As we got off the aircraft, the length of the bridge was stacked with wheelchairs, each manned (or should that be personed) by what I can only describe as a peculiar looking specimen.
I think the rule of thumb is that if you have a US passport, you instantly qualify for special assistance.
And not the Olympic context, either.
Arrived in LAX arrivals hall.
Oh…
My…
God…
There were 3 Disney queues for foreigners. We (Sarah) picked the middle one.
Each block had 4 Customs booths servicing it. All were fully manned.
Except ours. Ours had 2. But wait. After a while, one of them left. So it went from “painful” to “excruciating”.
Oh, don’t worry. He eventually came back. From “excruciating” back to “painful”. All is good.
Remember, we were in Business Class. Most people in our ‘slow’ bank were from Business Class, so we were there before anybody else off our flight.
The staff noticed the slow queue, so started peeling people off the back of the queue into other, faster queues.
Do they pull people from the middle of another queue? No.
From the front? Hell no!
From the back.
Good for them. They get here last, and get fast-tracked. Excellent!
Then somebody came through looking for pax for Alitalia. They must be connecting to Europe. They find about a dozen in the next queue, and then bring the front. OF OUR QUEUE!!
Oh…
My…
God…
Again…
As we were almost at the front, we watched a family at the booth. Obviously they introduced fingerprint scanning since our last trip here.
Anyway, the officer was going through the same script for probably the zillionth time.
- Right hand four fingers
- Thumb
- Left hand four fingers
- Thumb
A woman in the family (mother I think) was struggling with the instructions
- Right hand four fingers
- Thumb
- Left thumb
- Left hand four fingers, woops sorry
- Left hand four fingers again
- Thumb
- Right again
- Left hand four fingers
- Um?
Who knew they would have an IQ test to get into America. Obviously it wouldn’t work for US citizens. Nobody would be let back in.
Have you ever noticed the way customs work their manning formula? Clearly it’s the same around the world.
- X number of pax expected
- Divide it by the magic number, usually 50
- That is the number of officers to roster.
Nothing wrong with that. Until some over-zealous number-cruncher decides to make the formula work dynamically. That means that as the queues shorten, the number of customs agents required goes down, so they get progressively peeled off.
Very clever, right? Wrong.
The maths doesn’t work for those at the back of the queue. Their time in the queue expands exponentially every time a customs booth closes.
Welcome to America.
So we were in the queue for an hour. Small room. Close quarters with a bunch of strangers. Not much in the way of aircon. By the end of it, our bag was waiting for us. The Priority tag was meaningless. We were the last to leave the arrival hall. Even the Customs officer who processed us followed us out of the hall. Shift over. I am sure somebody turned out the lights behind us.
By the time we hit the pavement, I had a good sense of what it was like to emerge from the birthing canal.
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