Calculating Luxury
Dave Says:
Consider the value of a dollar. Now consider ten thousand of them. The distance between Vancouver, Canada and Auckland, New Zealand is eleven thousand kilometers. I’m going to round that down to ten thousand kilometers because I’m an international business bigwig to whom one thousand anythings is just a mere rounding error. Here’s some math:
$10,000 / 10,000km = $1 per km
I’ll leave you with that for a moment.
I’m on an airplane heading back to New Zealand. My traveling companion with whom (twice in two paragraphs) I have sat, either window or aisle, for so many miles is not here. Although my travelling muse is missing, that’s not a bad thing for our bank account considering the dollar figure I just left you with. Unlike the last trip out, there are no stolen vacations, no working the system, just business. Dollars are dollars regardless of USD, NZD or AUD. So business it is and in business I am in.
I flew trans-continental business class once before, many years ago, when I was just a young whippersnapper of a worker. A freebie from American (or United, or Continental Airlines, I can’t remember who) to build loyalty to their newly opened route from Portland to Heathrow. I was too young to appreciate it and equally too hungover to enjoy it. Now, with probably one hundred thousand air miles travelled, although mysteriously not accumulated, I get to fly business class again.
My seat reclines and then folds like an oversized origami swan, to a fully horizontal position with the touch of a button. I can do this whenever I want because in my class of travel I appear to be immune to FAA regulations and can take off at the same inclination as the plane if I wish. My TV is on an armature that pivots, pitches and yaws to the ultimate viewing angle and my stewardess ensures that at any given moment my wine glass is full and its bounty never obstructs my multi-articulated movie watching. I shall call her my stewardess not because of sexism but because of classicism. As I type, my neighbors, who I take to be an semi-elderly couple on a big splurge, have left to brush their teeth (and not to be members of the mile-high club I hope) and in their absence our stewardess has made their bed with fresh linens. That, my readers, is class. It’s class in the same way the leaving for the restroom at El Gaucho ensures a folded napkin on your seat upon your return.
I have a wine menu highlighting great New Zealand wines and a choice of entrees devised by the three top chefs in the whole of New Zealand. Champagne awaited my embarkation although I chose orange juice (from concentrate – strike one against business class) – a more sensible choice forced upon me by two rather hurried pints of beer in the bar before boarding. A four-course dinner followed, served with a tablecloth, napkin and warm artisan bread accompanied by olive oil in a small plastic bottle not unlike the small bottles of shampoo given to you in hotel bathrooms. My entrée was of restaurant quality albeit a mini-me version. Quite sensible as it turns out because in business class we don’t fart, nor do we wish to battle the urge brought on by excessive eating. [Although, as I type this, we do apparently snore] I was even offered desert wine, a luxury I have yet to appreciate but then I’m not quite forty. Disappointingly, in the modern airline industry paranoia trumps luxury and although forks and spoons were silverware, my knife was plastic. It was the runt of my flatware litter. Despite the obvious attention to detail, certain parts of the service still had that slightly chilled feel as if it had been sitting in carts in the cold store waiting for the aircraft. It’s a bizarre tactile thing, your fork is a little colder than forks normally are or the body of the glass has a chill that is leaching its way into the red wine. I don’t mean to grumble though.
I watched a movie – you get nicer headphones in business class too. I went to bed – but not before I brushed my teeth, indicating to my stewardess, in a non-verbal and subtle manner that befits my class, that I wish my bed to be made. Upon my fresh mouthed return I discovered that either my subtlety was missed or my fraudulent pretense at being upper class was discovered because my bed was still a seat and my linens nowhere to be seen. I had to do the walk of shame past the few rows of economy class to find my stewardess and ask for my bed to be created. Very humiliating. I then went to sleep, which I did until sort of didn’t, then couldn’t, then could until I shouldn’t in case I missed the gastro thrill of business class breakfast. The bed serves as a metaphor for flying business class in general: despite the linens and mini duvet thing, you’re still only lying on a stiff aircraft seat.
Back to basic math:
10,000km / $10,000 = pretty spendy.
The Queen Mary II is substantially cheaper and you get six days of business class. However, flying business does take up one whole row of seats and it is about 3 times the price of a regular, full price economy ticket. I would never spend $10K of my own money so I’m not sure how my unethical brain won out over the normally incorruptible dominant side. But if the inventory of my life’s moral dilemmas contains only the distant feeling of guilt from spending $10,000 of my employers’ billion dollar revenues then I would have cause to celebrate upon my expiration. (Those keen observers of human psychology will have just noted my ham-fisted justification of this morally dubious act as just a mere delay tactic in the hope it will probably all come out in the wash at the moment when I am actually forced to reconcile my life’s actions)
Assessing the merits of such an excessive travel experience is an interesting mathematical equation that probably looks a little like this:
Ticket $ * need / entitlement * (sense there of)
—————————————————————– * angle of seat recline
wine * chanpagne / (orange juice – from concentrate)
Here some more complex math, a formula that even our best mathematicians can’t solve:
life = 1