HEALTHY LIVING TIPS

Today’s paper revealed that the traveling public’s Enemy No. 1 is still wreaking havoc. With his usual low profile, Les LeGroom has kept quietly behind the scenes while coaching airlines with their major decision making. For those unfamiliar with the man, a brief history would be that Les became a highly sought after consultant for the airlines after he left the sardine canning industry in the early nineties with an unprecedented package. His professional forte of packing humans into smaller and smaller spaces is evident in a recent flush of new aircraft deliveries to major airlines. The new planes have the same cabin space as previous models except that they sport an additional dozen or more seats.

Les LeGroom is very open about his unwillingness to buy airline shares, softening his admission by claiming to be a simple fellow with simple tastes in stocks, airlines being too sophisticated for him. But don’t let that down home facade fool anyone; Les is as shrewd as they come. He was the brain behind the disappearance of food galleys in favor of more seats, recognizing that passengers pay and pastries don’t. And that brings up another area in Les’ book of what pays and what doesn’t; apparently there is some ugly water cooler talk going on at airline headquarters these days about the non-profitability of on board lavatories and maybe there needs to be some cutbacks there.

Indeed, it has been revealed through a leaked memo that Les is advocating that airlines begin to advise passengers to purchase ATBs before boarding. After some research, journalists discovered that ATB is the acronym for Airline Travel Brief, which is nothing more than a euphemism for an adult diaper. According to the memo, these should be available for a fee at the boarding gate if passengers have forgotten to supply their own. Apparently, memos are not the only leaks that airlines resent having to contend with.

State of the art seat cushioning is Les’ favorite claim to fame on the new aircraft. New seats are now designed to emulate the thin profile of the flip down LCD screens that are supposed to keep passengers glued in their chairs, mindless of their close quarters. Something tells me that the human body is not as adept at fitting into many of the prescribed folded positions and tilts of the new seating, despite the positive press the airline spokesmen are giving it. Sitting in my flexible desk chair and carefully enacting a written description of how the new seats can recline without disturbing one’s backyard neighbor, I managed to act up my sciatica and bloody my knee on the desk in front of me.

The axiom less is more has its limitations. In this case, Les is just plain less for consumers. His vision for the future is airport terminals that look and smell like bus stations, only with a heavier security detail going on. The odd thing with people is that when you really jam them together, there is often less civility and a lot more hostility. Of course, all this is subtly being pushed on to us over a carefully measured timeframe. It may take that new proposed boarding gate installation, the Sardine Oil Sprayer (acronym SOS), to bring about a real revolution.

(A Note to Readers: After an earlier publication of this commentary, I received an email from a certain L.L. who politely informed me that I had misspelled his name. Correction: Les LeGroom should read as Less LegRoom.)

In one of his well known illustrations, Jesus told the listening crowds of his day that a city set on a hill could not be hidden. His point was about the abundantly obvious: a prominent community cannot help but broadcast messages about its culture, in the same manner as beacons guide travelers in choosing what to follow and what to avoid. Ironically, there are cities of varying sizes today built on the top of towering refuse heaps, such as the infamous ones of Calcutta and Mexico City. The messages of these particular communities are overt but a great deal of the planet’s cities hold lesser known tales.

Other cultures are more subtle about the fact that mountains of discard and ruin lie beneath their cities. Mankind has often chosen to build cities in layers, covering the ruins of a past with a sheathing of new structures and usages. In Europe, it is not uncommon for a tired tourist to sit down and rest on a stone wall jutting above the earth’s surface by a foot or two, an indication of ancient Roman days. In the New World, there are old street surfaces being uncovered and restored to the original stones that were left by ships unloading ballast as they took on rice and cotton to re-cross the Atlantic. Coastal colonial towns used their refuse as part of landfill projects to push back the tides and build wharves and fortresses.

Detritus has been a mainstay in civilizations’ building techniques since the time of Ur, regardless of how materially affluent or simple the community may have been. Archaeologists and historians try to piece mysteries of the past together by dig findings but some remain impenetrable to their understanding. There are mounds in different parts of the world that still defy interpretation, leaving these specialists in a quandary as to whether this structure had ceremonial significance or it purpose was primarily that of a dumping ground.

This makes one wonder what future interpretations may result from unearthing the mounds of this era which are today’s landfills. Aside from the typical uncovering and identification of housewares and personal items, there will surely be an additional furrowing of the scholarly brow. “What is the meaning of this extraordinary accumulation of fetid plastic-skinned paper product that keeps turning up?” And when they rightly conclude that they have been building their kingdoms of glass and steel upon depths of adult diapers, what will be the anthropological statements?

