“Travel scruffy” seems to be the current mantra of the airline passengers’ community, and it appears to be getting more profound. The state of dress, if you can call it that, has deteriorated rapidly over the past few years and one wonders where it will end. One can only hope that the state of hygiene of these scruffy multitudes isn’t deteriorating alongside their dress “sense”.
A recent transatlantic flight just served to reinforce my opinion. I can’t say I looked at all of the 200-odd passengers but I was one of only three I saw wearing a jacket, and one of maybe a handful that was wearing an actual shirt rather than some tatty T-shirt. I was in the back-end of the plane but I did notice that people in the front end were only marginally better dressed. My partner wrote me a note this week to say I should write a blog on this topic after she went to the airport to meet family and encountered the same phenomenon – an airport full of scruffy people.
Has any sort of self-respect gone out the window? Or is it a symptom of the “Me-Me” generation. In Spanish, this phenomenon is called the “Yo-Yo” syndrome, which actually works better as an English description than does “Me-Me” – at least in my mind.
Being crammed into a metal tube for hours on end does tend to concentrate the mind on relatively small concerns like scruffiness unless, of course, questions of hygiene go along with it – then it becomes a major issue.
While I’m at it, I want to mention another annoyance, partially related to “scruffy”, and that is the advent of the ubiquitous back-pack. If you don’t have any clothing, like a jacket, that you can keep personal items in, you carry a pack-pack. Now, I am not talking about the small item that some people used to carry containing a few pills, a wallet and, maybe, some makeup. I am talking about the monstrosities that are half the size of a suitcase. Lately, more and more people carry these, in addition to a wheeled carry-on case. It reminds me of tortoises carrying their house on their backs. However, to add insult to injury, these people have no idea how far these “back-packs” stick out behind them. When they turn to look for their seat, or to look back at their companions during the boarding process, the arc that their back-pack swings in is enormous. I have lost count of the number of times I have sat in my aisle seat and been whacked in the head by a swinging backpack – the owner totally oblivious to what he/she has just done. Enough on back-packs, this blog is about “scruffy” dressers.
Unfortunately, the impression I have from flying, is repeated on the streets of the city where I live. The scruffiness is not as concentrated in a city as it is in an airport or a plane, but it is just as ubiquitous and, to some extent, even more scruffy and bizarre than the flying version. Boulder, Colorado often ranks in the top five of the best places to live in the U.S. It is a mecca for rich students, and a local population who, in general, think they are, if you will excuse the language, “hot shit”. I have never seen such a community of people that is consistently scruffily dressed – and I have lived and worked in quite a few countries. In fact, the dress-sense, or lack of it, is so bad that it has to be deliberate. There is no way you can dress that badly by accident – it must be deliberate.
A few comments on this phenomenon, if I may:
1. If you show no sense of self-respect, the chances are you will receive no respect, or even courtesy, from those around you.
2. My experience in travelling says, if you do dress reasonably well, you get far better service, and far more attention when things go wrong. This also applies to everyday life on the ground.
3. Finally, if you really don’t give a shit, and you are a fully-paid-up member of the “Yo-Yo” club, then you deserve all the abuse you get.
I only ask one thing of you. Stop whacking me in the head with your ……. back-pack.
