We have clearance, Clarence...

Every time I go to the airport I think of one of the greatest movies of all time.  Airplane at time has some of the best word play in a movie and every time I see it takes me back to a simpler time.  Yesterday I was at the airport to pick up my wife and daughter who were coming back from a wedding.  I was there in plenty of time and due to a delay I spent some time walking around the airport looking at signs and thinking.

Life in America is so full of signs and order.  I took a few pictures mostly out of boredom and I’ll share my thoughts while I walked around waiting.  First I don’t know how many times I found myself looking at this information.

Everyone who has been to the airport has looked at this board to see the status of their flight.  I watched people like me who were waiting who would just stare at it.  I saw people leaving look and then take off running because they were late.  The sign here is updated fairly fast.  It was a bit concerning when all of a sudden the flight I was waiting for switched to delayed!  It was a three hour flight so for it to switch to delayed 10 minutes after it should have arrived was not something I was expecting.  To make a long story short, the plane was about to land and the pilot had some issue with the landing gear brakes and they had to circle for 30 minutes to try to fix it and make sure they had emergency vehicles on the runway waiting for them!  I didn’t know all this until after the flight switched to landed on the board, but it was most unexpected.  Everything turned out ok in the end.  The sign I was watching didn’t reflect all that excitement or really have the ability to tell me what was going on, but it wasn’t inaccurate.

While I was waiting I took some rides on the moving sidewalk.  I’ve always liked these, even though I think the point of them is moderately useless.  Maybe that will change as I get older and can’t get around as well.  For now though they are a fun novelty that are almost only found in airports so it’s fun to play on them.  There were two signs that I noticed there that follow with pictures here.

The first is the suggested placement for people on the walkway.  There were no people around last night so I just rode up and down and stood where I wanted to look out the windows of the skyway.  I’ve seen people not follow these suggestions and then some important person in a hurry has to change lanes to get around a family or someone who isn’t paying attention.  

The second picture is one that to me is a bit of over kill.  Isn’t it obvious that the walkway ends?  I find it interesting that the designers felt that this is information that people would not come to a conclusion to without having the sign.  It’s not like they are able to suck you under, but I suppose people who aren’t paying attention might get tripped by the end.  Those people have tried to sue or something and some lawyer said, put up a sign.  That way they can’t sue because now we can say there was a sign, we warned them.

The last sign is one I felt like I saw way too much.  It was on the door I was waiting by.

I wanted to see if anyone would notice me ducking in, there wasn’t anyone around so no one would have been there to physically stop me.  If I would have time it right I could have made like I was talking to someone and just pretended like I forgot something and slipped through.  Getting arrested for being curious was not on my list, so I guess it will have to remain a thought.

All this thinking about signs.  I was going to try to be clever and tell some made up story about signs related to things in my life. Like show a sign and then tell a story about something that happened to me in the past and how I wished this sign would have been there.  It’s probably been done before.

What I will do though is say that there are signs we all have in our life that we need to pay more attention to.  They aren’t the same as these signs, but like these signs they can vary widely on how much we pay attention to them or ignore them.  They give us informational tidbits or they warn us.  They are always there and sometimes other people think they can see them in other peoples lives.  The outward physical signs we put up are a reflection of what we have internally and over time society has been able to create informative signs that are used everywhere that everyone can read and understand.  

Being able to decipher those internal signs though is something we all struggle with.  There have been times when the signs are blatantly obvious to me and there are times when I wish I wouldn’t have missed some, but they were always there and are still there.