I'm a Stranger Here Myself

by Bill Bryson

  “You’re thinking of Second-Party Disallowance Invalidity Coverage,” said the second man in the line to the first. “Are you from Rhode Island?”

  “Why, yes I am,” said the first man.

  “Then that explains it. You have Variable Double Negative Split-Weighting down there.”

  “I don’t understand any of this,” I cried in a small whimper.

  “Look,” said the car rental agent, “suppose you crash into a person who has Second-Party Disallowance Invalidity Coverage but not First- and Third-Party Accident Indemnification. If you’ve got Third-Party Waiver Damage Exclusion Coverage, you don’t have to claim on your own policy under the Single-Digit Reverse Liability Waiver. How much Personal Loss Rollover do you carry?”

  “I have no idea,” I said.

  He stared at me. “You don’t know?” he said.

  Out of the corner of my eye I could see the other people in the line exchanging amused glances.

  “Mrs. Bryson deals with these things,” I explained a trifle inadequately.

  “Well, what’s your Baseline Double Footfault Level?”

  I gave a small, helpless, please-don’t-hit-me look. “I don’t know.”

  He drew in breath in a way that suggested that perhaps I should consider taking a Greyhound. “It sounds to me like you need the Universal Full-Coverage Double Top-Loaded Comprehensive Switchback Plan.”

  “With Graduated Death Benefit,” suggested the second person in the line.

  “What’s all that?” I asked unhappily.

  “It’s all here in the leaflet,” said the clerk. He passed one to me. “Basically, it gives you $100 million of coverage for theft, fire, accident, earthquake, nuclear war, swamp gas explosions, derailment leading to hair loss, meteor impact, and intentional death—so long as they occur simultaneously and providing you give twenty-four hours’ notice in writing and file an Incident Intention Report.”

  “How much is it?”

  “One hundred and seventy-two dollars a day. But it comes with a set of steak knives.”

  I looked to the other people in the line. They nodded.

  “OK, I’ll take it,” I said in exhausted resignation.

  “Now do you want the Worry-Free Fuel Top-Up Option,” the clerk went on, “or the Fill-It-Yourself Cheap Person’s Option?”

  “What’s that?” I asked, dismayed to realize that this hell wasn’t yet over.

  “Well, with the Worry-Free Fuel Top-Up Option, you can bring the car back on empty and we will refill the tank for a one-time charge of $32.95. Under the other plan, you fill the tank yourself before returning the car and we put the $32.95 elsewhere on the bill under ‘Miscellaneous Unexplained Charges.’ ”

  I consulted with my advisers and took the Worry-Free plan.

  The clerk checked the appropriate box. “And do you want the Car Locator Option?”

  “What’s that?”

  “We tell you where the car is parked.”

  “Take it,” urged the man nearest me with feeling. “I didn’t take it once in Chicago and spent two and a half days wandering around the airport looking for the damned thing. Turned out it was under a tarpaulin in a cornfield near Peoria.”

  And so it went. Eventually, when we had worked our way through two hundred or so pages of complexly tiered options, the clerk passed the contract to me.

  “Just sign here, here, and here,” he said. “And initial here, here, here, and here—and over here. And here, here, and here.”

  “What am I initialing?” I asked warily.

  “Well, this one gives us the right to come to your home and seize one of your children or a nice piece of electronic equipment if you don’t bring the car back on time. This one is your agreement to take a truth serum in the event of a dispute. This one waives your right to sue. This one avows that any damage to the car now or at any time in the future is your responsibility. And this one is a twenty-five dollar donation to Bernice Kowalksi’s leaving party.”

  Before I could respond, he whipped away the contract and replaced it on the counter with a map of the airport.

