Pearson airport baggage strike results in faster baggage retrieval
MISSISSAUGA, ON—Well, nobody could have seen this coming. Hmm, perhaps some people. Many people, maybe.
Though union officials warned that a walkout undertaken by 700 baggage-handlers at Pearson airport would slow things down over the weekend, people are getting their baggage faster than ever, seemingly because everybody can do anything and everything better than an airport can.
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"We think this could be attributable to a very sensible phenomenon," said Bill Shaker, a social scientist who studies airport-related phenomena, both sensible and otherwise.
"It's not that the baggage handlers aren't good at their jobs, far from it! I would never suggest that, and nobody writing a comedy article about this situation would ever be suggesting that, either," said Shaker. "No, it's because the airports are so bad. You see, there's a very reliable school of thought in my field that suggests that airports are so bad—so uncomfortable, so over-packed, so inefficient—that literally any change to them, no matter the change, will improve them immediately."
Shaker used an entertainment-related metaphor to help illustrate his point.
"It doesn't matter if it seems counterintuitive. The point is just to change something, because you have nothing to lose. Think of it as if Nicolas Cage stopped reading scripts or letting his agent accept films on his behalf, and simply started flipping a coin to decide whether to do a film. That seems silly, right? Well things were already as bad as they could get, so they will probably improve just from the change!"
At press time, the airport was toying with seeing if the planes went faster when you didn't make people show up two hours early for their flights.
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