Angry Pinballs (A Rant Dedicated to ABG)

"Why don't you just leave?"

How many times have I been faced with this question? I have lost count. But then again, I have lost count of how many times I have entered into a dark complaint about the airport. I have lost count of the times I have woken up at 3am and spent the journey to work cursing loudly. I have lost count of the time I have lost in this job...

"Why don't you just leave?"

And everybody at the airport is worse off than everybody else, at least by their own reckoning. Cabin Crew curse the easy life of shop workers, shop workers complain about the money pilots get, pilots moan that their hours are tougher than the management of the airport, and so on and so on and so on. And within the company I work for this attitude is intensified, everybody prowls around declaring their status as VICTIM. Before anybody says anything, I was crowned king of this particular human trait long ago...

"Why don't you just leave?"

But what pisses me off most about working in the airport is people who don't. They ask this question as if their jobs have revealed the Key to the Universe. It's a terrible, and very naive, attitude, that has become a crutch for people to deflect any questions about their own dissatisfaction. These, in the words of Stockton, are the people who cry into their pillows at night.

The "Why don't you just leave?" phenomenon has plagued me ever since I began work at the airport, and must be stopped. While my job can be stressful, tiring, exasperating and even a little humiliating, what job isn't? We are all selling our time, we are all whores. And as whores, we "take it" all sorts of different ways and would always rather be doing something else. But what other job allows the luxury of missing the rush hour everyday, of finishing work at lunchtime and spending a long afternoon drinking ice-cool G&Ts while reading a great, and soul-massaging, work of literature? What other job allows the mind to be altered through varying waking states? And what other job allows the avoidance of smug office-jockey assholes who think saving up for a Beamer will quash the rising emptiness in their souls...?

So why don't I just leave?
Well maybe, just maybe, the key to it all is fitting work around you life, and not the other way round. I will complete this rant with a question of my own:
Why don't you just fuck off?

[Normal service will be resumed shortly]