While I recognise and acknowledge that in today’s world, the colour of my skin, combined with my maleness, sexuality (being straight) and age, define me and my views as largely irrelevant, I’d like to think that there remains a possibility that somewhere, someone will still care just a little for the values my generation grew up with and the knowledge accrued from our years of life experience.
I’m not by any means a blind adherent to ‘the good old days’. I’m very conscious that one day, today will be a ‘good old day’ to someone, possibly even me. Not everything today is necessarily bad, just as not every value from the past was necessarily good.
I try not to bemoan the loss of ‘how things were’, and rather focus on how things are and sometimes wonder who thought it was ever a good idea to do things in a particular way. I love innovation, entrepreneurship, the genius who works out how to make things work and those who are brave enough to do things differently. I find it a struggle to understand why some people don’t learn from past experience and why others think their way is the only way.
I vote with my feet. For example, I don’t religiously watch TV news and criticise how dreadfully biased they are. I simply stop watching. If a company’s advertising or service is offensive to me, I stop dealing with them. I suspect it’s what most people do. We quietly fade away and become past customers.
When there became a choice, I stopped flying with Air New Zealand years ago. Internationally I’ve been forced on to a couple of Air New Zealand flights by virtue of time and availability and, I’m sorry, but being greeted in Māori when boarding never did it for me and still doesn’t. Especially when I’m on the other side of the planet. I can understand it on domestic flights, to some degree, but boarding in London or Los Angeles or Frankfurt? I find it bordering on rude and certainly unintelligible, especially when combined with the Kiwi English diction (which is another story).
I have sat through the sometimes mildly entertaining, though usually extremely corny, Air New Zealand safety videos through several iterations (and wondered who thought they were a good idea). But OK, they were different and innovative and perhaps even a pleasant change. Then came the “waka in the sky” one that signified the end for me. I’d rather drive or take a bus than be subjected to that nonsense. While I appreciate the many myths delivered by the colourful history of Māoridom, the flying waka was a step too far!
I recently had to travel to the South Island and found myself on a modern Air New Zealand aircraft with a pleasant-enough crew, beautifully balanced in terms of race and sex (though I don’t think there was a transgender in the crew – I didn’t think it appropriate to ask or prod).
It was a good start when I was greeted with “Good afternoon,” so I took my seat with some optimism. But that quickly evaporated when the first announcement started with “Kia ora” and a substantial ramble in a language I don’t understand that seemed to go on interminably. I tuned out and read my book. I did notice nobody around me stopped talking amongst themselves to listen, so what a waste of time.
Ironically, the people who make announcements on aircraft (which, it seems, they demand we should listen to for safety reasons) seem remarkably indifferent about whether anybody is listening or can indeed understand a single word they say. It’s a mechanical jumble of words that need to be said so they say them parrot fashion and move on. Between the dreadful sound quality of the ‘phone’-style microphone, the tinny speakers in the aircraft and the speed with which most of them rush through whatever they’re saying, it is usually a completely wasted effort and, to be fair, in most cases could arguably be in any language.
Then came the latest safety video featuring Kiwi basketball superstar Steven Adams. As he and a group of kids bounced a ball around and shouted incoherent things to each other, somehow some messages about seat belts and life jackets were interspersed equally incoherently. (Just a thought: do we really need to be told and shown how to fasten and unfasten a seat belt? Who thought that was a good idea? If you can’t manage that, how do you manage in a car? How did you get on the plane?)
Anyway again, I tuned out and read my book. I know the safety features anyway and I always have a read of the card “in the seat pocket in front of me” which commonsense suggests might be a useful idea. The flight safety ‘announcement’ and/or ‘videos’ are superfluous and the staff boringly putting on life jackets and pointing to where the exits are is a waste of their time and ours.
Just how superfluous is confirmed by the garbled messes you hear on some other airlines. I once flew with Alitalia (the now defunct Italian national carrier). They did the safety announcements in Italian first then repeated it in unintelligible English. Same thing happened on a China Airlines flight I was on: Chinese first then totally unintelligible English.
Whoever thought that was a good idea?
Probably some bureaucrat somewhere at a desk in the back of a dark office (or working remotely from home) who can’t remember the five things they did last week!