Statistics tell us that nearly 10% of today’s household trash consists of diapers. Some claim that baby diapers make up about 3% of that total; adult diapers adding up to the remaining 7%. At the time of this writing, that particular adult diaper stat seems a tad exaggerated. But there is no doubt that with the tail end of the baby boomers quickly shifting into their senior years and with their life expectancy on the rise, this adult diaper figure will soon be surpassed. Currently, diapers are the third largest source of landfill waste. It stands to reason that as the bottoms these nappies serve get bigger in both size and number, the bigger their allotted landfill space will need to be.

An aluminum can takes about 200 years to completely break down under typical landfill conditions. Shockingly, an adult diaper takes the same amount of time, more in some calculations, to disintegrate under the same circumstances. Oxygen is a key element for decomposition to take place and well maintained landfills ironically starve the garbage of this necessary ingredient. To manage the putrid nastiness of a landfill and to keep the public’s health as shielded from their trash as much as possible, many landfill sites try to apply a six inch layer of soil over the top of daily dumpings. This oxygen depriving burial and compacting works in tandem with public health efforts to keep oxidizing water out and leachate in, and leads to what is known as “dry tomb effect”. Refuse is inadvertently mummified, making for fascinating future archaeology, especially when considering the inevitable density of adult diapers that will be encountered.

“Brownfield” is the ecological term for a fallow landfill site before it is cleaned up – how appropriate when considering the diaper element. Brownfields become the mounds upon which expanding cities are built, today and long into the future. The press of urban life and its real estate requirements eventually dictate that developers turn the soil and turn a buck. Planners’ designs make it possible to completely ignore the history of the compacted detritus of broken hair dryers, rotting sofas and adult diapers that lie beneath. They dutifully follow the real estate maxim that location is everything: Everyone knows that if you want a great view, build on a hill.

I opened the paper today to discover that the traveling public’s old nemesis is back at it again. Les LeGroom has been an insidious presence in the airline industry for a long time but his influence is having an ever greater reach with a new rash of aircraft deliveries. Airlines are taking possession of airplanes that have same-size cabins as earlier ones but with the important distinction of having more seats crammed into them. Les has been up to this trick of squeezing humanity into tighter and tighter spaces for quite some time. Airlines have been hiring him as a key consultant ever since he left the sardine canning industry.

No one can discredit Les LeGroom by saying he lacks of ingenuity. The airlines cannot get enough of this guy’s ideas. He always delivers the goods and does it smoothly, such as when the removal of food galleys created hardly any upset among seasoned passengers. After all, this was seen as a positive public health move, the end of gray chicken a la king. A few more seats were tucked in these nooks as though they had always been there. So full of ideas, it is like Les never sleeps and of course, he expects the same from airline passengers. Another of his expectations may come as a bit of a shock though. Rumor has it that he is urging the airlines to consider cutting back on a significant percentage of lavatory space, to make room for even yet more seating. Why waste all that space on one or two uncomfortable thrones?

What credence should be given to this chatter? As odds would have it, earlier this year an independent journalist and blogger covering a paper products trade show in Foshan, China tripped over a small display of adult diapers, their waistbands imprinted with generic airline wings. Her inquiries were quickly silenced when she answered that she was not with a Mr. LeGroom. The booth’s manager threw a tarp over the pile, saying “This prototype. No ATB orders today.” A quick Baidu search answered her questions as to who the mysterious Mr. LeGroom was and that the acronym ATB stood for Airline Travel Brief. Even the mathematically disinclined can see where this is going.

Les has also come up with seat designs that are supposed to eliminate any perception of tighter space on board. These seat structures are thinner, with a bottom that somehow miraculously slides forward to produce a reclining position that doesn’t compromise the knee room of the passenger in the seat behind. Not fully understanding this concept when I read it in the paper, I tried to replicate the described tilting motion with my office chair and immediately bruised my knee on my keyboard tray. I guess it’s just one of those things that need to be seen to be believed

What is Les LeGroom’s vision for the future of air travel? It hardly bears contemplation. People shoved together in their ATBs, figuring out their ETAs and stinking to high heaven of the sardine oil showered on them by the sprinklers recently installed at the boarding gate. Practices gleaned from one industry and applied to another can have frightening consequences. We might be well advised to tuck one of those funny little can keys into our Airline Travel Briefs just in case of an emergency.

(Readers: Please note that this is a reprint of an earlier publication in which I unintentionally misspelled a certain gentleman’s name. Since then, I received a polite email stating that in fact, Les LeGroom is spelled Less LegRoom.)