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Vampires at the Airport
They are there. I've seen them. I can spot them. There
is one right now, at the Dallas-Fort Worth airport, a little middle-aged man with
a goatee. His eyes roam greedily over the crowd, scanning phone banks, airline
gates and walls. It's the walls he cares about. The little man spots it. His eyes
light up. He takes a few determined steps forward, then a leap, and then he's
there. He crouches, he grins, he opens his shoulder bag and out comes his vampire
cord. He plugs it in. He plops down on his knees before his bag and takes out:
1) his laptop, 2) his cell phone. He turns them on. They begin to glow. He closes
his eyes. Silence! The vampire is feeding.
He is not alone long. A chestnut-haired brisk young woman approaches swiftly.
She nods curtly, drops down next to her goateed colleague, and pulls her own
vampire cord out of her case. She plugs it in below the other's cord. Then she
sits down in a perfect lotus and pulls out her cell phone, her laptop, her ear
phones and her Palm.
This is it for this particular feeding station. There are only two outlets.
A number of roaming vampires pass, disappointed. They have gotten here too late.
There are other feeding stations here, but they are rare and far between. Vampires
sometimes travel the breadth and length of a huge airport before they find a
place to feed. I know. I'm one of them.
At Portland International, an inconsiderate vampire is using two outlets for
a number of devices. He is watching a DVD on his screen, eyes closed, juice
flowing through him, oblivious to the world. I curse him, I move on. Finally,
I spot an outlet under a dangerous looking sculpture of something vaguely aeronautic.
I leap to it, my cord is out in a flash, I'm in. I check the glow light on my
laptop. It's not on. Egads! It's a dead station! I look around, momentarily
disoriented by the sudden drop in my blood sugar levels. I see a grinning vampire
watch me. He knew! He had tried it and failed and he is now delighting in my
pain. I pull my cord out roughly. I resume roaming, but not before giving my
mean co-creature an evil look. You'd think that being in the same boat would
make us compassionate. Not at all. We are fierce hunters, individualistic, hungry
beasts of the computer age. We don't share the juice.
It is not until Seattle, the third leg of my trip, that I am
able to feed. The moment I plug in I can feel it. The sweet juice flowing into
my chips. The hum of the communicator coming to life. I dial a far-away place
and the juice lets me hear the sweet voice on the other end. The icons light
up on my desktop. I rejoin the sphere of the global network. Vampires pass by,
hungry, needy, jealous. Let them pass. I will not share.
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