“Racing” to Catch a Plane while Blind
How to hurdle a truly dizzying number of systemic barriers
Hear me read this post on the Deep Sy podcast.
My wife, Gabrielle, and I arrived to the airport later than we wanted. We were flying home from Montreal where we travel often because her family lives there. We were on Air Canada for this trip, and, at least in Montreal, passengers on international flights with that particular airline have to check in two hours before their departure. We had just under 20 minutes to spare, and we didn’t know how long the line would be.
The two-hour requirement is, as Air Canada’s website and employees will repeatedly tell you, for your own good. You may not make it through passport control and security to your plane if you don’t arrive early. And of course, they are correct. This is why the flights of other airlines flying internationally out of Montreal, none of which have this requirement, routinely take off with no passengers. One stubborn flight attendant demonstrating how to buckle a seatbelt in front of an empty cabin, the other dutifully asking each chair if it wants a cookie or pretzels, all because they refuse to admit Air Canada is right.
Gabrielle and I proceeded quickly to the priority check-in line. This is not because we fly business class, or have any status with the airline. It’s because as soon as any airline employee spots that I am blind, they put us there. I categorize this as a disability perk. It’s not an accommodation. I don’t actually need a shorter line. But I get one, and I’ll happily take it. The perk is so inevitable that we often don’t bother talking to the employees at all. We just go straight to the fancy line.
But this time, we made a rookie mistake. I have to be clearly visible to the airline employees if we want unobstructed access to the priority line. I got a few too many steps behind Gabrielle as she was winding her way through that rope maze. Half way through, she was spotted by an Air Canada employee I’ll call Strict Lady. Strict Lady didn’t know that we were together.
Now why would that matter? Wouldn’t Strict Lady just assume Gabrielle was someone flying with a business class ticket and let her go? Other people ahead of us walked right past her without issue.
These are reasonable questions. Unfortunately, in our current political climate, I cannot answer them. Noting any obvious differences in physical appearance between Gabrielle, whose family is from Haiti, and the other people on the line, or suggesting that difference has any bearing on how the world functions, is considered divisive. And I don’t want to offend the current political powers that be as they grow increasingly, shall we say, enthusiastic about law enforcement. So there was NO DIFFERENCE between Gabrielle and the other people on the line. It must have been a COMPLETELY ARBITRARY stop.
So Strict Lady FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER asked Gabrielle if she was flying in business class or not.
Gabrielle said “Coach, but—”
“Then you need to go to the other line,” said Strict Lady.
Gabrielle stopped moving but didn’t respond at first. I caught up just as Strict Lady was about to repeat herself. She hesitated mid-sentence, seeing we were together. But she seemed to make up her mind and doubled down.
We walked to the regular line, which was long enough that we would probably miss the two-hour mark. Fortunately, we ran into another Air Canada employee who saw me. I’ll call her Reasonable Lady. She told us we should go in the priority line. Already suspecting this was going to happen, and knowing we shouldn’t mention we already tried that, we acted pleasantly surprised.
“Oh thank you!”
Helpfully, Reasonable lady opened up the little ropes between the two lines and yelled to Strict Lady, “They’re going to go in this line.” I smiled at Strict Lady as we passed.
We got to the check-in counter with about 15 minutes left, and met Grumpy Guy. Grumpy Guy took our passports and sullenly started plugging our information into his computer.
You might wonder why we didn’t check in online given the time limit. The issue is that Air Canada’s computer system is programmed to easily process names that follow a certain pattern. Of course, the identity of the people who created this system and whose names all follow the pattern is INDISCERNABLE. But the names the system works easily with consist of one first name, one family name at the end, and often a single middle name. Gabrielle has six names. For the sake of making things comprehensible for the system, she will say the first two names are her “first name,” the second two are her “middle name,” and her final two, hyphenated names are her last name. Only the last of these is in any sense true.
Relatedly, Gabrielle’s passport has a 31-character limit on the photo page for “given names.” Gabrielle’s four given names have 32 characters, so a lonely “e” has been cut off. Then there is an additional page that reads, “FULL NAME OF THE BEARER IS,” followed by all six of her names, this time including the “e.” Then, because it’s Canada, there is a translation that reads “LE NOM COMPLET DU TITULAIRE EST” FOLLOWED BY, ONCE AGAIN, all six of HER NAMES. You are maybe (just maybe) thinking this is an absurd way to tackle this problem. But the stringent rules about Canadian passports are rules for a reason. And that reason is the people from the UNKNOWABLE group who make those rules don’t spend a lot of time thinking about people with 32 characters’ worth of given names.
I don’t exactly know what happens to the Air Canada check-in software when it tries to process Gabrielle’s name. I think it has some sort of existential crisis and goes to sit down for a while, questioning its assumptions about the universe. In any case, Grumpy Guy can’t check us in. He clicks things, types things. Takes deep breaths. Makes a few noises. Clicks some more. This takes several minutes. He doesn’t know what’s wrong. We’ve had this happen before. Some people figure it out, others don’t. If they don’t, their supervisors do.
