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Girl Stuck in Pittsburgh Airport Shoots Epic Horsing Around Video
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The practical upsides that self-service check-in kiosks at airports offer airline passengers are overrated. Geared toward citizens of the countries that they are located in, these smart machines are most efficient when passengers can scan their passports and transmit all of the necessary information required for their flight in an instant to their airline’s database. For those unlucky foreign passengers with old-school paper passports that can’t be scanned, let alone correctly handled by security and ground personnel, an attempt at checking yourself in at a self-service kiosk can turn into one of the most unpleasant experiences of today’s already stressful air travel.
When passengers let these machines know that their passports can’t be scanned by pressing the appropriate touch-screen buttons, the machines ask them to enter their information manually. In most cases, getting to the last screen of seemingly never-ending questions that involve the place where your visa was issued, is by no means the end of an arduous road. The machines almost exclusively flash with the message “SEE AGENT AT THIS KIOSK” after they have patiently collected their information, leaving passengers stranded by their sides. It is after somehow getting an already frustrated agent to your side in the midst of a crowd of angry passengers and screaming babies that the real trouble starts, however. The agent takes your bizarre looking passport in their hands, looks at it skeptically and starts entering more information into the machine, which then attempts to connect to its main server and verify the information that you entered, promising somehow to tap into your country’s vast database of personal details on its citizens. Needless to say, it fails in this grandiose attempt of intelligence gathering, at which time the agent tells the passenger to wait and not move until his or her supervisor comes along. Throughout this process, the passenger has been waiting patiently, but has not restrained him or herself from asking the agent what was going on and why he or she needs to see a supervisor. The response is an order not to “get too smart” with them and to “obey the rules.”
The mere attempt of checking in to a domestic flight thus turns into a nightmare. If the passenger is clever, he or she walks to the desk of a check-in agent at this time, and tells him or her that they would like to check-in to their flight the old way, upon which the agent that has asked them to wait ever so patiently for the supervisor comes along, and says, “Watch out for this one – he’s hurt me, too.”
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En son Istanbul’a ucarken, tam ucus kapsiinda bir polis sorgusu olayi oldu gene, mesela ordaki polis ‘biz sokaktaki polise gore daha cok yetkilere sahibiz’ falan demisti.
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Airports are still romantic places. I get really offended that I have to show everything and I am scanned every time. There is a clash between these different thoughts. I wonder why I think of it as romantic, I kind of like when I have to wait somewhere. When I actually sit down, I enjoy that. It’s this place of transience. Everybody is on their way. It’s been written so much. Before, maybe it was different. So much more problematic now, I guess. When they started checking the shoes and everything, it became very invasive. It’s a very contradictory place. A feeling of both, I’m still amazed how quick it is to get from place to place. It’s also contradictory in that sense too. The airplane is contradictory too, you’re just going from one place to another. At the same time, the guilt of doing it. The flight is connected to the airports.
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I like to go to airports, really early, before my flight. I like to get through security and sit on the other side. Read my magazines, read my books and I like hanging out. It’s almost like going to the laundromat. I actually don’t mind going to the airpots. It’s like a non-space, I enjoy it. Free space and free time. You can’t block with anything else.
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When I was in the airports getting in line to come here, to Banff, it was a kind of zigzag, back and forth. There was a man outside of it, looking at the zigzag of people. I guess he was looking at his girlfriend or somebody that he loved, he was crying, streaming tears, he was very stoic at the same time. He was also very good-looking. I was standing in line, looking at this man, looking at the crowd that I was in. I have never seen a grown man have those emotions, in public, at an airport. It looked like he was looking at nothing, but I knew he was looking at someone. He was trying to catch the last glimpse of a person and the only way he could do it was to look at the crowd. Next to him was my mother, who was half anxious half smiling. projecting the same feeling into the same emptiness. I’m on the same level of this man’s girlfriend. He and my mother are the same person. It made me realize, I have never been sad to see anyone leave at the airport, ever.
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I have some interesting memories about airports. The first time I flew, I was flying from Toronto to Ecuador, Quito. I can’t remember if it on the way there or on the way back or both, but I remember lining up on the airstrip and the dogs sniffed our bags. I remember thinking that it was kind of cool but scary at the same time. The first time I flew on my own was from Hamilton to Thunder Bay. I remember my parents standing there, explaining everything to me and I thought I got it. I got my boarding pass and I was in the security line. I then realized I had lost that small piece of paper that was given to me (my boarding pass) and I asked the security guard whether it was something important. My parents were watching the line progress and suddenly when it was me, it stopped. The people were very nice though and I got on the plane.