The Definite Article

I'm sitting in the NEC Arena train station in Birmingham. Birmingham has the distinction of being one of my least favourite cities, on an even par with Croy (Scotland), Rotterdam (Netherlands) and Cleveland (USA).

I hope the suburbs are nice. Cleveland has suburbs; my parents live in Mentor, and there are parts of Mentor that nearly have the charm of Milton Keynes.

I'm flying to Birmingham for work - not to go to Birmingham, per se, but to Abingdon.

But it is neither the ultimate nor the proximate destination that holds my interest right now. Instead, it is the dynamics of interpersonal interaction on flights, plus the environment - the tree hugging kind of environment.

The man in the seat adjacent to me was Jonathan Tomlin, the UK Sales Manager for the Vitasheet Group, a subsidiary of British Vita, a plastics manufacturer. His business card is clear, flexible plastic and looks cool. But even cooler than the card was a particular product which he wants to sell - no to me, obviously; I felt as though he genuinely believes in what he is selling and that he practices his pitch on his fellow travellers. Admittedly, the information was solicited. We sat in silence for the first twenty minutes of the flight, which was my fault. I had whipped out my trusty PowerBook and was busily preparing for the meeting to which I was headed.

But when the airline attendent proffered a chicken sandwich and an enormous cup of tea, I accepted, shut my laptop and hunkered down for a conversation.

The pitch that he was practicing was properly cool. A plastics company in
the States, NatureWorks, has developed a new type of plastic-like substance, called
PLA. PLA is biodegradable - seriously, properly biodegradable. It's
basically extruded corn starch. In a landfill, it will turn back into
corn starch. I have some additional questions about it - energy
intensity of production, conditions under which it biodegrades, cost - but it internalises the pollution
externality. Marks & Spencers' clingfilm wrap on all of their food
packaging is now PLA. It costs somewhere between 30 - 40% more than its
ABS counterparts. Is it worth it to increase our packaging costs by 30%
to replace plastic in our landfills in the future with corn starch? My
gut tells me it is, but it will obviously take further investigation to
either validate or repudiate that intuition.

It made me excited because this is exactly the sort of thing that we need to be investigating if we hope to stave off dying in our own waste until a future generation.

The conversation was bijou, compact, it lasted no longer than the 45 minutes that comprised the second two thirds of the flight to Birmingham. A single serving friend, as Tyler Durden might have said. Like most frequent flyers, I have a lot of these conversations.

Some of you fly more than I do (I'm thinking particularly of B.J. here), but I suspect I'm in the top end of the flyer market. I've flown more than 50,000 miles this year.  Tyler Durden was right about single serving, fast food friends; every time I fly, I meet someone new. Sometimes, these conversations are really, really cool - I once had a conversation with the best quilter in the world. I thought she was self-proclaimed and, er, a bit eccentric until she produced a quilting magazine, with her on the cover. "Barbara Barber, UK's Champion Quilter" went the headline. In fact, she was into some kind of international competitive quilting scene and had just been visiting Lancaster, PA and Atlanta to research how certain American communities make their quilts so she could make hers more authentic. She really loves her dogs. Another time it was John, a fellow who had started his own company from his PhD thesis, making printed circuit boards, only using electrostatic printing instead of photo-lithography. He was 26. This time, it was Jonathan Tomlin, plastic salesman to Europe.

You can tell a lot about a person from their opening moves in the airline conversation pre-packaged friend category. Barabara Barber's was to talk about her daughter, who "must be about your age!" (her daughter was 23; just for the record, I'm nearer to 43 than 23). John said "Thank God! Someone with a lighter!" (we met just outside the lounge at Ciampino - which was oddly devoid of smokers). Jonathan Tomlin's opening moves were a polite silence.

It was up to me to open. My opening was "Why are you headed to Birmingham?" It's easier than "What do you do?" I get "What do you do?" a lot. The problem with this is that, while I love my job, my title is long without being descriptive and there's basically no way to sex up the fact that what I do is IT support for a massive multinational. Jonathan was vague in his reply and it was with a bit of pressing that I found out he sold plastics. I was so relieved. If there's anyone who can relate to loving a job that makes other people bored, it's a plastic salesman.

As a side note, by the time I was done reading this, I was on the train to Oxford - and the countryside around Oxford is absolutely stunning, a vast improvement over Birmingham.