2017 Summer July 8 Saturday

78/67 degrees this morning (78 degrees OKC), No walk this morning

Airports are always somewhat of a strange experience, certainly not all bad.  When you think about it, the passengers are all temporary residents, for probably several hours at most.  They may be literally thousands of miles away in a short time, to many different destinations or have arrived from thousands of miles away. 

I’ve always wondered what it would feel like to work at the airport, with thousands of very temporary customers a day, most of whom you will never see again.  Somehow, most of them make you feel like you are a valuable customer that will come back again.  

I have never read anything by anyone who worked at a busy airport on how they felt or how they viewed their very temporary customers.  

While I can hardly speak for them, I expect that, to some degree, they tend to categorize customers  into certain categories based on how we dress or act.  Or, maybe not, maybe we are viewed as just valuable (or not) visitors who are there for a day.  

Thinking what it must take to run a major airport, the food, the transportation (especially an airport with trains etc. to different boarding areas etc.), the security, and especially dealing with people from all areas, all cultures, all languages etc. all every day, even to some degree 24 hours per day.  Almost an overwhelming thought.

In a lot of ways, it is like a big City, except that all of the “customers” are tourists, and not even tourists, since almost  none of them stay for more than several hours.  

Meanwhile most of the “customers” are anxious, mad, hurried, or otherwise tense from spending several hours or more in a big flying tube with 50 to 300 strangers!  

Kind of makes you wonder how it all works as well as it does!  Or at all for that matter.  

I read that one of the books frequently assigned to college students (although they said for some reason not as much as in the past) is “Nickel and Dimed in America”.  

I went to Google to check on the actual title of this book, and while there happened to read some of the reviews.  Generally, the idea is a writer “went underground” and tried various low-wage jobs to see how someone could really live on minimum wage.

Of course, as expected she found out it is probably impossible.  

What surprised me was the number of critical reviews for her even trying the experiment.  They ranged from she stereotyped low-wage people (probably somewhat true) to the reaction that she “can’t really feel” what it is like (she stated that at the beginning), to criticism for having a junky car (the criticism was made that most low-wage people can’t afford a car, which is probably true) to criticism to getting a rash taken care of by her “real” doctor (the criticism was that a poor person wouldn’t be able to get any medical care or would have to go to a free clinic or the emergency room) etc.

While some of the criticism was certainly valid, or more likely, just a fact of life, the book still asserted it goal of bring to our conscious mind an invisible world (to many of us) that we never really think about.  

Of course some of the criticism was that she  was “trying to get sympathy” for low-wage people and “promoting” their needs for medical care and exposing  the practices of many businesses.  Kind of makes the point she was successful! 

I think it also pointed out  that much of the “tyranny of big business” is not by the big business itself, but by practices or policies that allow persons who abuse their positions to do so.  

That’s it for now, Saturday, July 8, 2017.