  “Now to get to the car,” he continued, drawing on the map as if doing one of those maze puzzles that you find in children’s coloring books, “you follow the red signs through Terminal A to Terminal D2. Then you follow the yellow signs, including the green ones, through the parking ramp to the Sector R escalators. Take the down escalator up to Passenger Assembly Point Q, get on the shuttle marked “Satellite Parking/Mississippi Valley,” and take it to Parking Lot A427-West. Get off there, follow the white arrows under the harbor tunnel, through the quarantine exclusion zone, and past the water filtration plant. Cross runway 22-Left, climb the fence at the far side, go down the embankment, and you’ll find your vehicle parked in bay number 12,604. It’s a red Toro. You can’t miss it.”

  He passed me my keys and a large box filled with documents, insurance policies, and other related items.

  “And good luck to you,” he called after me.

  I never did find the car, of course, and I was hours late for my appointment, but in fairness I have to say that we have had a lot of pleasure from the steak knives.

  I have been watching a movie called Magnificent Obsession lately. Made in 1954 and starring Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman, it is one of those gorgeously mediocre movies they made in abundance in the early 1950s when people would still watch almost anything (as opposed to now when you have to put in lots of fiery explosions and at least one scene involving the hero rappeling down an elevator shaft).

  Anyway, if I’ve got it right, Magnificent Obsession involves a handsome young racing car driver played by Rock who carelessly causes Ms. Wyman to go blind in a car crash. Rock is so consumed with guilt at this that he goes off and studies eye medicine at the “University of Oxford, England,” or some place, then comes back to Perfectville under an assumed name and dedicates his life to restoring Jane’s sight. Only of course she doesn’t know it’s him on account of she is blind, as well as apparently a little slow with regard to recognizing the voices of people who have left her permanently maimed.

  Needless to say, they fall in love and she gets her sight back. The best scene is when Rock removes her bandages and she sputters, “Why, it’s . . . you!” and slumps into an extravagant but comely swoon, but unfortunately does not strike her head on the coffee table and lose her vision again, which would have improved the story considerably, if you ask me. Also, Jane has a ten-year-old daughter played by one of those pigtailed, revoltingly precocious child actors of the fifties that you just ache to push out a high window. I expect also Lloyd Nolan is in there somewhere because Lloyd Nolan is always in 1950s movies with parts for doctors.

  I may not have all the details right because I have not been watching this movie in order, or even on purpose. I have been watching it because one of our cable channels has shown it at least fifty-four times in the last two months, and I keep coming across it while trawling around looking for something actual to watch.

  We get about fifty channels in our house—it is possible on some systems now to get up to two hundred, I believe—so you think at first that you are going to be spoiled for choice, but gradually you come to the conclusion that the idea of the bulk of TV these days is simply to fill up the air with any old junk. I have watched “current affairs” investigations that were ten years old. I have seen Barbara Walters interviewing people who died years ago, and weren’t that interesting to begin with. On this very evening, under the category of “drama,” my cable channel magazine lists as its most sublime and compelling offerings Matlock and Little House on the Prairie. Tomorrow it recommends The Waltons and Dallas. The next day it is Dallas again and Murder, She Wrote.

  You begin to wonder who watches it all. One of our channels is a twenty-four-hour cartoon network. That there are people out there who wish to watch cartoons through the night is remarkable enough, but what is truly astounding to me is that the channel carries commercials. What could you possibly sell to
people who voluntarily watch Deputy Dawg at 2:30 A.M.? Bibs?

  But perhaps the most mind-numbing feature is that the same programs are shown over and over at the same times each night. Tonight at 9:30 P.M. on Channel 20 we can watch The Munsters. Last night at 9:30 P.M. on Channel 20 it was The Munsters. Tomorrow night at 9:30 P.M. on Channel 20 it will be—did you guess correctly?—The Munsters. Each Munsters showing is preceded by an episode of Happy Days and followed by an episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It has been like this for years, as far as I can tell, and will stay like this forever.

  And it is like this on virtually every channel for every time slot. If you turn on the Discovery Channel and find a program on Hollywood stunts (and you will), you can be certain that the next time you turn to the Discovery Channel at the same hour, it will be a program on Hollywood stunts. Probably it will be the same episode.

