Finns are getting weird. Back on Finnair and this time it’s reindeer salad and cloudberries at 35,000 feet. The highlight of this trip was Gate 37a. There was a woman dressed in white standing in a corner looking at the wall. To start with I thought perhaps she had done something very naughty and had been asked by airport officials to stand in the corner for ten minutes (oh, the memories!). Then I realised she wasn’t moving.
Why would you stand facing the wall? Surely you’d look outwards. I was fascinated. I was also interested by the fact that nobody else seemed to have noticed her or, if they had, they were ignoring her.
Then it dawned on me. This was either a brilliant statue or someone was doing performance art (yawn). It turned out it was neither. She finally moved when a small girl ran up to her and looked at her up close. Turns out she was making a phone call and, I presume, was trying to block out the surrounding distractions. However, my imagination had been stirred and my eyes soon settled on a Japanese woman with perfect white skin. She looked a bit like the female android created by Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro and she wasn’t moving either. A real life robot as hand luggage? No, just someone else good at not moving.
Other news to report. First, the Finnair spa has five different types of sauna, not four as previously stated (see June 14 post). Furthermore, there’s a bathing pool filled with mineral water (there might also be one filled with asses’ milk, but I couldn’t find it). Anyway, the interesting thing was that there was a window from the pool (also observable from one of the saunas) that looked directly at a concourse, through which people are passing dragging suitcases and unruly children. But the glass is one way. You can see them but they can’t see you.
Is this a continued part of the future? A privileged few frolicking in a giant bath, while everyone else is stressing out about finding something to drink or somewhere quiet to sit. The one-way glass interests me immensely. Was it there so that the few could gawp at the many and think how lucky they were? Was it there simply to add to the experience (sitting in a pool looking at aircraft taxiing on the tarmac does have a certain appeal)? Or was it there to somehow emphasise schadenfreude? I think that’s it.
It’s same reason that business-class-only flights don’t work. Psychologically, part of the reason business class seating works is that there are other economy seats close by. The cost of a business ticket includes the perverted thrill of seeing people turn right when you turn left or, better still, having people drill past you while you are sipping champagne.
Please don’t get me wrong. I am not some kind of status junkie. Far from it. I didn’t buy my ticket and I’m certainty not paying for it. I have some Yorkshire/Scottish/ no money heritage and my greatest thrill is spending the least possible amount of money on anything. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to observe this spectacle and speculate as to whether a similar dynamic might operate across other swathes of society in the future – a polarisation where, if you can afford it, you are silently whisked from one place to another and generally treated like a king, where, if you can’t, you are stuck on hold, forced to talk to machines, made to wait in line, rounded up and treated like cattle and generally fed to the lions, red in tooth and claw, of capitalism, extreme individualism and free-market economics (i.e. my trip on easyjet to Munich last week).
One more thing. The Future of the Internet by Jonathan Zittrain is worth reading, especially the chapter about what we can learn from Wikipedia. It’s especially interesting if you read it in a sauna with fresh herbs hanging from a roof made of roughly sawn pinewood with pine needles on the floor.