Children at play

Yesterday I was driving my tug at the airport out to make a delivery when I sensed that something was not quite right. The tug seemed unusually bare; then it occurred to me why: My backpack was missing. There was nothing inside of it that was of irreplaceable value to me, but the pack itself had some value to me since it was a reusable item that I didn’t have to concern myself with budgeting for every month, given my modest earnings. It kind of annoyed that I needed to take it along with me in the first place, partly because the individual wall lockers were kind of small (tiny, actually) and secondly I needed something to mark the tug as “in use” so that nobody would confiscate it. Anyways, I observed to my distress that the backpack was gone, even though it seemed it had only been there a minute ago; I looked frantically about the ramp and could find it nowhere. I thought to myself that I certainly would have noticed if it had fallen off tug, and since it had been situated between the seats, it was unlikely to have done so. I wracked my brain to determine when I could last confirm its presence; yes, I had parked it next to my “office” underneath an overhang that was part of the building where the “friendly skies” of money-losing, low-customer satisfaction Acme Airlines ran its ramp operations. We operate half the gates attached to the building, which was a source of friction from the start, since Acme still had this idea that because of its name recognition it is the bully on the block—something its union rampers and mechanics were not adverse to demonstrating on occasion. It certainly took a long time for these people to get used to seeing my face every day, since the cargo was staged for pick-up adjacent to the location I just mentioned. For a long time I had to endure demeaning remarks, slurs shouted from behind half-closed doors, police siren noisemaking and vehicles parked in places meant to deliberately obstruct the performance of my work. I recall one of Acme’s employees telling me that they were not all “pricks,” and I accepted this statement for what it was worth; maybe HE wasn’t one. In any case, most of these activities stopped only after a complaint was made to a Port of Seattle supervisor.

Acme’s employees, probably because they feel invincible from the “aura” of working for a “major” airline, still demonstrate an astonishing brazenness. Take for instance their attitude toward the airport’s smoking policy. No one is allowed to smoke anywhere on the airport grounds save two locations outside the main terminal building. Acme’s employees have apparently decided that this stricture is simply too much to bear, being union and all, and so they’ve chosen a dark, narrow hallway leading outside as their secret smoke break area. The place looks like one big ashtray, with cigarette butts strewn everywhere on the floor. One day recently the airport ramp duty manager took an interest to the goings on there, and conducted an entirely fruitless campaign to end the illegal smoking. I observed with amusement the removal of chairs from the hallway, which the duty manager expected would halt loitering; I could have told him that Acme employees always smoked standing up, just in case they had to make a quick getaway. It didn’t matter anyways: Acme employees just laughed at him. At one point I became tired of being accused of smoking myself in there, and I before I took a few days off I found a broom and swept-up all the cigarette butts; when I came back, the place looked just as much the ashtray as it did before.

Anyways, I came to the conclusion that the last place I saw the pack was when it was parked in my “office” and I was on my lunch break. I distinctly remember reaching into the bag to take out a couple packs of Ketchup I had saved from a trip the previous night to Denny’s, so that I could deposit their contents on the sandwich I was about to consume. When I came back, I had some rush deliveries to make, and it was then that I discovered something was amiss. Although I had no empirical evidence to support the suspicion, I suspected that one of those Acme employees I saw sneaking in an out of the “secret” smoke break hallway, and with whom I mentioned the existence of the no-smoking ban, responding by smirking at me as walked past the tug, had something to do with it. For these people, stealing the personal property of an employee of a despised competitor wasn’t really “stealing” but simply showing someone who was “the boss” in that itty-bitty portion of the universe.

I don’t expect that my backpack will ever reappear, likely thrown in garbage container out of pure malicious “fun.” All the behaviors I have described here is the kind of conduct you might expect from spoiled children, which of course makes the task of being an adult none the easier.