Arinze

There are things I will never understand, no matter how hard I try. Take airport regulations, for example. Airport officials frown at passengers travelling with perfumes. If they find certain quantities in your luggage during security checks, they often confiscate them. But the moment you pass through security and enter the departure lounge, you will find shops selling those same perfumes. You can walk into one of those shops, buy an entire bag of perfumes, and proceed to board your flight with them. So, essentially, you are telling passengers that certain perfumes cannot pass through airport security, but allowing those same products to be sold at the door of the plane. Does that make sense? How about Airplane Mode and the insistence by some flight attendants that every mobile device must be completely switched off during takeoff and landing? On my last flight from Lagos, a flight attendant approached me and asked me to switch off my phone. I politely explained that my phone was already on Airplane Mode. She insisted that I switch it off completely. So, I asked her whether she understood the reason behind the instruction she was so determined to enforce. From her response, I was heartbroken. She had no understanding of the theory behind the rule she was enforcing. One of the reasons airlines restrict the use of electronic devices during certain phases of flight is to minimise potential interference from radio transmissions. And what exactly is Airplane Mode designed to do? Disable the phone’s cellular radio transmissions. The rule to switch off mobile phones were made when phones had no Airplane Mode features. The Airplane Mode features were introduced to mobile devices to help passengers use their phones while flying. Even the name alone explains this. On some flights, the announcement is straightforward: switch off your electronic devices or put them on Airplane Mode. On many local flights in Nigeria, however, some flight attendants insist on complete shutdowns without being able to explain why Airplane Mode is supposedly insufficient. And this is where my problem lies. Not necessarily with the rules, but with our relationship with rules. We have become so accustomed to receiving instructions, memorising them, repeating them and enforcing them that we sometimes forget the most important question: WHY? A person can spend ten years enforcing a rule without ever understanding the problem that rule was created to solve. And when you ask questions, they interpret your curiosity as disobedience. Perhaps one of our biggest problems as a society is that we have trained too many people to obey instructions and too few to understand them. We have perfected the art of following procedures without questioning their purpose. Sometimes, the people enforcing the rules are even more confused than the people being forced to obey them. Another very useless practice is the checking of car trunks at hotels and some other public places. What are they always looking for? Just open and close to fulfill all righteousness. There are places in a car that dangerous weapons can be hidden. -KAA #kaa_truths