Airport Blogging
Dear Dallas-Fort Worth Airport:
I don’t care how shiny and new your hallways look. I don’t care if you have interesting-looking shops for me to waste my time and money in while waiting for a connection. I don’t even care if you have lots of fast-food restaurants so that I can grab a bite to stave off hunger during my cross-country trek.
What do I care about, then, you might ask? Clocks. For goddess sake, put a freaking clock or two around the concourse. I’m not asking for much. Just a display of the local time on a wall somewhere on the concourse other than the “departure” or “arrive” schedules (on which I couldn’t actually see the time — I assume it appeared at the bottom, which would only have been visible from a good twenty feet away, and then likely illegible at that).
This might come as a shock to you, but unlike shoppers at a random mall in middle-america, it is not a good thing for your customers to lose track of the time. I understand that shopping malls want their customers to lose themselves at the mall — spending for hours and hours without realizing that the sun has long since set and the moon is high. However, when customers to your shiny-new stores get lost in time, they delay flights.
Sure, the flights may not actually wait for the passengers, but in this post-911 age, there are rules about luggage flying to destinations before their assoicated passengers. So, in the worst-case scenario, should someone get lost in time, and completely forget about their flight (or, more likely in the D-FW case, have no access to the current time) they will cause the baggage handlers to locate the errant passengers’ luggage in the already packed cargo bay. In the not-so-worst-case scenario, said passengers will arrive, huffing and puffing, onto the plane late, and expect that their space in the overhead bins is still free.
Of course, setting aside the worst-cases, it is just nice for your passageners to know what the time is, so that they can feel free to wander through your interesting stores and grab a bite at your numerous fast-food joints, and not feel rushed to return to the gate 30 minutes before boarding just because they don’t have a watch.
So, I implore you, and many other airports across the country…nay, across the world…to feel free to liberally install clocks throughout the terminal.
Sincerely,
A not-so-worldy traveller