385 words on Travel
When spending substantial amounts of time in public transport as I did this weekend, particularly when this time is spent at airports, you get to see and hear many people use their mobile phones. This irritates me a lot. Not only because people chattering around you are distracting but also because they seem to have no need for privacy. Personally I’d feel uncomfortable chatting about my friends or business while half a plane is standing right next to me while waiting to board.
But other people, particularly businesspeople don’t seem to be plagued by such concerns. They’ll just phone all the time. Confirm appointments, cancel appointments, confirm appointments with the wrong guy, cancel them again, discuss details of what they’ll do the next morning and so on. Can’t these people just plan properly in advance to make all those calls unnecessary? And aren’t business people usually so secretive that you’d expect them to be sunder some kind of NDA? And wouldn’t that mean that you just don’t speak about your projects while standing in the unsuspecting and mildly-annoyed public?
Hm, perhaps I should start being an industrial spy, and see what I can find out by hanging around at airports.
On a side note… I was quite surprised to see a non-trivial number of business-types on the cheapskate Ryanair flight. Of course that made a lot of sense as a bunch of them had work to do in Lübeck (i.e. just where the airport that Ryanair call ‘Hamburg’ is located), but I would’ve expected the business people to go for a conventional flight to Hamburg plus an extra journey to Lübeck just because those are more conventional and will give them bonus miles of some type or another.
On a mildly related note: If companies like Ryanair put up notices in numerous languages at their check-in desks to remind you to not check in bags you haven’t packed yourself &c, is it really asking too much to have those notes translated by someone who actually knows the language and is able to spell? Similarly, the German security advice they played on the plane sounded really (slow and) strange. While not blatantly wrong, the wording still seemed atypical in many places. Couldn’t they just have booked a flight on another airline and recorded their message?