A day at the airport

Working at the airport is different every day. With 100.000 sometimes 150.000 travellers a day, it's quite natural you'll see and meet all sorts of people. This is the thing a love most about working at Schiphol Airport. There are people who are nice, angry, crazy, funny, smart, frightened, ugly, pretty, fat, skinny, normal, black, white, dumb, blond, old, young, colourful dressed, business men/women, people who are in a hurry, impatient. You name it and they walk around at the airport. All those people make my workdays different every time. Sometimes you already know what will come up at a certain time of the day. Usually on friday afternoons, lots of Frenchmen come up to desk trying to get on a earlier flight. Most of them have the same kind of tickets and then we are able to change their tickets. On sunday mornings it's usually the englishmen coming in. You can already smell the alcohol from the evening before. Most of the time they missed their flight and the have non changeable, non refundable tickets, which leaves them with nothing but a new ticket they have to buy. Right now we have lots of students collecting their tickets before their flights to Aruba or Netherlands Antilles, where they will be working as a part of their studies. Sometimes delays happen and then we have people stranding in Amsterdam. Most of the time we are able to help out people pretty good, but sometimes there are problems as a lot of people need a visa to enter the Netherlands or other Schengen countries and if they do not have a visa, they sometimes have to stay at the airport for 2 days and wait for the next flight. Sometimes people miss their flight because of their own mistake, then it's even a bigger problem for them as we have to stick to their ticketrules. It's also funny to see that people always tell us: "I don't have money, I am not able to pay a change fee." When we tell them no money no flight.... within an hour, they are back ... with money. I always wonder were they find it..... maybe I can go there as well :-)
Somehow people always blame us for the fact they missed their flight, or the wrong date in the ticket they booked via their travel agent. We also cause traffic jams, train delays....pretty good hey. But ofcourse there are also lots af nice people walking around, even though they might have had some pretty bad experiences. Today I had a couple at my desk and they had quite a big problem, caused in Londen yesterday. I wasn't able to turn things around for them, but tried to help them as good as possible. Later the man came back to me a thanked me for everything I had done. That makes you feel good when someone takes the time and comes back. Then you forget other less pleasant things that happen. Well this is just a part of my 'other life'. I have an early shift tomorrow, so I'm going to bed early, at least I'm going to try to go to bed early :-)

Ps. Put a smile on your face and find out how many people will smile back at you.