Flying No Class
Few things are worse in life than being relegated to “C” status on Southwest Airlines.
That thought occurred to me as I stood at the end of the C line at 7 a.m. Saturday. Not only was I in the worst group, but I was the worst of the worst, and the woman in front of me seemed to be delighted as she pointed that out to me.
“You’re last on line for the C group!” she cackled.
“Yeah…how about that?” I replied, groggily.
“You’re the last of the last!” she persisted, laughing way too loudly for such an early hour.
Maybe if I hadn’t spent the last 20 minutes on a rental shuttle listening to Suzy Q prattle on and on about her cats and how heavy her luggage was, I’d be in a mood to chit-chat. Maybe if I hadn’t been utterly violated by the Transportation Security Administration a few moments earlier or had been spared the five-minute lecture about how, even though I did the right thing by packing only 3-ounce travel size portions of shaving cream, I was still a suspected terrorist because the plastic bag I used was too big, I’d be more receptive to her observation.
But I wasn’t. In fact, at that moment she represented all that was wrong about my morning and, therefore, society in general.
A while back, a landmark study was conducted on prison inmates. The researchers built a replica of a prison and signed up 20 or so allegedly “healthy” people to take part in the study. Half of the group was to be prison guards, and the other half was to be prisoners. The experiment was supposed to last several weeks, but it was stopped after six days.
The prisoners — even though they knew they would be let out, and it was just an experiment — couldn’t handle the incarceration. Why? Because the prison guards hazed them to the point where the prisoners were breaking down in nervous fits. After the study, the prison guards said they didn’t know what came over them — why a little power, an upgrade in status, made them want to beat down those underneath them.
On a Southwest flight, something similar happens — only it’s far more annoying than jail. It dawned on me that the whole process of getting on the plane resembles the path cattle take to a slaughterhouse, with three curving lines heading toward three corrals.
For the uninitiated, Southwest has three boarding groups. A is the elite group of travelers who checked into their flight at least 24 hours earlier or are part of some reward program that I clearly do not know about. The A group generally will take all of the window and aisle seats for the first half of the plane. In the terminal, they will wait on line and stare only at the gate door, either totally desensitized to their surroundings because of their mad blood lust for those seats or because they don’t want to look down their noses at the riff-raff — the B and C groups. They’re above that.
The B passengers will look longingly at the A group for a second or two but will quickly turn their attention to the C group. Unlike the As, the Bs delight in looking down on the C group. They usually sport looks of disgust, disdain and a lot of other words with negative connoting suffixes. They represent Southwest’s middle class. Some will get plum seats in the first half of the plane, but most window and aisle seats in the second half of the plane are theirs for the picking.
The C group tries to live up to its reputation as the devil-may-care, lovable screw-ups they apparently are. They’ll say things like “Guess I’m in the C line!” or “I guess I should’ve checked in earlier!” or, the popular, “Can we bring these beers on the flight?” They will straggle into the cabin like a bunch of untouchables, begging for seats from the more alphabetically gifted populace that preceded. They will search in vain for bin space for their bags, only having to suffer the indignation of having to surrender their luggage, having it stripped from them in the middle of the aisle by the flight attendants, who then coldly exile their belongings to the earmuff people on the tarmac.
Families are broken up. Young children cry hysterically as they watch their fathers and mothers wave long goodbyes to them, making their way to the back of the plane. Their parents gave them a seat in the front section, leaving them with only a little blue blanket, sacrificing all for their children in the hopes that they will have a better flight than them.
What happened to us as a flying society? People used to get dressed up to go on planes. Men wore suits with airline pins, women wore attractive hats. Martinis were served in real Martini glasses. When you ordered a Coke, you got the whole bottle — not a few ounces served in a dribble cup with ice the size of Jimmy Carter’s teeth. Now we’re getting yelled out for having too much Prell; we’re making grandmothers walk barefooted on cold floors.
There was a guy sitting on the ground, first in line for the A group when I arrived for my flight that day. He had been there for three hours and had this smug look as he wallowed on the dirty floor, reading his John Gresham novel.
That guy? That guy was a jerk.