Hell in the Heavens

Why is it that no matter where I go, there is always someone there determined to drive me to drink with their obnoxiousness? Not that I ever need much of an invitation to drink – I think last year I single-handedly contributed not less than 6.7% to the gross global earnings of the Chivas Brothers Company. I really am doing all I can to stop this recession from spreading to every sector and every company. Well, to one company at least.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that I enjoy the occasional glass of whisky (or four). I am refined in my drinking habits and dignified in my drunkenness. But every once in a while I meet a real ISO-certified asshole who makes me want to empty my whisky into buckets and then pour it into my mouth continuously until I pass out. Case in point:

I woke up at 5am this morning to catch a flight to Johannesburg. I suspect those readers that know me are already struggling to believe this story, as on most days I am generally up round about the crack of lunch. I’m known for waking up early about as much as Michael Jackson is known for his insatiable appetite for women. But suspend your disbelief for a moment, will you? This is a true story. Anyway, my driver arrived promptly at 5.30am to pick me up, just as the hardest-working witches whizzed over our heads in a rush to park their brooms before sunrise. It was so ridiculously dark; I think all people who wake up this early as a matter of routine are evil. If your husband, wife, brother, mother or whoever ever says to you, “I just can’t sleep past 5am. I’ve always been a morning person,” I think you should drive a stake through their heart that very evening when they get back from work or wherever the hell they claim to have gone. Trust me, it’s the only way to kill them, I’ve done my research (with a lot of help from MGM Studios in conjunction with Twisted Pictures Entertainment).

I am neither a wizard nor a blood-sucking vampire as far I know because as much as I’m not a morning person, I’m decidedly also NOT a night person. I can’t stay up past 10pm, so I’m really just an afternoon person, which is relatively harmless, unless of course I’m a daywalker, like Blade, in which case I’m even more badass than I thought I was because it means I routinely present monthly reports to my Board of Directors in the morning, hunt vampires and kill lycanthropes during my lunch break, and then come back and review my company’s weekly marketing plan before quitting time. Jeez, even I didn’t know I rock this hard.
But back to the matter at hand. I don’t know what type of plane passenger you are, but I am one of those that loves to keep to himself. All I want to do on a plane is read a book or a newspaper (but not those worthless in-flight magazines – complimentary copy my ass, no one takes those things home coz they’re BORING), listen to my iPod, do a little bit of work on my laptop if I need to, and sleep. I particularly value the sleep part. So it pains me a great deal when I get seated next to another type of passenger: the motor-mouths. These passengers think it is polite to tell you their life story no matter how disinterested you make an effort to appear. Then they want to know your life story, never mind that you’ve been giving them one-word answers since they boarded the plane. Anyway, as soon as I walked up to the SAA check-in line at the airport, I spotted an acquaintance that I hadn’t seen in about ten years. He’s always been talkative, so I groaned inwardly and tried to duck behind this fat woman who was in line in front of me. The problem with assholes is that they can sense fear. He immediately cast his eyes around behind, spotted me, and greeted me with as much joy as John the Baptist must have greeted Jesus at the river that day.

I made idle chit-chat with this guy for about 5 minutes, you know the usual, man it’s been so long, when did you get back, what you up to these days etc, before, thankfully, he was called up to check-in. When it came time for me to check in, I was determined to sit as far away from this guy as possible because having woken up at 5am, I needed conversation on this plane about as much as Kate Moss needs a regular supply of Slimfast. So I asked the check-in lady where she was seating me, only to be told, to my absolute horror and disgust, that this flight was free seating. Free seating?! Since when do you get to sit randomly on a plane? Even kombi drivers tell you where to sit in their long-distance omnibuses these days. But I quickly recovered from my shock and realized that I still had a chance of avoiding sitting next to Mr. Motor-Mouth if I could make sure that he boarded first or that I sat in a fully occupied row. The problem with the latter plan was two-fold, however: Firstly, the plane was not full, so I would doubtless have gotten the look of Satan if I had dared to try and squeeze myself into the middle seat of an occupied row in a half-empty plane. The second problem was that even if by some miracle I could pull that off, there’s no guarantee that I would have found myself in between two fellow guardians of the Seventh Circle of Eternal Sleep Society of which I am an active, paid-up member. The last time I sat next to a stranger on a plane I made the mistake of commenting that I wondered why the game of Sudoku was so hugely popular. Man, that guy spent the entire two hours of our flight educating me on all the technical aspects of the game, and tips and tricks to use to improve my time. I had never played Sudoku, and still have not, and will not. Don’t you hate when people assume that just because something fascinates them to death, it should also leave you in breathless awe?

Anyway, I realized after making these quick deductions that my best chance was to ensure that he boarded first. But as we all know, God has a wicked sense of humour. My acquaintance was held up for an inordinate amount of time by the customs officials, until the runway bus began to board. Now, while I’m on this topic, please indulge me for a moment as I ask a question that has genuinely baffled me no end for years now: Is it really necessary for the Civil Aviation Authority of Zimbabwe to provide a bus to ferry passengers twenty meters from the boarding gate to the plane? A ten month-old baby could casually walk that distance in 9.8 seconds. Incidentally, upon deplaning on my last return trip to Harare we were made to wait for almost ten minutes in the frigid night air for the bus to come and collect us to take us this twenty meters to the airport entrance. When the feisty old white lady standing next to me asked the CAA employee who was engaging in what was quicklybecoming crowd control why we couldn’t just walk to the airport entrance, he told her because it was dangerous. It was quite a hilarious conversation that followed as she refused to let the issue die. What do you mean, dangerous? she quizzed. Because of the traffic, he replied. We all glanced around the dark runway; it was dead silent and apart from ourselves, nothing else moved. We looked back at the cranky old white lady and a hundred eyes implored her to ask the obvious question: What traffic? Unperturbed, he replied ground traffic. What ground traffic? the lady persisted. There’s no one but us, why can’t we just walk? At this point the guy began to realize the issue was not going away. He thought about it for a moment, then a flash of fear briefly streaked across his face as he realized that actually, he had no clue at all why we couldn’t just walk. He only knew that it was not allowed. After a moment he said: Air traffic control regulations do not permit you to walk on the runway. He sounded even less convinced of this reply than of his “because of traffic” retort earlier, but he issued it with a finality that said: I may not know what the hell I’m talking about, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to lose my $100-a-month-paying job because you idiots want to just walk into the airport. Thankfully for him, the bus arrived just then, saving him from another round of interrogation by Super-Gran.

Now look, I’m for keeping our airport up to international standards as much as the next man, but seriously, I think purchasing a bus and fuel and paying a driver to ferry passengers twenty meters to the three planes that use Harare Airport a day is a waste of resources. But that’s just my opinion.

Now back to the asshole (don’t worry, you’ll soon understand why I refer to him as such). I could not for the life of me fathom what the Zimra customs officials were talking to him about, but our bus left for the long ride to the plane without him. Ten minutes after we were seated on the plane, the bus came back with a handful of late passengers, my unwanted acquaintance among them. I watched in terror as he quickly scanned the plane, found me, and made a beeline for the seat next to me. Resigned to my fate, I steeled myself in readiness for the almost two-hour-long torture that was to follow. And boy, did it come in some style.

Holy crap, I’ve just realized that I’ve mastered the art of digression. This post is already 2000 words long and I haven’t even gotten to the subject at hand. More importantly, I now need my beauty sleep, so since this is my blog and I can do what I like, I’m going to end like this:

TO BE CONTINUED…

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