Are you two “no baggage”? asked us the airlines attendant in the terminal, when we were waiting in a long queue in front of the check in counter to receive our gate pass. In fact we didn’t have any check-in luggage and so we said yes to the query and she promptly redirected us to the counter in the opposite corner of the lounge marked “No Baggage”.

We were happy that there were only three such people waiting already in that counter and were sure we would be served “quickly” and could save some life time for us, which would be spent otherwise waiting in the longer queue.

So we left our place as 29 and 30 in the longer “Yes Baggage” queue and proceeded to stand as 4 and 5 in the shorter “No Baggage” queue.

And we waited. Some time later we did waited 2.0 and proceeded to waited 3.0 until we effectively watched the 24 and 25 in the original queue received their gate pass and move on.

Reason: The computer in the “No Baggage” counter is abnormally slow.

Later when we lodged ourselves in one more already swelling queue for security check expecting it to take forever to move, we were asked by another attendant to move on to another shorter queue. Not to believe in conspiraacy theories too soon, we took the bait. The shorter queue did move quickly and allowed us to reach our designated flight leaving gate too soon. Bemused, we waited, as there was about thirty minutes left for the departure time.

When it was about ten minutes to departure, the attendant near the gate matter of factly informed us that the flight departure gate has been changed and we (about thirty of us) aare supposed to go back to another gate which is two floors away.

Reason: The computer in the gate area counter is abnormally slow.

The escalator refused to be “reversed” from its original operation direction (moving downwards). Cursing to ourselves, we climbed the stairs to take us back to the second floor, from which we had come down comfortably using the escalator. When it doesn’t “escalate”, and does exactly the opposite I wonder whether it is correct to call it that.

Anyway, upon reaching the re-designated gate, we were informed by the security that he was not aware of any such gate change for that flight and so, although we could actually see the flight standing across the glass doors, we were denied entry. And so, we waited in the lounge.

Later, a new temporary check-in was setup near the gate that made us wonder why this couldn’t have been done in the previous gate itself, where the “computer was slow”.

Reason: The attendants in that situation were slower.

About thirty minutes past the scheduled departure time for the flight, we were allowed to board the flight. A “full flight” it was. And we waited in there for about an hour watching brats bray. It wasn’t our day. Finally, the time at which we should actually have landed in our destination, the flight departed.

Reason: computers in the airport air traffic control was slow

In the flight a six year old boy kept yelling and crying non-stop because he simply decided to be that way on that day on that location for that many hours. His parents were going through all of the possible rich spectrum of human emotions and their combinations ranging from stoic non-chalance to scintillating rage. To get ourselves distracted, we tried returning to our book and realized out of about 168 overhead reading lamps on that flight, only the one above us had an electrical snag (loose contact). The overhead lamp, like the parents of the yelling kid, kept offering light flickering continuously in all possible frequencies of the visible electromagnetic spectrum.

Conclusion: Respect the hidden normalization laws of life that, by striving to maximize the collective functional incompetence of man plus machine in a given situation, brutally marshall what one can take for granted in life.