By a man who once shouted at a flight attendant, and would quite like to explain himself
Humanity, broadly speaking, is a disappointment. I say this as someone who has spent a great deal of time among it, on roads, in queues, in airports and in the car park of a large American supermarket on a Saturday afternoon, which is basically the Somme with trolleys.
Take driving. There is a man, and I’m fairly sure it’s the same man, who follows me everywhere in a pickup truck the size of a small cathedral. He sits eleven inches from my rear bumper at seventy miles an hour, flashing his lights as though I’ve personally insulted his mother, and when he finally overtakes he gives me a look usually reserved for people who talk in cinemas. Then he pulls in front of me, brakes for no reason, and turns off without indicating, because indicators on these trucks are apparently an optional extra, like modesty.
Then there are pedestrians. Somewhere along the line, a large portion of the population decided the correct place to stop and consult their phone is the exact middle of a doorway. Not near it. In it. They stand there like a bollard with a data plan while a queue of people builds up behind them, and if you say “excuse me” they turn round slowly, with the wounded expression of a cow that’s just been asked to move off a railway line.
And don’t get me started on people in shops. I once watched a man berate a teenage cashier for fully four minutes because a coupon had expired. The coupon was worth forty cents. He was wearing a watch that cost more than my first car. The girl stood there and took it with the thousand-yard stare of someone who knows she’s paid eleven dollars an hour and that no amount of eye contact will change that.
So yes. People are awful. I have long held this view, and I held it firmly, right up until the day I was the awful one.
A while back, my mum was taken into hospital. If you’ve had the phone call, you’ll know the one. Your stomach falls into your shoes and stays there for days. You carry on functioning, sort of, the way a car with a snapped cambelt carries on rolling for a bit after the engine’s stopped. Everything looks normal from the outside. It very much isn’t.
I was at the airport with Georgie, my dog, walking him between gates. He’s small, he’s well behaved, and he was doing what dogs do on a lead, which is walk, sniff things, and look up at me as if to ask whether we’ll be landing somewhere with squirrels.
Then a flight attendant appeared. I shan’t name the airline. I’ll just say it has a reputation for staff whose customer service style falls somewhere between a traffic warden and a nightclub bouncer, and if you knew which one I meant, I suspect we’d all be United in agreement.
He said something about Georgie. That he shouldn’t be walking. That he should be in his bag.
Now, on a normal day, I’d have said “right you are,” popped Georgie in the bag, and muttered something about jobsworths once I was safely out of earshot, which is the British way and has been since roughly 1066.
This was not a normal day.
I went off like a firework in a biscuit tin. I’m told I was quite eloquent. I’m also told I was crying, which rather undermines the eloquence. I said things to that poor man that I would not repeat to my own reflection, and I said them loudly, in a public place, in front of people eating overpriced sandwiches, who stopped chewing to watch, the way you might stop to watch a lorry reversing into a hedge.
And here’s the thing. It wasn’t really about him. He was just the one standing nearest when the dam gave way. Everything I’d been holding in since the phone call, the worry, the fear, the sheer helpless sadness of being thousands of miles and several time zones from someone you love when they’re in a hospital bed, all of it had been sitting in me like pressure in a boiler. He happened to tap the valve.
To him, I was just another rude passenger. A shouty man with a dog who didn’t like being told the rules. He’ll have gone back to the crew room and said “you’ll never guess what some lunatic did at gate twenty-three,” and everyone will have nodded and agreed that people are awful.
And he’d have been right. From where he was standing, I was awful.
Which brings me, rather uncomfortably, back to the man in the pickup truck.
Maybe he’s a nasty piece of work. Statistically, some of them must be. But maybe he’s just had a call from the school. Maybe his wife’s in labour. Maybe he’s just been told his job’s gone and he’s driving home working out how to tell his family, and every car in front of him feels like one more thing standing between him and the end of the worst day of his life.
The doorway woman might be reading a message saying her test results are back. The coupon man might have forty cents to his name and a watch he can’t bring himself to sell because it was his father’s. I don’t know. That’s the point. None of us know. We only ever see the tip of someone’s iceberg, and we judge the whole thing by the bit that’s poking out and being rude to us.
I’m not saying we should all become saints and let people drive over our feet. There are genuine idiots out there, and some of them should be put in a sack. But the next time someone snaps at you for no obvious reason, it’s worth pausing for half a second and wondering what’s going on underneath. Because one day, it’ll be you in the airport lobby, red-faced and wet-eyed, shouting at a stranger about a dog, and you’ll hope very much that somebody gives you the benefit of the doubt.
As for that flight attendant, if you’re reading this, which you won’t be, I’m sorry. You were only doing your job. Badly, and with the charm of a parking ticket, but still.
Georgie, for the record, has forgiven everyone. Dogs always do. It’s one of the many ways they’re better than us.
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