Whilst standing in what seemed to be a neverending queue at Schiphol Airport on my way back from a weekend trip I couldn't help but notice that the information encoding process of the young male species is becoming less and less effective. On numerous occasions, a woman regulating the security check desk had meandered up and down the queue informing bored travellers, relatively loudly and clearly, that anything metal should be removed from their person and passed through the X-ray machine in order to 'speed up' the process. For the most part, people complied. An exception to this, however, was a group of three rather obnoxious Aberdonion male tourists still high from a weekend of legal skunk consumption. I was unfortunate enough to be directly behind them, and just as the end was in sight, the final member of said group attempted to pass through the detector mid-way through sending a text. Evidently, the machine went off, and he was asked to place his mobile in a little black box for X-raying. He walked through and again set off the beeper. Returning yet again, he removed a belt heavily laden with metal. This process was repeated until a set of keys, a pile of coins, shoes with metal clips, a watch, an awful necklace referred to often as 'bling', and an I-pod had all been individually removed and passed through the X-ray machine. The security woman may as well have been instructing in Swahili. The stoned Aberdonian found the entire process highly amusing.

After fifteen minutes of unneccesary extra waiting, I was finally inside the boarding gate, where an instruction came over the tannoy for all passengers requiring assistance and passengers with small children to come forward for boarding. The same group of youths proceeded to vacate their seats and head towards the door to board. Either they were hallucinating the presence of a small child within their number, or they were surprisingly intelligent enough to recognise that they required assistance. Unfortunately for the rest of their flight companions, mental assistance is not exactly the speciality of Schiphol Airport employees. The flight attendants deserve a payrise for handling passengers - and sure enough, on take off, one of the same group decided to stand up and attempt to locate somthing from his back pack as the front wheel of the plane lifted off the ground. I will give them the benefit of the doubt and put it down to the hash. But that is being very generous...