I read once
that certain German nursing homes have fake bus stops. Evidently the patients on the dementia ward
find comfort in the act of sitting on a bench under a little shelter and
waiting for the bus, even if the bus is nonexistent and will never show
up. We followed an analogous ritual this
morning when we all got on the plane that was to take us to Athens, only to get
off it again around an hour later due to some kind of technical glitch that the
engineering crew couldn’t sort out. The
pilot sheepishly informed us in Swiss-accented English that he “couldn’t accept
the aircraft,” a phrasing which (perhaps by intent) gave me some comfort that
he was looking out for us. As if someone
had offered him a Bombardier C Series 100/300 and, after giving it a once-over,
he shook his head and said that it would not do.
So we
lingered by our original gate for another half hour or so, until they told us
that we would be taking a different airplane from another gate. We redeemed the 5CHF voucher they gave us for
some sandwiches.
I think
it’s good for one’s soul to run into an issue like this every now and
again. It reminds you just how
complicated and miraculous it is that we can get from one side of the planet to
another in a matter of hours, and that always expecting this process to go
perfectly smoothly (or, even worse, making plans with that expectation) is an
unreasonable, if not immoral, thing to do.
