When I walked into Terminal 5, my jaw dropped. I stopped and just looked from side to side. There were multitudes of people as far as the eye could see, looking lost, angry, sad, hungry, tired--it was some weird middle-class refugee camp of sorts, with children screaming, women crying and men stomping about angrily.
Now, I may be small, but I'm determined. And there was no effing way in hell that I was going to be kept away from my plane, assuming it was departing. Without any luggage trollies in sight, I re-gripped my 80 pounds of luggage and set off. A BA worker put me in a queue and told me it was for bags. I suspected it wasn't. But where could I go? If I left, and it turned out I was the wrong one, I'd just screwed myself by giving up my place in line. Though I'm not much of a crier, and certainly not in public (unless someone has died), I slumped over my bags--now on a trolley--and began to very quietly and softly cry. I felt a hand on my back and a young woman's voice asking me if I was okay. Looking up, I found myself face to face with three people my age who were trying to make their way from Madrid to Dallas, though their flight had been cancelled. Their kindness gave me comfort and allowed me to dart around the terminal looking for answers as they watched my bags and held my place in line.
It turned out that the line WAS NOT for bags, and thanking my fellow stranded passengers, I pushed my way over to the next queue--one that looked to be hours long. When I finally made it up to the 'real' part of the line, a staff member turned me away, saying I couldn't get in line until 2 hours before my flight left. 5 minutes passed before a small old lady came up with her trolley and cane, asking to be let through because she was having difficulty walking.
He turned her away. She saw my (presumably blotchy, I can't seem to make crying or sweating seem feminine and composed) face and tried to make the man let me through when she'd found out how long I'd been waiting for a flight out of the country.
Here was a small old lady who was having a hard time walking (or so she said; I would have my doubts in the moments following), trying to let me, a much younger person, through. I wouldn't have that, so she said "All right, then dear, we'll just wait until he turns his back, and then we'll just go right through."
For someone who was having trouble walking, she sure could run fast.
"Are you coming, dear?" she hollered over her left shoulder as she approached the bend in the barrier at a full tilt. I slammed down the handle on my trolley, releasing the brake, and took off sprinting after her. We made it into the queue, and with a shake of my head to put my hair over my face (a lovely cousin-it look can easily be achieved with this season's popular long-bob haircut, dontcha know) slipped around the bend, past our gatekeeper friend.
Home free.
Well....kinda.
After another hour and a half in line, and some interactions with an unhappy-to-help BA staff member I flagged down for my new partner in crime, I made it to the bag drop, where the man took one look at my ticket and went "oh! miss! you could have bypassed this whole line, since you are one of our Club customers...drop zone H is reserved for our Club passengers."
I just stared at him.
"You mean to tell me," I said, "that I could have SKIPPED all of this? I was told to get in the wrong line, actually, and had to figure it out myself. I was not informed of the fact I could jump the line, rather, I was given wrong information."
"Oh, I'm so sorry for how you were treated, miss," he said, the epitome of politeness.
Now, perhaps he would have apologized anyway, but I had a sinking feeling it was basically just because he thought I Had Money. He didn't know I was a middle-class college studentwho worked two jobs over the summer to save up money for this trip. He didn't know I make minimum wage. He didn't know I was the person who rings up his groceries, answers his computer questions, is the verbal punching bag for the stresses of the world as I simply exist, trying to do jobs, often receiving the negative end of people's bad days.
He didn't know that in our money-driven world, I was a nobody, wearing an 8-quid jumper. I looked at him, stood up, and said, "actually, it's fine. If I hadn't stood in line, I wouldn't have met all the incredibly nice people I did."
He found this amusing. He didn't understand. He was behind his little booth. Out in the line, though, it was becoming Us Versus The Man. With little information or coordination from the airline, passengers were banding together. During both my long waits at Heathrow, I saw some of the best human behavior I've seen in a long time, if ever. People watched others' bags, with no stealing, no abandoning trollies, no complaining. They shared information, tissues, phones, food, shoulders to cry on. People tried to help their fellow passengers, even ones who, really, were better off than themselves, such as the old lady who tried to help me, a fit young woman. As I looked at the man in his booth, I realized he had no idea. He worked in a world of ticketed class systems. Had I been offered the chance to jump the line earlier, sure, I would have taken it. Who wouldn't? But I wasn't going to get mad about it now. I wasn't going to stomp and rant and rave about being denied a perk that, honestly, I wouldn't have had in the first place. Not when I'd seen so much and met so many people who were sticking together like glue.
That said, I didn't say no to being put through Club fast-track security.
I might like observing humanity, but I'm not a moron.
And, with that, I was through. One more bus took me to my plane on the tarmac, and I was off.
home.