Lounge Lizards

I've been travelling this past week on business. Due to the amount I travel for my company, I recently got a gold card for klm, and received a leaflet explaining all of the benefits to which I am now entitled. The one that sounded most useful was lounge access: from now on, I'm entitled to use the klm lounge at Schiphol, even when travelling economy.

You can tell a lot about how boring my life in Holland is by the fact that this is one of the most exciting things that has happened to me in months.

The other morning, I decided I'd try it out and made my approach to the klm lounge. When I got to the door, there was a handwritten sign outside it, on which someone had scrawled the word "FULL". Now, I've lived here long enough to know that this was exceptionally unlikely to be the case, and that, rather, the subtext of the sign meant "PLEASE GO AWAY - WE HAVE MAGAZINES TO READ". As I was pondering my next course of action, the doors to the lounge swung open and about 8 businessmen exited.

I therefore figured that, at worst, the lounge must now be full, minus 8 people. So I went in. 3 klm staffers sat behind the counter. 2 were chatting to each other, the third was.... reading a magazine. I decided I would approach her and went up to the desk, said "good morning", and smilingly proffered my boarding pass and card. Without looking up from her magazine, she simply pointed a dirty-fingernailed, nicotine-stained, wrinkly hand towards the door where the "FULL" sign stood.

I didn't say anything (I was actually a bit stunned), and stood there. She flipped the page in her magazine, making no attempt whatsoever to communicate or even make eye contact with me. I looked across at her 2 friends who were still too engrossed in their conversation even to be aware that there were customers waiting to be served.

So I decided I'd just ignore them, as they had done me, and go right on in. The place was busy, certainly, though 2 things caught my attention: (1) there were plenty of empty chairs around the place; and (2) it was absolutely filthy.

As I was taking about my 6th step past the reception, one of the talking girls shouted after me: "Shur - it is not posssshibolll. It is very bisssssshy."

I returned to the desk. I was livid. "I'm so sorry - I didn't want to interrupt your conversation earlier and your deaf-mute colleague is busy reading about Big Brother, so I figured I'd just come in. Also, for your information, the lounge isn't full. By a quick reckoning, I'd say 20% of the seats are free. It is completely filthy though. Why the 3 of you aren't fired immediately is beyond my comprehension."

And with that, I continued into the lounge, and got a coffee. I felt like such an asshole. It is pretty out of character for me to speak to people like that, but my outburst wasn't really about this latest episode of imbecility from the Dutchies: I guess it was the dam breaking after several months of drip, drip, drip: the daily grind of trying to get anything accomplished or any modicum of professionalism or service from the Dutch. I didn't feel like saying "maybe you could look up from your magazine and talk directly to me?" or "maybe you could stop chatting; take down the misleading sign from outside; and run this place professionally for your paying customers?" Not today, at any rate.