My epic airport marathon: Surviving walking 89km in heels

The dead guy in the raincoat punched me in the kidneys. They called my flight before the relationship ended, which meant the chair continued to wallop the air as if the dead guy was sporadically animated by a cattle prod.

THEY shout at you from the moment you park. The first voice tells you to take your parking ticket with you and pay up before you rejoin your vehicle. There are, it announces, no cashiers at the exit.

As soon as you get away from that first voice, you get the female who tells you you’re heading for Departure Gates A and to turn back if you want to get to the B gates. Which is kind of her, but kind of selective. If you speak only French, Mandarin or Polish, you can keep going, as far as she’s concerned.

If you’re wearing high heels and decide to keep going to gate A71 in Dublin Airport, it’s at this point you lose the will to live. Until recently, the A gates were a bit of a walk, alleviated somewhat by a moving walkway. But what they’ve done is a) turn off the walkway — although that might just have been a Friday dress-down gesture, and b) put half the A gates in Cavan. Passengers walk for 89km before they reach the holding pen.

Give them their due, the airport authority do their best to make the 89km interesting. They have timings up: 10 minutes left in the walk. (Twenty minutes, in reality, unless you’re the Road Runner and wearing MBT trainers.) They have signage with clever propositions. One expresses the desire to dig up the inventor of the cuckoo clock and ask him why he did it. I’ve wanted to dig up a lot of guys in my time, but the cuckoo clock inventor is low on the list.

Finally, they have a poster exhibition showing actors onstage, one of them a woman with a scrunched face and unexpectedly fetching knees. Those knees are plump and positively seductive. They are knees you’d love to get to know, but the problem about a poster exhibition in a corridor that lasts 89km leading to planes that won’t wait is that if you stopped to investigate her knees, Buggins By Three would run over you.

The announcements never say “Would the three passengers named Buggins get their asses onto their flight right now and stop pfaffing around in the bookshop.” They say “Passengers Buggins By Three should proceed immediately to Gate A70, where their flight is closed and awaiting departure.” Well, if the bloody thing is closed, why should Buggins By Three make the effort?

The holding pen has a coffee shop in the wall, like a walk-in wardrobe, and an enormous number of seats, which still manage to run seriously short of those required to seat survivors of the 89km airport marathon. On Friday, reaching this holding pen, I noticed one empty seat. I figured it was empty because it looked as if it was made out of a dead guy in a raincoat. I sat in it. It FELT like it was made out of a dead guy in a raincoat. Then I discovered it was a mechanical dead guy in a raincoat, who was prepared, for a couple of euro, to give anyone sitting on him a massage that seems to have been named after a breed of dog: Shih Tzu.

I fed it the money it demanded, and the dead guy in the raincoat punched me in the kidneys. Then he belted me in the neck before running his bony fingers up my spine. They called my flight before the relationship ended, which meant the chair continued to wallop the air as if the dead guy was sporadically animated by a cattle prod. A small child in a push-chair stared at this in mute terror.

Then it was on to a Ryanair flight, where the voices were back, this one telling passengers they could sit anywhere except rows five and six. Several passengers muttered that they’d love to know how the company selects the verboten seats, because sometimes it’s the front six, but at other times it isn’t.

By the time I’d done the return journey, walked the corridor from Cavan back to the car park, discovered I’d left my lights on all day — although the car miraculously started, anyway — I needed an out-of-body experience because the body I had was fed up with the whole performance.

In fact, though, the out-of-body experience in an airport was happening at the same time to a colleague, somewhere in Europe.

This colleague is a fit and healthy individual with one addiction: Tic Tacs. Those tiny pellets of sugar and flavour sold in dispensers designed to serve one at a time.

My colleague, in this European airport, did what he always does. He ripped the top off the dispenser, tilted his head back and poured the total number — he says 27 — of miniature sweets into his mouth.

And stopped breathing.

He coughed. He thumped himself on the chest. He strained. No results. Twenty seven Tic Tacs joined in sweet solidarity to block his airway. His fingernails turned blue. (He didn’t notice this, being a bit preoccupied at the time, but that’s one of the symptoms of oxygen deprivation.) He realised he was going to die. (He didn’t have time to consider possible headlines announcing Brilliant Young Irish Manager Dies in Tic Tac Attack.) His vision was filled with bursting multi-coloured stars.

It was at this point that the man who’d sold him the sweets left the counter, came over and did the Heimlich manoeuvre on him. The damage to the interior design of the area caused by the expulsion of 27 wet green Tic Tacs was spectacular. His rescuer then went back to making the Vente Skinny Cappuccino with an extra shot of espresso he’d been preparing for another customer.

The interesting thing about this is that Tic Tac man is the second individual in a medium-sized company to have needed the Heimlich in the past couple of years. Another colleague had it done to him on a train. In that case, the guilty sweets were cherry-coloured chewies, the expulsion of which turned half an Iarnród Éireann carriage polka-dotted and didn’t do much for the appearance of a few of his fellow passengers, either.

Here’s a thought. Every company nowadays has to have a health and safety officer. Plus a health and safety plan. Yet nobody demands that staff be trained in this simple, life-saving procedure. Despite the fact that with an aging population, the likelihood of choking due to inadequately chewed meat (consequent upon false or deteriorated teeth) increases.

In my company, we’re scheduling a Heimlich training programme. Hell, if people are prepared to pay for a dead guy in a raincoat to punch them in the kidneys, we can find the time and money to learn how to punch each other in the diaphragm. It promises to be positively pleasurable.

The strange factoid about Mr Heimlich is that, having invented this procedure, he never, in his own life, got the chance to use it.

I’d love to dig HIM up and ask him how frustrating that was.