Any excuse is always a lousy excuse, but one of the reasons for the gap between posts was a truly, truly glorious wedding in Jerusalem which I had the pleasure to attend in the interim. Leaving aside both the wedding and the glory, I wanted to share something I noticed while I was travelling.
Like most people, I tend not to engage my brain too much in airports. We’ve heard all of the questions before and I just want to get my coffee and get on my plane and try not to feel too petty about the fact that I’ve probably had to take my shoes off.
So the questions just roll over me these days…Did you pack this bag yourself? Do you have anything sharp that could be used as a...Are you carrying anything that…Have your bags been anywhere that someone could have…?
My friend and I were shuffling and yeah-ing our way through this tired conversation in Tel Aviv airport, frankly being more concerned with gauging how long the whole process ahead would take, when the very nice woman that was asking the questions did something that surprised me.
Without breaking her verbal stride or changing her chatty tone in the slightest, she glanced at us, looked back at the passports and oh-so-casually threw in, “Girls, you know that we ask you these questions because we don’t want someone to use you to smuggle explosives onto the plane, right?” She looked back up and smiled at us.
We paused. We looked at each other. We looked at our bags. We thought. We looked back at the woman. No, no one could have been in our bags. Definitely not.
The woman told me I had the cutest passport cover she’d ever seen, took the maker’s name and waved us through, having transformed us from nodding dogs to responsive passengers in the space of fifteen seconds.
I’ve no doubt it would have caused us more trouble than it was worth for me to start asking about how the airport staff are trained to communicate with travellers about explosives, but I’ve reflected on that interaction a number of times after the fact and I’d really like to know.
Are security staff in some airports being taught how to communicate to actually get the best out of people? Or was this woman just really smart and passionate about the importance of what she does? Did she just see our nodding dogs and think “I can get an honest answer without needing to bore or threaten it out of them”?
I’ll spare you the lengthy analysis of where she used the word “smuggle” in the sentence, or when she chose to smile or look directly at us, but any time I might fall into repetitive cycles in communicating the reasons/causes that I work for, I’m going to try and remember this bizarre interaction and the woman that liked my passport case.
The fact that I’m a fundraiser probably means that I spend most of my life talking about things that I have already been talking about for most of my life. It would be lethal to forget that there is always a way, often simple, to communicate a truly vital idea, no matter how tired its communication has got to date.
