For valuable consideration
By We’re asking you for money today, and I want to write about a little incident from last week that was symbolic and symptomatic for me. My mother died last Thursday morning (I was touched by the many very evidently heartfelt responses to this post; thank you, it does means a lot) and for various reasons the burial had to be Friday morning. I bought a plane ticket to get me there by Thursday night, which involved taking a flight from Denver to Detroit, and then another to Kalamazoo. The Denver flight left 25 minutes late, which was a problem since it was a tight connection. It made up a little time in the air, but after landing the plane sat on the tarmac for 20 minutes because there wasn’t anyone to guide it to the jetway (this kind of thing happens constantly now of course, because McKinsey has told some CEO who is paid $50 million a year that X dollars can be saved by just in time staffing of various jobs).
So this resulted in me having to run all the way across the Detroit airport, since my other flight was in another terminal. I remembered that airlines had a policy of shutting the door to the jetway ten minutes before the scheduled departure, and I knew exactly what time it was because of my smartphone, so I managed to get to the connecting gate 11 minutes before the other flight was supposed to leave. I found the counter deserted and the door to the plane locked. I could see the pilot very clearly through the plate glass window of the terminal, so I started hammering on it like Dustin Hoffman in the wedding chapel scene in The Graduate. I’m quite sure he saw me.
Two minutes after me, three other people from the Denver flight got to the gate. A couple of minutes after that, a gate agent finally appeared out of the jetway, and explained that their policy was to lock the door 13 minutes before departure. I asked as politely as I could what kind of sense this policy made, given that the airline is of course perfectly aware of when their own connecting flight(s) have arrived, and surely it was more sensible to unlock the door now than to put us all up for the night in a hotel and pay for our dinners, given that it was 100% the airline’s own fault that we got to the gate eleven and nine minutes before the departure, rather than thirteen.
The gate agent explained that he was just a pawn in the game of life, buffeted by the bureaucratic whims of late capitalism, although maybe in not exactly those terms. So we didn’t get on the plane.
I did get to Kalamazoo the next morning, after some further drama, but the point of this story is that you are not that gate agent, or that CEO, or that McKinsey consultant, and it isn’t an algorithm that’s trying to extract some money from you, it’s us right here at LGM, and the kind of actual human connection that produces such decisions is something McKinsey et. al. can’t completely monetize.
Yet.
P.S. One of the comments to the AI version of me noted its inauthenticity by the lack of an Orwell quote, so here you go:
One morning it was announced that the men in my ward were to be sent down to Barcelona today. I managed to send a wire to my wife, telling her that I was coming, and presently they packed us into buses and took us down to the station. It was only when the train was actually starting that the hospital orderly who travelled with us casually let fall that we were not going to Barcelona after all, but to Tarragona. I suppose the engine-driver had changed his mind. ‘Just like Spain!’ I thought. But it was very Spanish, too, that they agreed to hold up the train while I sent another wire, and more Spanish still that the wire never got there.
Homage to Catalonia