88 Confirmed Dead

For the past few days, I have been attempting to figure out what I am going to do for my October break, which begins late October and lasts a week.

Originally, I had planned on visiting Cambodia, or perhaps Myanmar (Burma) or Laos, either with someone else or even alone. That said, there are also good friends of mine in South Korea, and so I have also been inquiring into getting cheap flights in that direction (I would pass on the North this time around, sorry Kim Jong-Il). Most flights seem ridiculously over-priced, at about CAN $1000 for a round-trip flight from Bangkok to Seoul, not including the trip from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. A little expensive for seven days, but I still have been looking.

Tonight I happened to peruse the daily news, as I often do from time to time (although I admit, I have strayed away from it lately just because I can afford the luxury of being uninformed out here), and saw something that I never expected to see: I know you're thinking something in the lineage of, "Bush wins the Nobel Peace Prize," but it was worse... eighty-eight people had died in a Thai airplane crash on a flight from Bangkok to Phuket. The paper said forty-two survived, although they were injured - one of them was a twenty-three year old Canadian, go figure. Half the plane was Thai, the other half was foreign - all of them should have lived.

It was a discount flight run by One-Two-Go, a subsidiary of Orient Thai Airlines. Incidentally, One-Two-Go is also the company that runs my phone plan which, surprise surprise, doesn't work all of the time. It just so happens that a discount flight is what I have been looking for to take to Korea.

A little about me, airliners and airplanes:

For as long as I can remember, I have always been worried about flying. It doesn't matter that millions of flights happen annually; it doesn't matter that my father seems to be on half of them for business trips. They scare me, and besides the practicality of getting from point a to point b, I partially loathe them.

I mean, at least in North America, it appears as though airline companies are one of the few businesses that treat their customers like garbarge. Obviously, this does not include every single person who works for an airline, I concede that I have met some very kind individuals at rare moments. But on the whole, the image which is generally projected is a negative one: I have dealt with employees who couldn't be bothered to help me, were rude, and acted as if they held the key to my travel experience in the palms of their quixotically petulant hands. The sad part is that they did, and when one wants to get on with their vacation or business trip, you can't really argue or tell the person what you truly feel about the way they are behaving, unless of course driving to your destination instead is part of some hidden agenda.

If you think that's bad, try this: the morning I left for Thailand, the flight I was scheduled to take from Toronto to Chicago was cancelled because every available pilot had exceeded their weekly quota of air travel. That is beyond incompetancy, it is theft: they don't have pilots to fly their planes, yet they are selling tickets for imaginary flights. They are stealing my time, my money, my ability to arrive at my employment on time and be competant myself. Here is the kicker: the ticket agent was even unwilling to help me transfer to another airline to make my connecting flights. Quality customer service, indeed.

And then there is security. Don't get me started about how incongruous and hypocritical it is to have the insane level of security we have at an airport and not any other form of public transportation. I feel like a criminal every time I go through security. Once I had to open up my carry-on bag because it had chocolate in it. I mean come on, let's be serious, chocolate?? Are you kidding me? I had no idea people made bombs out of cocoa.

In reality this is simply an extension of terrorism: we have been scared into inhibiting our own personal freedoms just so we can be "safe."

And then after all the hassles, the stress, the security, the rushing - after all of this - eighty-eight souls die in Phuket.