Doorless

I spent about 5 hours in the Atlanta airport today. The experience reminded me of why I've only taken nonstop flights (or long stopovers that are really 2 separate flights) for the past however-many years. Sitting at the airport with nothing to do is really not very fun.

So I walked all over C concourse as our flight kept getting delayed. The originally scheduled time was 2:45, but by the time we got off the flight from Jacksonville, the flight had already been delayed until 3:07. 2:45, 3:07, 2:50, 4:12, 4:41, 5:04. I think I got to my seat around 5:25. We got on the train home from the airport about 2.5 hours later.

While walking, I saw pouring rain, flights taking off into the low clouds, lots of fast food, lots of crowds of people crushing gates. I bought lots of food. We had Charley's Subs for lunch, and then I got a Frosty for a snack, and then before our flight finally left, I also got Popeye's for snack. I guess the post-vacation shape-up has been delayed until tomorrow.

I also saw smoking lounges. I thought most airports had gone completely non-smoking (at least, in the States), but I guess I was wrong. My first tip-off about these had been last week when we were waiting for our flight to Jacksonville and some girl was raving about how she had spent hours in the lounge and wished she could stay there. I felt like rolling my eyes.

If you know me, you probably know both that I can't stand and am allergic to smoke, which explains my strong aversion to being around cigarette smoke. I don't care so much that smoking lounges exist, so long as they don't end up polluting the regular air space and that I don't end up breathing in the stale smoke smell off some neighbor's clothes or breath (happened today... ugh). The only problem with smoking lounges would be that people smoke really close to the time they get on the plane, so the smell hasn't come off their clothes yet. But I guess I can deal with that. After all, the stale smoke smell from a polluting neighbor drifts into my apartment hallway all too often and it's impossible to keep my lungs healthy anyway.

Back to the smoking lounges. What's the point of having them if they have no doors? They're separate rooms and I suppose they have good ventilation systems, but there's no doors separating the smoking lounge from the gate areas! So what's the point? The smoke drifts out of the lounge and you can smell it a few gates away. Granted, it's not as bad as if they were allowed to smoke throughout the whole airport, but it's still not a smoke-free environment. I'm puzzled that they didn't put doors on the smoking lounges. Can you think of any possible reasons?