Egalitarianism and Hierarchy I: The airport metaphor

I love airports. Anyone who knows me will know how surprising this is because I hate waiting. And airports, much to my chagrin, seem designed to maximize the amount of dead space they can drag out of every activity. Whether it is the impossibly clueless person at the counter; or the guy ahead of you who has to go through the metal detector 15 times because you forgot to take off his belt, and his keys, and his cellphone and...; or the way calls that weather will delay takeoff seem to occur just after all the passengers have loaded the plane; or how wireless is priced just high enough to never justify you going online to make the most of your time, until you find that your flight has been delayed, but by just long enough to ensure that purchasing wireless at that point will still be profligate. I have a lot of gripes with airports but I still love them. I love airports because of how similar they are all over the world.