Friday, November 18, 2011

Car competition in the Airport

photo by HikingArtist.com via Flickr.com

I was in Birmingham (the one in England) yesterday for a meeting. The meeting ended up in the afternoon and the next available flight was around 8PM. That left me with a lot of time to kill in the airport.

I tried accessing the 'free' wi-fi. Nothing. Maybe it's me but I have never had much success connecting to free wi-fi in airports. In fact free wi-fi is generally not available nor working properly.

Enough of that. With no internet to browse, I headed for a book shop and picked up a copy of New Yorker magazine. I spent about 10 minutes deliberating about which magazine to buy, which probably reveals a lot about my mental state these days.

I sat down on the first available seat and started to read. I didn't get very far because right beside me there was one of those platforms on which stood parked two high power sports cars. An Aston Martin and a Porsche. With the cars were two eager salesmen trying to grab the attention of passers by, with the aim of selling them a raffle ticket for ten pounds.

I tried ignoring them, zoning them out by extra hard concentration, but it didn't work. Their constant hooks such as "what about you big man, do you want to win this car?" or "come on sir, let's get you into this Aston.." or "come on sir, we'll be giving it away at the end of the month, why not you?"

One one level it was interesting to see who did actually stop. In a word, Germans. Almost universally it was Germans who stopped to learn more. There was one guy who stopped that was not German. He was from the UK and had bought one of these tickets recently. They really love bombed him and looked him up on the computer to see how his ticket was doing?

Anyway, I eventually was drawn into the magazine by a brilliant Malcolm Gladwell piece on Steve Jobs and a harrowing murder investigation story (not related to Steve Jobs) about a soldier who was on death row, and then free, and now possibly heading back to death row.

And then it was time to board.

Until the next time.

image courtesy of HikingArtist.com via Flickr

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