Richard Flynn :: no comment

I stepped off the Qantas plane from Sydney in Los Angeles last week to notice that there were a far larger number of staff waiting to greet the plane than I was used to seeing for the equivalent plane in London or Sydney: people with wheelchairs, name-placards, official-looking clipboards, cleaning equipment, etc. Knowing that none of them was waiting for me, I carried walking down the jetway. When I got to the terminal proper, it was to be greeted by a sign on the wall saying:

WARNING: this building contains substances known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.

Well, that’s certainly one idea of a friendly welcome. Apparently, in fact, this is a sign which is used so often throughout the state that it has lost all meaning. But still, I hurried down that flight of stairs quicker than I might otherwise have done.

Having been regaled with stories of queues at LAX immigration stretching for hundreds of yards, I expected the arrivals process to take hours. In fact when I did get down the stairs from the cancer-ridden doorway I found a long hall with hundreds of staff members encouraging the newly-arrived passengers to go down as far as possible since, as far as I could see, all the immigration desks were then manned. There were ‘welcome’ announcements specifically for my flight from Sydney, and I went straight to the desk where I was directed. Understandably enough I was interrogated fairly closely about what I was doing, but everything was civil and only lasted for a maximum of five minutes. The most boring part was queuing to take my bags through customs/quarantine, but even that didn’t take long.

Talk about efficient. Heathrow could stand to learn a thing or two about my experience. Perhaps I just got lucky?