Fancy Carpet Tile

Recently, I flew from California to New York. The airport to me always feels like the hub for innovations in nickel-and-diming a captive consumer base. I was eating snacks from home and otherwise trying to avoid paying a premium for non-lunch items.

Boarding groups in airplanes are never set up in the most efficient and logical manner, which would be for the back of the plane (and I was in the very last row) to board first. Instead, they read off categories (first some metals, then some letters, then numbers, then “Basic”) to allow different people onto the plane in a specific order (before the whole plane takes off at the same time).

What really annoyed me this time was the slow speed of the line—and just next to us, a second ticket-scanning station at which no line was allowed to form. This machine is in front of a special little carpet tile labeled with the name of the airline. I wondered how much it cost to install one of the ticket-scanning machines.

When I got off the plane in NYC, I stepped over the special carpet and caught myself in a brief and embarrassing moment of glee.