Another One

It was that time again. Shouting my name and address again and again at the call taxi reservation desk over phone, then at the driver for having gone in an irrelevant direction, then to giving him directions, trundling my bag to a place on the main road for having given up hope that the driver would ever make it to my doorstep.

After the usual Murphy-influenced check-in procedure (literally, this time I changed 3 queues after the counters at each of them developed some problem or the other) and the zero noise frisking, (I love it when I wear my track pants or the Thai trouser that doesn’t need a belt – the guy goes mad searching for a metal beep where the belt buckle usually sits and it takes him a while to figure that the detector is perfectly alright and that I am actually not wearing a belt – so in the end the detector does not make even a single beep. Not even the calibration one.) there was still 40 minutes’ time left for the boarding, thanks to the last minute series of delays announced by our good(?) old national carrier.

Then something happened which made me wish I were cruising. Uss, Chandasa, Random Access, Mugga, yawl know what I am referring to, right?

I noticed a godforsaken aquarium close to a nondescript advertise-carrying pier in the waiting area. The area was teeming with people, as most of the airlines had chosen to go easy on their schedule. Anyway, the aquarium called for such a qualification because literally not even the children were giving its existence a dingo’s liver. I decided to have a closer look, and noticed how the air bubbles stuck to some underwater plant looked like silver beads. Then I noticed a fish trying to wrap itself in another structure (do not know whether it was plant or an animal or non-living, but it had long-ish tentacles and may have served as a blanket to the fish in question).

The interest kept me there for about 3-4 minutes when I suddenly felt a slight increase in the temperature of the air around me. Shifting my focus further deeper into the aquarium glass, I saw there were 5 people standing behind and around me, staring at the aquarium. Most, I could sense, came looking at others staring into the aquarium, and I was the seed. After the initial tide, some started giving a running commentary: “look at this shitty fish, it doesn’t wanna swim!” etc.

After a while I decided to go closer to the boarding counter. Surprisingly, without even an announcement, a huge queue formed behind where I and a couple of others were standing just like that. We all stood there for at least 20 minutes before an official boarding announcement was made.

Surprising? I do not know. I stood only because I did not find a place to sit closer to the boarding counter. The people forming the queue were sitting comfortably right next to the counter, and still chose to stand up in the queue for 20 minutes without an announcement! Fortunately there weren’t any to go and teach the airline staff not to make people stand in a queue like that, because they would have gotten shouted back at: “there has been no announcement, why are you here?”

On second thoughts, it would have been a good thing to have that question asked.