Passengers

Given that I quite enjoy people watching, I always find it a great vantage point to observe human behaviour in the checkout line at the airport, or even at the airport in general. You have the people waiting for the passengers, greeting them or saying goodbye, then the actual passengers who are about to get on the flight. People stand in line from anywhere from no minutes to 45 minutes, and then when they get to the front of the queue the large majority of them develop a glazed unseeing look and have to be screamed at or tapped on the shoulder by the person behind who tends to be paying more attention than they are. You would think that at the end or beginning of a long holiday, they could just relax and be happy, but no. Queueing seems to instill a huge amount of stress on people who are normally lovely, take more than a few moments to process them and they start to stress out, usually their fears are unwarranted, sometimes they are warranted, such as when they're the last ones to check in and there are almost no available seats and the computer spits them out randomly positioned seats all over the plane. Granted, we only have them for 5-30 minutes at a time and the crew have to look after them for anywhere from 4 to 14hrs, i feel sorry for the crew. Over the last 3 days, we've been processing alot of people from several cruise ships. The bookings are made in blocks on the plane, so the first ones to check in get the good seats and get to sit with their spouse, and the last ones to check in don't. This causes them a lot of stress. I tried to put myself in their position today, especially when i was being snapped at, after all it is a 12hr flight, delayed by 2hrs, and why would you want to sit next to a complete stranger? On the other hand, theres not much I can do about it. I don't have authority to change seats, only my supervisor does, and I avoid telling people this, because he's busy and doesn't need to be inundated with requests to change seats from every single person on board. I had one lady check in with her husband, they were almost the last to check in, and she was sitting in a window seat directly in front of his window seat, she got so mad at me that they weren't sitting together. She wanted an upgrade to business class so she could sit with him. I didn't say it, but I was thinking, "You're meant to check in at least 2hrs before international flights, you arrive here 45 minutes before boarding and you think you should get preferential treatment? yeah good luck." I sent her over to ticketing so they could deal with her. Hehe. Sometimes you bend over backwards to get people the seats they want, and they're still not happy, or don't even acknowledge your efforts. Other times you get people who are just so lovely even though they have awful seats, and they smile and thank you for trying anyway. I am so glad I have the next 3 days off. Now that I've had this vent I can go away and forget about all the stresses of work until friday.