  I have the fondest memories of programs from my childhood that I would adore to see again in small, measured doses—a little Burns and Allen, perhaps some Jack Benny, a discriminating selection of Leave It to Beaver and Sgt. Bilko, maybe a little 77 Sunset Strip and Wagon Train for nostalgia’s sake—but I don’t want to watch any of them over and over and over, at the same time each night, and in any case I won’t because the best of the old programs seem curiously forgotten and unavailable. I just don’t understand it.

  No doubt the fault is mine. When I left America I had never lived in a household that received more than four channels. In England, for the next twenty years, it was four channels again. So it may be simply that I have not developed the skills necessary to deal with such a multiplicity of choice. Then again it may be that it’s just all crap.

  What I can tell you is that with so many channels to choose from, and nearly all of them interrupted every few minutes by commercials, you don’t actually watch anything. As a friend recently explained to me, you don’t watch television here to see what is on, you watch it to see what else is on. And the one thing to be said for American TV is that there is always something else on. You can trawl infinitely. By the time you have reached the fiftieth channel you have forgotten what was on the first, so you start the cycle again in the forlorn hope that you might find something absorbing this time through.

  I’d love to go on, but I must leave you now. I notice that Magnificent Obsession is about to start, and I really would like to see Jane Wyman lose her sight. It’s the best part. Besides, I keep thinking that if I watch long enough Lloyd Nolan will shove that little girl out an upstairs window.

  My father was a sportswriter who flew a lot for his work in the days before it was common to do so, and occasionally he would take me on one of his trips with him. It was exciting, of course, just to go away for a weekend with my dad, but at the heart of the experience was the thrill of getting on a plane and going somewhere.

  Everything about the process felt special and privileged. Checking in, you would be one of a small group of welldressed people (for in those days people actually dressed up to fly). When the flight was called, you would stroll across a broad tarmac to a gleaming silver plane, and up one of those wheeled staircases. Entering the plane was like being admitted to some special club. Just stepping aboard, you became a little more stylish and sophisticated. The seats were comfy and, for a small boy, commodious. A smiling stewardess would come and give you a little winged badge that said “Assistant Pilot” or something similarly responsible sounding.

  All that romance has long since vanished, I’m afraid. Today commercial planes are little more than winged buses, and the airlines, without detectable exception, regard passengers as irksome pieces of bulk freight that they consented, at some time in the remote past, to carry from place to place and now wish they hadn’t.

  I cannot begin to describe in a space this modest all the spirit-sapping features of modern air travel—the routinely overbooked flights, the endless standing in lines, the delays, the discovery that your “direct” flight to Dallas actually involves stops in Scranton and Nashville and involves layovers of ninety minutes and two changes of planes, the near-impossibility of finding a friendly face among the gate agents, the being treated like an idiot and a cipher.

  Yet in the oddest ways airlines continue to act as if it is still 1955. Take the safety demonstration. Why after all these years do the flight attendants still put a life vest over their heads and show you how to pull the little cord that inflates it? In the entire history of commercial aviation no life has been saved by the provision of a life vest. I am especially fascinated by the way they include a little plastic whistle on each vest. I always imagine myself plunging vertically toward the ocean at 1,200 miles an hour and thinking: “Well, thank gosh I’ve got this whistle.”

  It is no good asking what they are thinking because they are not thinking anything. I recently boarded a flight from Boston to Denver. When I opened the overhead storage compartment, I found an inflated dinghy entirely filling the space.

  “There’s a boat in here,” I breathed in amazement to a passing flight attendant.

  “Yes, sir,” said the flight attendant snappily. “This plane meets FAA specifications for overwater flights.”

  I stared at him in small wonder. “And which body of water do we cross between Boston and Denver?”

  “The plane meets FAA specifications for overwater flights whether or not overwater flights are scheduledly anticipated,” was his crisp reply, or something similarly inane and mangled.

  “Are you telling me that if we go down in water, 150 passengers are supposed to get into a two-man dinghy?”

  “No, sir, there’s another flotation craft in here.” He indicated the bin on the opposite side.

