Monday, June 19, 2006

On smartness...

I was to take the 6.45 am flight to Delhi. Making generous allowance for the time it takes to reach the airport in the early hours and the time it usually takes to check in and go past security, I asked for a car to pick me up from my residence at 5.15 am. My office, adding a margin of safety, instructed the taxi agency to ensure that the car reached my house at 4.45 am sharp. The taxi agency, building some more cushion as a matter of abundant caution, advised their driver to report to me at 4.30 am without fail. The upshot of this was that the exuberant driver rang the doorbell (the one that plays out the entire nursery rhyme) at 4.00 am, on the dot, and woke up the entire family.

Anyway, the good boy that I am, I reached the check-in counter, groggy-eyed and brain-dead, at 5.45 am, a full hour before the scheduled departure of the flight. There were three other passengers before me in the queue and I waited patiently. Just as my turn came and I was about to furnish my ticket to the person at the counter, I felt this jostling and pushing and turned around to see a passenger jumping the queue, charging menacingly towards the counter and demanding that he be attended to first as he had to board the Bangalore flight which was about to take off any moment now.

Instead of handing him over to the police, the airlines chose to give him priority over others and he marched off triumphantly with the boarding card in his pocket and a wide grin on his face.

Not bad, I thought. He managed to sleep for an hour more than I did, though booked on a flight that was taking off 30 minutes before mine. When am I going to be smart enough to beat the system?

3 comments:

dazedandconfused said...

Raj, if you are one of those conservative Tam Brahms, never. Otherwise, there's hope yet :)

Usha said...

There was always the possibility of him being treated as no show for having exceeded the timelines. And I bet one day soon, it will happen to him and he will learn to wake up at 4 a.m. as they say "you can foll some of the people etc....." - someone will see through his bluff if he is a regular in this. if it is one off, we all agree that he was ok to get the treatment he got,no?

Casement said...

DAC,

I've heard that in most cases, the guy who rushes past in queues turns out to be a conservative Tambram!;)