Do you board your flight before your zone is called? New tech is poised to rat you out

In these divided times, there is one thing we can all agree upon.
Rule breakers are annoying. I’m not talking about major infractions such as murder, grand theft auto or idolizing Elon Musk. It’s the smaller infractions. The grocery shopper sneaking a ninth item into the 1-8 Express Lane. The able-bodied driver using an accessible parking spot. The TTC rider who does not use earbuds while blasting Jelly Roll.
This brings us to “gate-lice,” a term I never heard of until this week.
Gate-lice is what airline employers call impatient flyers who do not wait until their zone is announced. Nope. As soon as boarding begins, gate-lice rush the gate to jump ahead of the elderly and moms with frazzled toddlers.
Gate-lice read the Zone D on their boarding pass as Zone Whatever.
According to reports this week, American Airlines has become the first carrier in the world to roll out a new technology targeting gate-lice. If a too-early boarder shows their pass, a scanner emits a noise and flashes a message to the gate agent.
All that’s missing is a mandatory dunce cap the gate-lice must wear until landing.
This is Big Tech as Big Shamer — and it’s delightful.
Now, in the shambolic bedlam that is commercial air travel, gate-lice may not seem like a big deal. That makes them even more annoying. I’d prefer if all airline R&D went toward safety to ensure a door never spirals off at 30,000 feet.
But if we can safely make it from YYZ to LAS without severe turbulence, by all means, exterminate the gate-lice. This is about re-engineering etiquette and the honour system that was once the glue in polite society. Why should this scowling fool in his Ralph Lauren button-down be allowed to jump the queue and fill my overhead bin with his oversized carry-on just because he didn’t want to check a bag?
Wait in line like the rest of us, Ralph Lauren. Follow the rules.
We need more of this surveillance tech at ground level. My blood pressure spikes when I’m in bumper-to-bumper traffic and a driver with no other passengers zooms past in the carpool lane. We need cameras with facial detection between every traffic light to catch these cheaters. Or AI police guns that hover up from bushes and shoot electromagnetic waves that disable the engines of all carpool delinquents.
Looks like you didn’t save 10 minutes. Looks like you better call CAA.
Kudos to American Airlines for doing its small part to restore rules. Although I don’t want to be too effusive in my praise just in case we eventually get to a point where a robot flight attendant points a Taser at any passenger asking for a blanket. Can you imagine being on a transatlantic flight and the new food service bird’s-eye monitor detects an anomaly: “Seat 23B ordered the meat loaf but changed his mind. Seat 23B is now eating the vegetarian entrée requested by Seat 14D. Put down all plastic forks until the situation is resolved.”
The key to rules is avoiding the ridiculous.
In another story this week, New Zealand’s Dunedin Airport erected a new sign in the drop-off zone: “Max hug time 3 minutes. For fonder farewells please use the car park.”
OK. Let’s say I go missing in the woods but manage to survive for years. Highly unlikely, but just go with it. Then one day I’m rescued. I return home with a three-foot beard and reeking of pine cones. My wife would be overjoyed. She’d hug me. But there’s no way she’d break the two-minute mark. Hugging is measured in seconds before it gets awkward.
So I don’t get this new rule. Are New Zealanders are a huggy people? Do they routinely sway in 10-minute embraces in the drop-off zone before jetting off to Singapore? And what happens if you hug for two minutes and 59 seconds, detach, then start a new hug?
Are their undercover hug cops with stop watches deputized to arrest lingering cuddlers?
Per CNN: “Dunedin Airport CEO Daniel De Bono weighed in on the topic in an interview with New Zealand’s RNZ radio. Describing airports as ‘hotbeds of emotion,’ he pointed to a study suggesting a 20-second hug is enough to get a burst of the ‘love hormone’ oxytocin and argued that moving customers along quickly allows more people to get more hugs.”
I’m not sure what the hypothalamus or pituitary gland has to do with orderly departures. But if hugging is creating a backlog, put up your weird sign. And if there is a way to scrub gate-lice from the collective scalp of bad behaviour, let the shame beeps thunder.
We wouldn’t need new tech if people followed the existing rules.