  “So two boats for 150 people? Does that strike you as just a little absurd?”

  “Sir, I don’t make the rules, and you are blocking the aisle.”

  He talked to me like this because all airline employees eventually talk to you like this if you press them a little bit, and sometimes even if you don’t. I feel safe in saying that there is not an industry anywhere in which the notions of service and customer satisfaction are less regarded. All too often the most innocuous move—stepping up to a counter before the check-in clerk is ready to receive you, inquiring why a flight is delayed, ending up with no place to stow your coat because your overhead locker contains an inflated boat—can lead to snappishness and rebuke.

  Mind you, with the notable exception of me and a few other meek souls who feel a certain commitment to orderliness, most passengers these days deserve what they get. This is because they take on bulging suit bags and wheeled carryons that are at least twice the officially permitted size, so that the overhead bins fill up long before the flight is fully boarded. To make sure they get a bin to themselves, they board before their row is called. On any flight now you will find perhaps 20 percent of the seats filled by people whose row numbers have not been called. I have watched this process with weary exasperation for some years, and I can tell you that it takes roughly half as long again for an American plane to get boarded and airborne as it does anywhere else in the developed world.

  The result of this is a kind of war between airline employees and passengers, which all too often redounds on the innocent in a way that cries out for justice.

  I particularly recall an experience of a few years ago when my wife, children, and I boarded a flight in Minneapolis to fly to London and discovered that we had been allocated seats in six different parts of the aircraft, up to twenty rows apart. Bemused, my wife pointed this out to a passing stewardess.

  The stewardess looked at the boarding passes. “That’s correct,” she said and started to move away.

  “But we’d like some seats together please,” said my wife.

  The stewardess looked at her, then gave a small, hollow laugh. “Well, it’s a little late now,” she said. “We’re boarding. Didn’t you check your boarding passes?”

  “Only the top one. The check-in clerk”—who was, let me interject here, a disagree
able specimen herself—“didn’t tell us she was scattering us all over the plane.”

  “Well, there’s nothing I can do now.”

  “But we have small children.”

  “I’m sorry, you’ll just have to make do.”

  “Are you telling me to put a two-year-old and a four-year-old off by themselves for an eight-hour flight across the Atlantic?” my wife asked. (This was an idea that I believed I could warm to, but I made a grave face, in solidarity.)

  The stewardess gave an elaborate, put-upon sigh and, with an air of undisguised resentment, asked a kindly white-haired couple to exchange seats, which allowed my wife and the two youngest to sit together. The rest of us would remain separated.

  “Next time look at your boarding passes before you leave the terminal,” the attendant snapped at my wife in parting.

  “No, next time we will fly with someone else,” my wife replied, and indeed ever since we have.

  “And one day, I’ll have a column in a newspaper and I’ll write about this,” I called after her in a haughty voice. Of course, I didn’t say any such thing, and it would be a terrible abuse of my position to tell you that it was Northwest Airlines that treated us in this shabby and inexcusable way, so I won’t.

  I have finally figured out what is wrong with everything. There is too much of it. I mean by that that there is too much of every single thing that one could possibly want or need except time, money, good plumbers, and people who say thank you when you hold open a door for them. (And, entirely by the way, I would like to put it on the record here that the next person who goes through a door that I’ve held open and doesn’t say “Thank you” is going to get it in the kidneys.)

  America is of course a land of bounteous variety, and for a long time after we first moved here I was dazzled and gratified by the wealth of choice everywhere. I remember going to the supermarket for the first time and being genuinely impressed to find that it stocked no fewer than eighteen varieties of incontinence diaper. Two or three I could understand. Half a dozen would seem to cover every possible incontinence contingency. But eighteen—gosh! This was a land of plenty. And what a range of choice they offered. Some were scented, some were dimpled for extra comfort, and they came in a variety of strengths from, as it were, “Oops, bit of a dribble” to “Whoa! Dambusters!” Those weren’t the labels they actually used, of course, but that was the gist of it. They even came in a choice of colors.