A Lot
of Executive Action
(reprinted from GSAE, Spring 2012)
Executives, unlike soldiers and athletes, are rarely involved in acts of physical performance. Our moments of courage most often feature attack by buzz words or death by Powerpoint. I’m proud to report, however, that I’m fresh back from the airport with a daring physical escape story of my own. I liberated a parking lot full of sniffling execs from their captivity. Here’s how it went.
First, the foreshadowing: I was on a return flight from the West Coast. I took my seat and buckled in. It was a nice plane, each coach passenger having an individual TV monitor. Then commercials for cars and then commercials for computers started playing on the screens. The off buttons on the monitors were apparently automatically disengaged during the commercials. The sound for the commercials was blasted over the PA. There was no way to not watch the commercial. We were a captive audience.
Scene two: airport economy parking lot. The flight was on time; weather was good; I’m out to my car in no time; I was going to beat traffic; all was well. I drove to the exit gate, and was just a few cars away from the exit. There was no attendant, of course, it was a fully-automated entrance and exit situation.
Something was going wrong up front, and the first car in line started to back up. OK, so the dude’s credit card was not working, and now we all had to back up to let him get out of the way. It was like an amoeba going in reverse, but we pulled it off and the next car pulled up to the machine.
The next guy, the same problem. Hmm, this didn’t look good. A parking lot attendant on a bicycle pedaled by, and started talking on his walkie-talkie. He looked like he was officially doing something for us, so we all went back to our phones and emails to keep busy; it would just be a few minutes, we believed.
A little-old-lady cashier soon showed up to open the cashier booth. The heck with those pesky machines; now we had a real person to fix things. The cashier motioned for me to move from the existing line to be the first in the new line. I made pleasant chitchat and gave her my credit card. The computers weren’t working, so it didn’t do much good. Without the entrance data from the computer (there were no entrance tickets, just a credit card swipe to enter the parking lot), she could not process a charge. I told her when I had arrived, showed her my itinerary as evidence, and offered to pay in cash. She said she couldn’t open the gate without a transaction, and the computer was not working to process a transaction.
Flashback: years ago I lived in
My colleagues laughed and laughed at that suggestion. Right away, they saw a hole in it big enough to--- well, drive a truck through. With no attendant at the entrance, one could push the button, get a ticket, enter the lot, and park well enough. However, when ready to leave, one simply walks over to the entrance gate, pushes the button and gets a new ticket to present upon exit. The new ticket has but a few minutes on it, and the cost is much less. From the beginning of the plan considerations, we had all agreed that an attendant was definitely needed at the exit. After their laughter about the entrance gate, I understood that we also had to put the entrance and the exit at the same place so the attendant could watch both. As an aside, they also told me that an attendant was needed at the exit because the gates were fairly easy to break or lift up (this information might prove handy some day).
Scene three – Flashback over, and back to the airport parking lot. By this time several of the strandees had gotten out of their cars and were gathered at the exit booth. The cashier and I were by now on good enough terms with me having tried to charm her into opening the gate. She was trying to call the manager, but couldn’t get anyone. The inconvenienced executives started to grumble.
“I’m supposed to be somewhere; we’ve got to get this fixed,” said one.
“You can’t just keep us here. This is your business problem; we’re ready to pay, but your system is down so let us out,” said another.
“Let us out presently, or I’m on the phone to my attorney,” one woman chimed in, and began to search her cell phone’s speed dial.
“I am an attorney, and you can bet I’ll file suit,” came the comment from the best dressed of our lot.
“They need to let us out. This is false arrest, without a doubt,” said another, I didn’t know if he was an attorney or not, but he sounded good.
Then it struck me. I was embarrassed for my kind. Here we were stuck in a parking lot, and all we could do was whine about litigation while the machine cast our lot. I hadn’t been this ashamed to be an American since I witnessed a guy in a Hawaiian shirt ordering his steak well done in a restaurant in
I knew from experience (refer to a certain flashback) that with the exception of border crossings like Checkpoint Charlie, parking gates are a pretense. I got out of my little hybrid car, took my credit card back from my powerless friend the cashier and walked over to the parking gate. I approached the free standing end of it and prepared to heave it heavenward with all my might. It was no big deal at all, it flew right up and stayed up.
No one said a word except for the cashier, who was still trying to get a manager on the phone. I heard her leave a message that the customers were starting to leave. I got back in my car and drove off, hoping to beat traffic. At least for once—on a sunny afternoon—I had escaped the lot.
(c)Copyright 2011 JP Harrison. All rights reserved.
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