When I’m anxious, I chat with people who are also eager to chat because they are probably as anxious as I am. Mark used to find it cool, then admirable. Now he finds it deeply embarrassing, just like everything I do and apparently my mere existence.
Last Saturday, at Charles de Gaulle airport, under Mark’s mortified eyes, I chatted with a guy who had grown up in Montreal, lived in Paris and was now not very happily travelling back to Montreal because of family. Then, four of us on the Montreal- or Ottawa-bound flight, wandering around the duty-free shop, had an entire conversation about the exchange rate and the Canadian economy in front of overpriced perfumes and a bewildered employee who thought Canada was the land of milk and honey. Minutes later, I bumped into a “from nowhere, living… nowhere really, it’s complicated” Canadian in the smoking room.
Really, the only passengers with blissful smiles on their faces were Canadian tourists still full of memories of Greece, Spain or France.
In the lineup to board the plane, a passport cover I didn’t recognize caught my eye.
“South Africa,” its owner said, waving the document.
He was the anxious, eager-to-talk kind, despite (or because of?) his crazy-long journey—Johannesburg to Paris, Paris to Ottawa.
“I can’t wait to sleep in a bed ten hours from now!”
“It’s only a seven-hour flight,” I pointed out.
“Yeah, but by the time I clear customs, pick up my luggage, get an Uber and all that, it’ll be ten hours. At least.”
Clearly an experienced traveller. This is the kind of realistic expectation you pick up after too many flights.
It turned out he was on a business trip for his company, meeting suits and ties in Ottawa.
“Defence,” he beamed.
“Booming business,” I added.
“Can’t complain.”
And he would be pitching or selling whatever—I didn’t ask, it felt too classified for a pre-boarding chat—to NATO officials for a week before going home with contracts in his suitcase, hopefully.
I failed to see the connection between a South African businessman who peppered his sentences with Afrikaans and the Department of National Defence, but this may be why I can’t find new clients. Translation is not a booming business.
“Excuse me… did you get a paper as well?” the woman behind us asked after we scanned our boarding passes and showed our passports one last time for no apparent reason—I mean, by the time you’re meters away from the aircraft, chances are you know you’re not stopping by Carrefour for bread.
“Nope.”
“Nope,” I confirmed.
The machine had spit out a ticket when she scanned her boarding pass.
“What does it say? Let me see… oh, you’ve been upgraded,” the businessman expertly assessed.
“But why?”
“That, I don’t know.”
“This is your lucky day,” I added. “It’s like getting the golden ticket!”
My Charlie and the Chocolate Factory reference was lost on the South African businessman and the lucky passenger, citizenship to be determined.
She frowned.
“But I had a seat…”
Yes, we all do, honey, at this stage in the process.
“Just take it,” he advised.
I agreed.
I would have taken it.
A free airline upgrade is one of my wildest dreams.
You must have realized by now you’re reading this blog for stories and not tips on maximizing airline perks, credit card points and preferred status or whatever. I travel and I do it well, but often the hard way. You’ll find me at the back of a bus, freezing because of the air con, not in the first-class cabin of a jet.
I walked all the way to the back of the plane, silently grumbling that some people just know what button to press and reach elite status effortlessly.
In all fairness, I would have been grumbling moodily about something if it hadn’t been the upgrade because that’s how I am on very little sleep before flying to Ottawa.
“Why do I never get the gold ticket?” I whined in my head like a petulant child. “Why don’t I get a nice surprise for a change?”
These days, I feel I’m doing everything right—or at least not terribly wrong—yet still failing in ways big and small. I’ll spare you the small stuff, but among the things that keep me awake at night, I can’t connect with moody Mark, and I might be losing the battle of making a living with human creative skills in a world of algorithms. A detail, really.
The minute this thought crossed my mind, I realized I was being unfair.
Maybe I was never handed a golden ticket by a corporation—they must smell the anarchist on me.
But I have been handed golden tickets, or at least gold-plated tickets, along the way by hundreds of strangers.
This is how I’ve made my way through the world, after all.
Take work, for instance. A long time ago, someone handed me a golden ticket into the world of translation. I still find it amazing that I can make a living making sentences in one language or another and, believe it or not, I had never considered it before.
This blog is another golden ticket. To where, I still don’t know (and maybe I should figure it out after twenty years), but I’m grateful for the people it has sent my way. Among the latest random exchanges were a guy who, two months later, sent me a picture of me taking a picture of him in Toronto, and someone else who messaged from across the country just to say he liked my stories—take that, AI!
And of course, golden tickets are generously handed out during each and every one of my trips. Perfect strangers show me the way, literally or not, teach me something or just inspire me.
No machine ever offered me a nice surprise.
But plenty of humans did.
I still want the airline upgrade, obviously.
Gratitude only goes so far.
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