02.03.2009

Earlier today I was at the airport, and in the three hours plus I lethargically sat with nothing to do I began to ponder on the Arrivals Table that sat before my eyes. The scheduled arrival read 14:35, yet under the expected arrival section I found myself staring at a bewildering 17:22. I glanced blankly at the digital screen for a while longer, fathoming the reality at hand and letting the full realization of what these numbers meant to sink in; 14:35.....17:22......14:35......17:22. The insignificant detail that began pestering me was the 2 at the end of 17:22; here lies a chart showing that the flight will actually land approximately three hours after it is supposed to, yet at the same time paradoxically claims to have the precision to calculate the arrival to the very minute (that being 17:22 as opposed to a less staggering 17:20). If the estimated arrival would have been at 17:20, 17:30, or anything of that sort, I would have passively accepted it as an estimate, an "-ish" scenario that allows for some sort of wiggling room; but here they are blatantly lying to our faces saying the plane will arrive at EXACTLY 17:22. Given that the plane was three hours late I had difficulty believing this to be true. My beliefs were further proven to be true as some time around 17:15, or 17:16 the estimated arrival by divine intervention mysteriously changed to 17:12. Not only was the chart wrong (yet again) but now they were eliminating any evidence incriminating them of doing a shitty job. Given the situation above and the amount of time I had to think about the problem I came up with two very eloquent solutions that should be implemented by the airline industry:
1)Stop lying to us. On the estimated arrival just write "A shitload of time, don't bother getting your hopes up" so at least we know what we are dealing with.
Or
2)Rearrange the budget to spend less on precisely trying to calculate an arrival to the given minute (which will be hours off anyways, rendering the whole operations useless anyways) and more on actually getting the planes off the ground at the time they are supposed to leave.