Things Fall Apart: A Transatlantic Odyssey
In recent years I’ve often thought that we, as a society, fail to appreciate how much our high living standard—our safety, creature comforts, and conveniences—are provided by an unseen and unsung army of skilled laborers.
Flip a switch and you have light; turn on a tap and you have clean water; adjust the thermostat and you have heat or AC; depress a lever and you flush the toilet. It wasn’t so long ago—a little over a century—that such conveniences were not available to even kings and emperors. Now most houses in the developed world are equipped with them.
Most of us take these comforts and conveniences—and hundreds of others—for granted. Likewise, we give little thought to the skilled workers who maintain them. If our civilization is going to maintain itself, we must have a large, skilled, and reliable workforce.
My recent trip home from Europe caused me to become concerned that airline maintenance departments are struggling to maintain their fleets of aging aircraft. For me, the result of mechanical problems was a comical experience of hassle and inconvenience. However, I fear that if airline maintenance departments are indeed understaffed with skilled and reliable people, the consequences could eventually be far more serious.
My journey began at the Vienna airport, where I zipped through security and quickly boarded my BA flight. I had a very tight connection in Heathrow, but it looked like we were going to push off on time.
Then the captain came on the PA. With pretty good Hugh Grant-bumbling British charm, he explained that the cargo door sensor was indicating the door was ajar, even though it seemed to be closed.
“But no worries, ladies and gentleman, the engineer will soon be here, put some magic spray on the thing, and then we’ll be off.”
The captain’s prophecy proved to be true, and we departed 25 minutes late. This would give me exactly 30 minutes on the ground in Heathrow to get to my connecting flight’s gate before boarding began.
We landed at Heathrow and pulled up to our gate. Glancing out a port window, I saw the jet-bridge. For some reason the aircraft had parked 70 yards from it, and it appeared to be the jet-bridge operator’s first day on the job.
Ever so slowly and halting, with multiple lateral corrections made with each foot advanced toward the aircraft, the jet-bridge seemed to be an eternity away from reaching us. Watching it inch forward was sheer agony. At last it made it to the plane and I got off and sprinted up the jet-bridge.
“Just follow the purple connections signs” said the stewardess as I set forth like Pheidippides running from Marathon to Athens.
Heathrow was apparently laid out by a drunk madman. My arrival gate might as well have been in another county, with a series of interminable corridors turning at right angles onto yet more i
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
