Ladies and germs, let me introduce you to Aditya Singh. Aditya has been living out the real life adaptation of Tom Hanks’ The Terminal for the last 3 months at O’Hare Airport in Chicago.
Apparently, Aditya told authorities that he was fearful of flying back to California because of COVID. I realize we live in a world where people have about a million different takes on COVID so I’m not going to cast any stones in his direction if he was truly that scared, and I’m certainly not going to sit in my blogging ivory tower and say that Aditya is a HARD 36 years old. Those aren’t highway miles on those tires.
Anyway, I’m not sure how shocked I am at all that a person was able to live in an airport for 3 months. Especially one as big as O’Hare. If you really committed yourself to it I think 3 months is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of how long you could be there without being detected. You’ve got millions of people from all different countries and walks of life walking around all day long. I would think as a security guard that all of those people start to blend together at some point. It would take quite some time to notice once single person has been lingering for months at a time.
Now if I put myself in Aditya’s shoes, this would low key be a passion project of mine. Fun fact: I love airports. I love the moving sidewalk, I love Chile’s Too and their 30% markup on all food and drinks, I love a good pat down, and I LOVE to people watch. And in my opinion, there is no better place to watch a bunch of random people all thrown together in a stew than an international airport. You’ve got stressed business people stuck behind a family of four going on vacation, you’ve got people with flight anxiety sitting next to a bachelor party, you’ve got a guy who takes his shoes off on a flight next to a germaphobe, it’s beautiful! There’s almost no other place in the world where people with wildly different backgrounds and ideas about social norms are all thrown together in a shared situation*.
So I, for one, am a little jealous of Aditya. Honestly I don’t think it would be a terrible blog idea to become a daily airport blogger. Just sit in a big ol’ airport and blog/tweet about what you see all day long. File that one in the idea journal.
*Spoken like a person who doesn’t ever travel for work.
PS: There is no tastier beer than a Friday-after-work beer, but a close second is the airport beer/cocktail before you’re about to board a plane en route to a vacation. That beer just hits different.
Double PS: The Wednesday-before-work beer is also top 5.
