“There is optimism overall as the industry, companies and travelers worldwide lean into recovery and the much-needed return to business travel." (UPI, 17 Nov 2021)
My business travel game is extremely rusty. I forgot to pack socks on a recent trip to Lisbon,
leaving me hand-washing and blow-drying the same pair for three days. For last week’s trip to DC, I forgot to pack
jeans, so on the trip home I was rocking the suit pants, t-shirt and hoodie
combination which suggests a hedge fund manager with a psychiatric disorder. I used to be able to pack my bags like sniper
assembling a rifle while blindfolded.
Now I stand in my bedroom staring at the floor, sure that I’m forgetting
something but not sure what.
Things have changed at the airports. Going through security, I don’t need to
remove my laptop and iPad from my backpack anymore, although maybe that’s only
because of TSA PreCheck, which I think I qualify for because I have Global
Entry, but I’m not sure if this is the case at every airport. Now there’s also something called CLEAR which you can pay for to get through
security even faster. I’m not quite sure
how this works, but they’re selling it hard: one dude practically dragged me to
the ground to offer me a free trial the other day. “CLEAR makes you unstoppable,” promises their
website.
I don’t know if there have been breakthroughs in airport
screening technology which have enabled all this; or if the powers that be in
the transportation industry have decided that a little less security is
acceptable to get more people traveling again; or if people have simply stopped
giving a shit about terrorism in the same way they seem to have stopped giving
a shit about COVID-19.
In any case, returning to traveling at least provides a respite
from 7am Zoom calls, and an opportunity to stare at the ceiling in different transportation
hubs around the world.
Airport Ceilings, Vol. 3
Aeroporto Humberto Delgado, Lisbon (LIS). Kind of cool to look at, in the way that early computer animation wireframes were kind of cool to look at in the 1980s. This image in particular makes me think of the original Tron, or better yet The Black Hole. Yet I feel like the designers have missed the mark here: this cold metal has nothing to do with the warmth one feels when visiting Lisbon. And, for God's sake, if there’s one airport in the world which is crying out for tiles on the ceiling, it’s this one.
Oslo Gardermoen Airport (OSL). This was taken pre-pandemic, which means that it feels like I was there either 5 months ago or 5 years ago. Large, impressive, lots of natural wood, which seems on-brand for Norway. I’m in the middle of doing some renovations, so I am unable to look at this ceiling without mentally calculating how much all that custom woodworking must have run them.
Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). Bright, domed, and teal, evoking the Capitol building and Disneyworld in equal measure. I was down there for a conference and stayed at the Gaylord, itself the size of an airplane hangar. These type of places always leave me marveling at the audacity of the human beings who conceived and executed such an immense structure. “Live” conferences have started up again, and, from the upper floors, you could peer down the atrium into the lobby bar, which thrummed with industry people until way past their bedtimes. It was also oppressively hot and humid during my visit, which amplified the languor one senses around DC, and which made the "swamp" metaphor feel a bit more well-chosen.
Aéroport Nice Côte d'Azur (NCE). It’s hard to see from this picture, but this is a raised walkway, around 100 feet above the main terminal. As if the designers had understood the desire to look at the ceiling, or to approach the sky, so they gave the airport visitors a lift.
This one was from February 2020. I was on my way back to Geneva after a global leadership meeting in the south of France. Our colleagues from China didn’t attend because of a virus which we had read a little about but didn’t give much thought. I gave the same presentation four times, to different groups of my colleagues who rotated through. On the last night, a bunch of us got on stage and sang “I Gotta Feeling” with the French cover band.
Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (CVG). As I’ve noted before, midwestern airports seem to have a thing for displaying fossils mid-terminal. I was carefully positioning myself to get the McDonald’s logo in the background of this photo for maximum wry effect when I heard a voice over my shoulder:
“That’s the only one of those in the world. You’ll never see another one like it.”
I turned to see a man, middle-aged and sandy-haired in a
teal uniform shirt, who was working the information desk.
“A mammoth?” I replied, ready to counter that there is in
fact a mammoth skeleton in the Beneski Museum of Natural
History at Amherst College.
“That’s not a mammoth," the man said. "It’s an American mastodon with wooly mammoth tusks. Mastodon tusks are straight.”
I looked back up and confirmed that the tusks on this animal
were in fact curved.
“They had mammoth tusks lying around, so somebody had the
bright idea to stick 'em on a mastodon,” he continued. “Took a 7th grader to tell the
museum people they had gotten it wrong.”
The man and I considered the mastodon/mammoth for a moment.
“Well,” I said, “perhaps they did that so no one would bang their
heads on the tusks when they were walking by,” indicating with my hand the
approximate angle at which mastodon tusks would intrude into the walkway and bonk the unalert traveler.
“Ha!” the man said, “I would love to see that!”
Airport Ceilings Volume 1 and Volume 2.
