on how unstable social hierarchies are the most stressful and violent. The nature of most airlines and the changes over the last decade-ish have created unstable social hierarchies at boarding. It’s not like things were great before — don’t get me wrong! But there’s all kinds of confusion and uncertainty and variable expectations and so forth. Mathematicians keep promising clever new ways to board that will “fix” the boarding problems, which of course fail because mathematicians keep getting confused about the existence of family groups with members who require assistance and thus cannot board individually but do not necessarily think of themselves as belonging in the “disabled or otherwise needing extra time to board” category. For that matter, if we taught everyone who should be using the “otherwise needing extra time to board” category to use that group, everyone else on the flight would decide “well if they can why can’t I”.
I do think it is interesting that people keep bringing up the whole Just Let Us Check a Bag Dammit or whatever in the comments because you know, you still can if you pay. And often the most expensive tickets (first or business, extra room, etc.) are among the last left to buy on a full flight, which suggests that a component of what is going on is straightforward fighting over that last penny/resources/wtf.
Still, calling your paying customers “lice” feels like a bad sign.
ETA: Having everyone check bags obviously won’t fix the problems either, especially given 2022 checked baggage woes.