Smushing People Together to Fight COVID

JOE BOB'S AMERICA

By Joe Bob Briggs

    CHARLOTTE, N.C.—Have you ever considered that maybe all the Customer Assistance reps—those perky people with headsets sitting in cubicles in Sandpoint, Idaho, the ones you talk to after listening to 45 minutes of cool-jazz vibraphone music or, for the especially cute mega-corporations, an endless loop of “Hold the Line” by Toto—are lifetime subscribers to QAnon Weekly and believe that the New World Order has regular meetings in a secret bunker underneath the Denver airport?

    The reason I ask is that most of them seem to believe that COVID-19 is so powerful it can hamper the ability of trucks to run down the interstate, infect telephone lines, and turn tanning beds into weapons of mass destruction.

    “This donut I’m buying—normally it has sprinkles on it.”

    “Sorry, sir, COVID-19. We can’t use sprinkles during the pandemic.”

      I mean, there are 794 new things every week that people say you just can’t do during a pandemic, none of them having anything to do with masking, vaxxing, hand-washing, or cramming 65,000 people into Raymond James Stadium, which is exactly what the Bucs will be doing Thursday night when they host the Cowboys.

    Most hotels now refuse to clean your room while you’re staying in it—unless you need cleaning.

    In other words, it’s excessively dangerous for a vaccinated hotel employee to enter a hotel room with mask and latex gloves in order to restock the mini-fridge and fluff a pillow or two—but if you call the front desk and say “I’d really like you to come clean the room today,” the danger disappears and they say, “Certainly, Mister Briggs, we’ll send someone right up!” The implications of this policy are that my personal preferences have the supernatural power to neutralize all respiratory droplets when my pillow needs fluffing. At the Hampton Inn, I become the CIA Mind-Control Section Chief.

    The amazing thing is that most people think all the COVID-19 policies sound reasonable.

    “Yeah, that makes sense, of course you can’t answer your phone at the Customer Service Answering-the-Phone Department—COVID-19!”

     ”You missed another deadline on the Cleveland Project write-up? Who could blame you? You probably have to Lysol your computer screen a hundred and fifty times a day.”

    Am I the only person who thinks COVID-19 has become a giant version of a “Gone Fishing” sign?

   “Can’t do it! COVID-19.”

    “You’ll have to wait for your money! COVID-19!”

    “Due to COVID-19, this ATM cannot accept deposits.” (Like you’re gonna sneeze on your check and 13 hours later a guy with rubber gloves is gonna get COVID.)

    But probably the worst example of this is the Charlotte airport.

    Let’s start with this: COVID or no COVID, Charlotte has the weirdest airport in America. They have five terminals, all arranged around a food court/shopping mall thingy that smells like a giant radioactive Cinnabon, and when you go from one terminal to another it’s like they planned it so that it would be Pedestrian Demolition Derby. All these massive hordes of people trying to go through other massive hordes of people, sometimes going head-on, sometimes crisscrossing cattywampus, but just imagine five football teams on a Chinese checkers board all trying to cross through the middle at the same time while pulling those roller bags that have handles so low to the ground they can be used to cut people off at the ankles if you don’t allow for a nine-foot opening behind the bustling realtor. (I know she’s a realtor because she has realtor shoes—canvas low tops she can kick off at any time when she needs to buckle up the six-inch heels for the closing.)

    And so, to deal with the real possibility of head-butting someone on the way to your next flight, or toppling over a peach-colored roller bag with “My Little Pony” stickers on it, they have these moving walkways. Let me correct that. They call em moving walkways—half the time they don’t move. So you jump on em—because you’re in middle of the horde and you can’t see your feet, or you can’t see anything, and you see the moving walkway and you go “Thank God” and so you jump on, and it’s broken down and so now you’re going even slower because you’re walking behind a family with seven children and three chickens on a passageway narrower than Barney Fife’s shoulders.

    I hope you’re following this.

    I would now like to call your attention to Terminal E.

    At some point in your future you will be called on to deal with Terminal E at the Charlotte airport. This is not optional. Someone will send you there, and the reason is that no one cares about your physical conditioning or safety. Terminal E is like a giant Marine Boot Camp that God created for civilians.

