Globalization will not eradicate Prejudices Competence, Efficiency and Education will! Or Why we need Israel to train security agents worldwide. Rainy end of October day.
Not intense but constant. Air France Cabin Stewards on strike. Do you know how the Airlines are making lots and lots of money?
Pay the staff less and offer no services at all. Budget airlines with Budget salaries, Air France in its arrogance ignore their clients..Transatlantic traffic is its highest in years, but try to find a good fare or value for money! Today by a stroke of luck, I am flying American Airlines AA, just seven days after arriving from Miami on Air France AF.
Radio announcer, while in the taxi: since 6 am, this morning, all flights of AF has been cancelled, since they are not sure who would show up for work. A friend who had a flight to Boston on AF had to take a bus overnight to London, stay at the airport until 5 pm to catch a flight to Boston. A very competent taxi driver.
Used his blue tooth telephone to contact the base and then took it off, to concentrate on the road, full of cars heading for Charles de Gaulle Airport CDG 40 minutes through the drizzle to CDG. Unlike younger drivers, no chatting on the phone, trying to save time and be safe, to get me on time for the flight to Miami MIA. Taxi Drivers The worst ones are of course in MIA, fresh out of the boat immigrants, less conversant with the local geography and language (which is Spanish rather than the star spangled English), more than once I had to give directions to the taxi drivers, to common place addresses such as 107 avenue.
Don’t worry, hopefully I would help one of their children to get into medical school, such is the life in the Americas.. Bangladeshis in New York, Eritreans in Washington DC, Togolese in New Haven, Congolese in Bruxelles.. this great metaphor for displacement, and movement, as if they are constantly in motion.
But not so in Argentina, where the locals are in a hurry to emigrate, but the taxi drivers are not displaced Bolivians, carton collecting Peruvians but Portenos who know their road well. Bienvenidos a Miami y las Playas. Good Luck to you, Mate..
CDG is not an user friendly airport. By now I know the layout. AA has, like most other airlines, special security lines for its Elite Frequent Fliers, I stood behind 7 or 8 middle aged to older Europeans and Americans, men and women.
I looked at the two desks where the security checking was taking place. Two distinctly Tamil (generic term to describe a native of Southern India or Northern Sri Lanka, their faces etched with the millennial miscegenation with the indigenous tribal people of India) faces- possibly, immigrants from Pondicherry, Sri Lanka or Ile Maurice, they looked much more Sri Lankan to me, certainly not the French locally bred ( don’t mean colour or face, there are plenty of Tamils from Ile Reunion or Pondicherry who are very French) And they were being Trained! I overheard the young Tamil girl ask a Spanish couple, she was checking Where were you last week?
What are your plans from Miami? And she took a full 20 minutes to check, a well dressed Spanish middle aged businessman with an elegant wife, flying Business Class to the USA! Where are the Israelis when we need them?
Her pair, the pre diabetic Tamil lady to her right, fared no better, if anything only worse. She was in the process of interrogating a Japanese Businessman. Asking for papers and other identifications.
Humiliating, if you ask me. Then she interrogated a pink lady, an elderly French lady, whimsically dressed in pink, flying first class nevertheless. The Line inches forward.
This is incompetency. Check their frequent flier status. Check their profession.
A middle aged Japanese businessman with a Platinum Card from JAL is no threat to George Bush. He is possibly rich enough to buy the entire township of Pondicherry! I was behind a gay American, young with a musical instrument in case, we could only guess what it might be, stylishly dressed.
He went to the young Tamil girl on the left, while the prediabetic one was still asking stupid questions of an American couple.
Original Blogger URL: https://medicoanthropologist.blogspot.com/2007/11/globalization-will-not-eradicate.html