Welcome Aboard! Now Please Stand Over There for Forty Minutes
Modern airline boarding isn’t really a process.
It’s improv.
It’s performance art masquerading as transportation.
Confused mammals in expensive athleisure wandering aimlessly toward a door they won’t be allowed through for another 40 minutes.
If you want to understand human behavior at its most illogical, skip the psychology books. Just watch people board a plane. It’s a masterclass in chaos theory, groupthink, and the slow erosion of dignity.
Boarding Zones: A Work of Fiction
Let’s start with the myth of zones.
Airlines love to pretend there’s a system. The announcements sound like they’re organizing a lunar mission:
“Now boarding Zone 1: Global Elite Diamond-Platinum VIP Titanium-Plus members, people with excellent bone density, and anyone who’s ever been called ‘sir’ by a valet.”
Zone 2: People pretending they belong in Zone 1.
Zone 3: People with carry-ons the size of a Fiat, insisting “it fits.”
Zone 4: People praying for a miracle.
Zone 5: People eating fast food out of the bag, visibly giving up on life.
Zone 6: Not a zone. It’s purgatory. It’s where hope goes to die.
Technically, there are only supposed to be six zones. But somewhere between “priority platinum early comfort select” and “economy minus,” airlines have invented entire fictional groups with names like Sky Preferred Enhanced Optional Boarding Pro Max. These people don’t exist. They’re marketing hallucinations invented to confuse us into compliance.
The Herd Mentality
Once any group is called — even “people who are just here emotionally” — everyone stands up.
It doesn’t matter what zone you’re in. The moment the gate agent picks up the microphone, the terminal transforms into a wedding buffet where nobody knows if it’s their turn, but they’re lining up anyway.
This isn’t progress. It’s airport improv.
The gate becomes a stage where everyone plays the role of Person Determined to Stand Near the Door for No Discernible Reason.
Carry-On Tetris: The Final Boss Battle
Congratulations. You’ve made it to the plane.
Now begins Carry-On Tetris, where rational thought disappears and people try to wedge bags into the overhead bins using brute force, silent prayer, and geometry they half-remember from a YouTube video they didn’t finish.
Overhead bins are not designed to hold your ambitions. They are designed to hold one bag and the crushed spirits of everyone still boarding.
And yet, someone will always:
Attempt to fit a cello.
Shove their bag with the same energy you’d use to close a rusty garage door.
Open the wrong bin, stare inside like it’s a portal to Narnia, and close it again for no reason.
Meanwhile, flight attendants — cheerful but clearly dead inside — will repeat:
“Wheels go in first.”
No one listens. They never have. They never will.
The In-Flight Reward for Surviving This Madness
After boarding is finally complete — a process taking only slightly longer than the gestation period of elephants — your reward arrives:
A complimentary beverage served in a cup so small it could legally be classified as a suggestion.
And a snack. A “cookie.” A solitary artifact wrapped in foil, clearly engineered by someone who thought food should be inspirational, not enjoyable.
Why This Is All a Lie
Airlines claim this system exists to make things efficient. It doesn’t.
It exists to maintain the illusion of control over something fundamentally uncontrollable: human behavior around luggage.
Boarding doesn’t go faster because of zones. Boarding goes faster when people stop treating the overhead bins like storage lockers in a dystopian game show. But we don’t. Because we can’t. Because somewhere deep inside all of us is a voice whispering:
“You’re boarding first. You win.”
That voice is wrong. There are no winners. Only people who stood near a door for 40 minutes and still had to gate-check their bag.
Flying Is Performance Art, Not Transportation
If aliens ever come to study us, don’t show them our art, our music, or our scientific achievements. Show them airport boarding. Watch their superior intelligence try to understand why we’ve mastered nuclear fission but still can’t line up in numerical order.
They’ll leave immediately. Probably to tell the rest of the galaxy:
“Yeah, they’re not ready.”
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