Volcano!
The past week has been slightly difficult for me. Not because I’ve been stuck somewhere, but because of the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to go on my vacation. And I guess I shouldn’t really say ‘difficult’ because I’m not sitting in an airport waiting to see how long it’ll take to get a flight home. Those people have the right to claim difficult as well as various other things, probably involving a lot of cursing. But it’s been a battle of the voice of reason in my head and the voice that really just wants to see her friends after not being able to at Christmas because of another force of nature: snow.
Objectively, I sort of think this whole situation is a good one. Yes, it’s disruptive and annoying, and yes it’s going to take a while to clean up. But it’s forced people to look at the fact that shit they cannot control will happen, and they have to figure out a way to deal with it without just flipping out and acting like an entitled-to-everything 8-year-old spoiled brat who gets whatever she wants all the time.
It’s nature. It’s kind of the boss. When it says ‘jump’, you have no choice. And if we were a smart race, we’d look at this situation and say, perhaps we should have backup plans for things we don’t really expect to ever happen, and while I know a volcano has nothing to do with climate change, perhaps we should really start thinking about some of the effects which that, as an uncontrollable force of nature, might have and what we’ll have to do about it. Even if you for some reason don’t believe the climate is changing (I won’t go there in this post), it’s still worth a change in the way we handle things.
But my selfish inner voice is saying ‘GODDAMMIT! I realise I’m being unreasonable, but PLEASE, MS. VOLCANO, ERUPT IN A MORE DIFFERENT DIRECTION FOR ME. KTHNXBAI.’
I want to go to Dan and Kathleen’s wedding, and I want to go to the dive bar in Philly with Sara and Donnie and Liam and Bobby for pierogies and PBR, and I want to see my family and their beach house and Randle the dog, and I want to go to Dogfish Head with Lindsay and Dan, and I WANT MY MOTHERFUCKING VACATION.
I’m generally able to quell this voice of insanity, because I know it’s no use. Volcano will do what Volcano feels like, and humanity be damned. And really, more power to it. Volcanoes are freaking awesome, in the fullest sense of the word. Who am I to try to change the course of life, you know? Human frustrations are not top of the list for the cosmos in general.
In any case, they’ve lifted the flight ban now. Quite abruptly, but they’ve done it. I feel like we’re still not out of the water though, because of the immense backlog and the possibility that the volcano will decide to spew a whole lot more. Still, I’m now cautiously optimistic about my flights next week.
What irks me is that the first thing to happen is that the British media jumps on the government and the CAA and tries to blame them for the backups. It’s unbelievable! You get pissed when the government doesn’t do their job, then you get pissed when they DO do their job. What exactly do you want? It’s not anyone’s fault that this happened, it’s a VOLCANO. There’s nothing you or anyone can do about it, regardless of their rank or relative importance, so stop trying to find some kind of scapegoat. I think the government is doing quite an admirable job really.
And the CAA. You cannot get pissed at the CAA. It’s not like they were thinking ‘Hey, let’s inconvenience as many people as humanly possible just to see what happens!’ No. They were thinking, ‘Hey, we aren’t sure what the effect of this stuff will be on all these jet engines, so lets take them out of the air til we’re sure we won’t have people falling out of the sky willy-nilly!’ Sounds smart to me. I may have been upset if I couldn’t go on my trip, but I’d much rather be on the ground than plummeting to earth because all the engines on my plane failed after an airline decided that profit was more important than passenger safety. That’s why you NEED a CAA. Airlines can’t look at this situation objectively when so much money is involved, which is fair enough really, but people have to step back and let the safety people do their jobs.
I’m petrified of flying to begin with, so I’m more than happy to wait until the people who know their shit on the subject say they feel comfortable with going back up there. Risking your life for a trip to the beach just isn’t cool.
What people should really be complaining about is travel insurance that refuses to pay out, especially if they’re stuck abroad for another week because they can’t get on a flight home and have no money to pay for extra accommodation. Yes, a volcano is an act of god, but if you can’t count on your insurance to cover the unexpected, what exactly is the point in having it?
And they should also be complaining about other travel companies taking this as an opportunity to charge out the ass for rental cars, train tickets, ferries, and whathaveyou rather than trying to genuinely help people out. People are always quick to blame for the cause of something, but it’s really the effects of the situation that show the good and bad in people and companies.
In any case, Eyjafjallajokull, you just keep doing your thing. Humans will sort themselves out eventually. And if you decide I shouldn’t be going to the US, well then, I guess I’ll just have to go with the staycation option and try not to sulk too much til you change your mind.