    The best way I can explain the shape of Terminal E is with reference to my third cousin twice removed, Clayton Baskin, who lives in the distant suburbs of Boone, North Carolina, in what used to be called a shotgun house, meaning a house he built himself that’s about 12 feet wide and 9,000 feet long. But it can no longer be called a shotgun house because every two or three years Clayton decides to “add on.” He does this by sledgehammering some dry wall and attaching a shotgun wing to the shotgun house, unless the planned shotgun wing would end up too close to the property line of Randy Scrubbs, in which case he has to dogleg it. If you do too many doglegs, you end up with a swastika effect, but Clayton doglegs off of doglegs, adds garages, attics, porches, lean-to tool sheds, verandas, man caves, game rooms, and Bouncy Castle rooms for his grandkids. The result is that if you wake up in a room added to the house during the fifth generation of construction or later, you will likely be reported as a missing person and/or starve to death by the time you hike to breakfast.

    Terminal E is the last double-dogleg add-on to Clayton Baskin’s house, but on a spectacular scale.

    When you enter Terminal E, you have to walk two miles before getting to Gate 4, then join an alpaca caravan that takes you to a sort of Reorientation Rotunda around about Gate 9 that can send you in two directions. If you’re lucky, you hang a right and go to Gates 10 through 19. Most people won’t be lucky, and they’ll be forced to hang a left to reach Gates 20 through 97. If you go to the absolute end of Terminal E, you still may not be at your gate. They can send you out onto the tarmac to be herded by bored guys in yellow vests to imaginary gates that are really just parking spaces for planes where somebody has trundled one of those rickety aluminum collapsible stair contraptions up to the boarding door. And throughout your Terminal E adventure, you’ll be watching people play musical chairs with the steel-seat benches provided at a ratio of 10 to 1, meaning one chair for every ten people planning to board a plane in that general area. The result is that the end of Terminal E—the terminus of the terminal, so to speak—looks like Ellis Island in the 1890s, only the people on Ellis Island weren’t clutching Starbucks cups or wearing Jurassic Park t-shirts. When your group is finally called to board, don’t be surprised if you stomp a toddler. They have standard insurance to cover this.

    Terminal E is where the treetop flights are. For example, you can fly to Greenville, South Carolina out of Terminal E.

    Nobody needs to fly from Charlotte to Greenville, South Carolina.

    Wait, let me rephrase. Nobody needs to fly from Charlotte to the Greenville-Spartanburg International Airport. Spartanburg is the hometown of the notorious Congressman-turned-Fox-News-personality Trey Gowdy, who discovered Hillary’s private email server while chairing the Select Committee on Benghazi. Obviously this explains the renaming of the airport—they had to institute trans-Atlantic non-stop service between Spartanburg and Tripoli.

    Greenville is 75 miles from Charlotte. Spartanburg is 65 miles. You don’t need an airplane for that! They could have a guy in a Ford Focus pick you up. Rickshaws would be faster. But instead you walk 37 miles to Terminal E and then three more miles on the tarmac and then they put up this rickety stairway thing that sways in the wind and you climb up into a mayonnaise jar disguised as an airplane. And they say “Prepare for takeoff, and also prepare for landing.” And so all these little planes go in and out of Terminal E, and when you get off a plane there and you have to go to your real plane in another terminal, it’s like going the wrong way in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade, you have to fight your way to Terminals A, B, C or D.

    So here’s my point.

    When you’re fighting your way through the massive sea of humanity in the Charlotte airport, there’s a crossroads area where they have four long walkways side by side. They need four in one place because the population of Cleveland has to go through there in about four different directions. And during the pandemic they put up a sign that reads . . .

THIS UNIT IS OFF TO SAVE ENERGY DURING THE COVID-19 CRISIS

    . . . and shut down two of the four moving walkways so that travelers would be forced into two toothpaste tubes instead of four.

      Meanwhile, they’re telling everyone in the airport to stay six feet apart.

     All right, three questions here.

    Numero Uno: What does “saving energy” have to do with the COVID-19 crisis? Maybe the entire board of the Charlotte airport is dyslexic and doesn’t realize that the goal here is saving people, not energy.

    Numero Two-o: When you have a pandemic with a social distancing mandate, don’t you go from four walkways to eight? Don’t you put in new ones?

    Numero Three-o: Why was I the only person who took a picture of this sign? Everybody else just walked right on by because it makes sense.

    “Oh yeah, I see why they had to smush us all together. COVID-19! Tough times! Good for you, Charlotte Airport!”

    I’m telling ya: Gone Fishing.