“I am going to have to book you on another flight because we are almost at two hours before your flight and the system won’t let me check you in after that,” said Grumpy Guy.
“We’re not missing our flight because you didn’t check us in,” I replied flatly.
“It is not my fault,” he said, now animated, “You did not get here on time.”
“We were at this counter 15 minutes before the deadline. You just spent that time trying to figure out how to check us in. Why don’t you find someone who can check us in?”
“It was not me! The computer is not functioning.” He said other inaudible things, grunted, and grumbled as he picked up the phone. At one point, he actually said “Bah!” like Ebeneezer Scrooge, or a goat. A short conversation and a couple minutes later, now within the two hours, Friendly Lady arrived.
Friendly Lady greeted us with a smile and within a couple minutes had us checked in and ready to go. Grumpy Guy returned to tag our bags, now doing an imitation of Friendly Lady. Perhaps he realized he could have handled things better.
We rush to security, hoping not to end up like the people on the airlines that don’t have the two-hour rule: arms outstretched, screaming “Nooooooo!” watching through the big terminal windows as their plane disappears into the sky.
Like at the check-in counter, we skip most of the security line. As usual, they make me put my cane through the X-ray machine. But no problem, Gabrielle can just lead me the rest of the way.
Except at this moment, Authoritative Man arrives. He announces that Gabrielle has been selected for random additional inspection. Gabrielle and Authoritative Man disappear.
Airport security started doing random additional inspections right around the time I began flying with Gabrielle. That must be the case because, before that, when I was travelling alone or with my biological family, I never encountered these inspections. And of course there is NO RELEVANT DISTINCTION between Gabrielle and my biological family that might provide an alternative explanation.
So, I stood by the conveyer belt without my cane, my bags, or my wife, wondering if anyone would materialize to help.
As I discussed in my last post, when I travel alone through an airport, I’m with an escort from the airline. So I know how security is supposed to go. After I drop my bags and cane on the conveyer belt, the escort walks me up to the machines. Sometimes, I get the body scanner. But often, I get the old metal detector. The escort tells me they’ll see me on the other side, and disappears from my awareness to go through some avenue for people the security agents trust. An agent stands on the other side of the detector, holds out their hand to take mine, and guides me through so I don’t touch the side and set the alarm off. I don’t know why this is the procedure. What I would otherwise do is find the sides of the detector with my hands, triggering the alarm for less than a second. Then I’d take half a step back and walk through knowing where I need to go. But we can’t have that. Why we can’t have that is harder to pin down. We can’t have it though. So I take the agent’s hand. About half the time, I set the alarm off anyway because I don’t know where the sides are, having never been allowed to touch them.
In recent years, for reasons impossible to divine, the blind security protocol often doesn’t end there. The next step is that another agent stops me and checks my hands to see if there are any illegal or dangerous, but invisible, substances on them. They wipe my hands down with some cloth and walk a few steps away to run tests. I just stand there for a minute. I can’t help thinking the last thing I touched was the other agent’s hand. But I know I shouldn’t say, “If you find bioweapons, arrest him.” Once the agent closes out the terrorism investigation, the escort rejoins me, and I go on my way.
But this time, I had no escort.
“Hey… could I get some help?” I asked to the room at large as my cane and bags slid slowly into the X-ray machine. No response. I carefully walked toward where I believed the metal detector must be, based on the direction of the conveyer belt and the sounds of people’s movement around me. I said as I walked that I was blind and would need help through the metal detector. Still no response. A couple steps later, I touched the side of the detector and the alarm sounded.
“You can’t touch the side,” said a French-Canadian accent, presumably a security agent. He was a couple feet in front of me on the other side of the detector.
“Yes,” I said dryly. He didn’t say anything else. I walked through the detector without issue.
It seemed like this agent had watched silently while I asked the room for help until I did something he felt he had to inform me was forbidden. There were many potential follow-up questions, but I did not ask them. I guessed that someone who handles that situation in that way was probably not someone with whom I would have a fruitful debrief. I never heard from that man again.
I wandered slowly to the end of the conveyer belt. Still, no one spoke to me. I reached out and touched the first bag in front of me to see if it was mine.
“That is my bag,” said a new French-Canadian accent a few feet away.
“Oh, sorry.” I touched the next bag over.
“That is also my bag.”
“Okay, I’m blind. They took my wife for inspection, and I don’t have my cane.”
“Yes, I saw that,” he said.
“You saw that?!” I thought. “So Two different people just quietly observed that whole thing?” But I made the same calculation about the likely value of follow-up questions. I moved left and found my stuff. I never heard from that man again either.
I waited several minutes for Gabrielle to return from her TOTALLY RANDOM inspection, and then we headed to the gate. There was half an hour before our plane started boarding. We marveled at our luck. Despite wantonly violating the two-hour rule, we had time to casually stroll through the terminal, buy lunch, and idly eat at the gate. How could this be when the rule is so good and necessary? I guess we’ll never find ou…
Oh no! I hit the character limit. Look out for my next post, which will be exactly the same but with a “t” at the end. The following week will be the same again, but in French.
See you next week!
À la semaine prochaine!