There is a line from a famous Paul Kelly song that goes something like ---“have you ever seen Sydney from a 747 at night” which goes on to evoke great memories and images of travel, of airports, of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, of the Opera House and city lights.
Sydney Airport Qantas Club lounge is also quite memorable on a Friday night around 5 – 7 pm too, and does conjure up not the memories and images of those in a Paul Kelly song, but of pigs at a trough.
The lounge is very crowded as the punters, mostly corporate executives, business types, senior public servants and others for whom someone else is usually the fare payer, head out of Sydney after a hard week of toil. And it does show.......
Getting a drink - soft or hard -from the self service area or from a reasonably pleasant barman or placing a few nibbles on a plate from the food service area is a tricky business and involves running the gauntlet of a jostling horde. More like pigs at a trough of swill!
Most manners and civil gestures among the punters seem to disappear, a bit of argy-bargy to commander the last morsel of camembert cheese or salami on the plate [yet the supply does seem to reappear as if from a virtual endless supply] and scant manners seem to be shown to staff working in the service areas.
Where is civil society going? Is it “big city” syndrome, where people seem to have less and less time to engage in social intercourse, is it time challenged airline travellers, or are people just after a free feed which for most would hardly be a serious expense anyway?
The ideals of civility seem to have disappeared in the Qantas Lounge! It is just like pigs at the trough.
Quite disgusting really.
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