In haphazardly scouring the internet for some royalty-free (read: cheap; still not making any money off this blog like WordPress keeps telling me I can) pictures of the chaos involving with boarding an airplane for an upcoming entry, I came across this one associated with an article entitled “Passengers boarding airplanes: we’re doing it wrong”:
All well and good. Looks pretty chaotic and congested to me and I was all set to use it until I took a second look at it. Because …
… if you do take a good look at the photo, you’ll realize that the people are getting off the plane instead of on it. Not good for a blog entry on boarding a plane. (Either mine or the one where I swiped this picture from.) The left-hand side of the photo holds most of the clues. The obvious seat-back video and the direction the one person is sitting clearly indicates that it’s a shot from the back of the plane to the front. (The charitable among us might argue that these people are boarding and have done so via the rear door. Again, the truth lies on the left: the hunched man is clearly moving to the aisle and not to his seat.) If, as the article suggests, these people are indeed boarding the aircraft wrongly, then they are doing so very wrongly insofar as they are all walking backwards toward their seats.
Now, believe it or not, but I’m not picking here on the author of the article, Jason Steffen, who has come up with the fastest, but unfortunately not the most practical, system for boarding a plane. Chances are that he didn’t even pick this particular stock photo, which also appears on lots of other webpages. If so, then this particular entry on The Conversation more than lives up to the website’s motto of Academic rigour, journalistic flair.
(And, in case he did pick the photo, let’s face it: my blog here probably has more than it’s fair share of flairs as well …)
Instead, I just love the irony of how the main photo of the article about how we’re doing something wrong is itself wrong. But instead of adorning this mistake with my otherwise snarky adjective of “bonehead”, let’s just call it my boarding comment of the day, which also fits just nicely into my BCD acronym.
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