I jokingly say that I don’t want to fly first class because I am somehow better than anyone. I want to fly first class because I’ve got really big, long legs, and I really like as much seat pitch as I can possibly get. That’s the joke, and it’s also true.
When those moments occur when I have to ride steerage, I find myself with a grand total of about an inch between my knees and the seat in front of me. My neighbors have to endure my shoulders constantly hitting them, and the simple act of reading a book is an exercise in contortions.
Saying that I like to fly first class is also a confession of which tribe I belong to.
Our firm has a very definite divide. It has nothing to do with practice area, seniority, pay, or who sits near whom. It is the difference between the gate girls and the bougies.
Mostly, it manifests itself in how we travel. Having watched it play out over five years, it doesn’t break down along the lines of whether I like certain people or whether I don’t. I wish I could say it was an introvert and extrovert thing. I wish I could say it tracked income or status in the firm. It doesn’t. It is really a personality indicator, and a personality indicator of the strangest order.
The bougies, of which I am very much a member, love the idea of our airport lounges. Clearing security with time to spare, we head for the lounge and revel in our ability to just relax before a flight. We want a chair that isn’t bolted to its neighbor, a little quiet, and a coffee from the machine. That’s the ritual, and we are devoted to it.
The gate girls, and there are both gate girls and gate boys, take a different road. Passing the lounge entirely, they pick up their coffee not from the machine but from whichever amazing local place the airport has to offer. In Seattle, that’s Olympia Coffee. In Portland, it’s Stumptown. When they can’t find something local, Starbucks does just fine. They grab their meals, they park at the gate, and they do every bit as much work as we bougies do.
It started as a firm thing, a bit of internal shorthand. I’m now fairly convinced it applies to anyone who has ever stood in an airport holding a boarding pass. You are a bougie or you are a gate girl, and I suspect you already know which one you are.
Which brings me back to my legs. Underneath that joke sits something else: somehow, we have forgotten that luxuries are not luxuries because we can’t live without them. They are luxuries because they make life a little bit nicer. Our current method of air travel, herding us from place to place in the most efficient way possible, has taken the humanity out of what should be a fun experience. I remember being a small kid and loving to get on the old TWA L-1011 to St. Louis. It was an adventure, and my father would always get us a seat of “two” on one side of the plane. Any attempt to recapture that, even just a little, is meaningful to me. My upgrade is not about being better than. It is about getting a little of the humanity back. (Yes, I have PreCheck. Fight me on it)
On the other hand, I have so much respect for our gate girls. I watch how much work they get through, and I watch them sit with the people in the glorious mess that is humanity. There is beauty to that too, and a kind of presence I don’t always manage from inside the lounge.
Most recently, I was traveling with a co-worker, and I watched as she was already sitting at the airport, ready with all of her materials. She had her computer on the chair as she sat on the ground. She worked feverishly, getting more done than I ever could with my complementary wine.
I think we get it into our heads that we have to be one or the other. Worse, we decide that our position is more moral, or more righteous, or more humane, or more whatever. The lounge becomes a statement of worth, and the gate becomes a statement of virtue, and neither is really true.
Maybe it’s just important to be more us, whatever us is, and however it works for us. Enjoy the label, whichever it is, and don’t think badly about it.
