On the tip of almost everyone’s tongue is the state of airline travel in the new millennium. Complaints range from too many people to too few flights, canceled flights to delayed flights, poor food to every conceivable problem known to man.

Travelers of today seem to revel in making the airlines the scapegoats of all these problems. Perhaps it is time to take the focus off the airlines and shift our gaze to the customers the airlines are forced to service.

Let’s look at a hypothetical scenario.

Summer has begun. You’ve packed your bags and you are definitely in need of a carefree and restful - yet exciting - time away from the grind of work or school. You climb in the car and head for the airport to claim your seat on the tour bus of the sky to the destination of your choice. You have a ticket and an assigned seat, so what can go wrong?

You arrive at the airport and find the crowds in the terminal have increased to bursting. But these airports are not filled with the sophisticated travelers of the past. Today you notice they are filled with the riffraff of this new millennium.

They are people barely removed from their ancestors who started walking on two legs. They have no sense of how to function in society. They only know how to charge those airline tickets on credit cards that will be maxed out before the vacation ends.

Forging through these characters, you manage to get into a long, long line behind other happy flyers who really wish they could move over to the first-class line, which never seems to have anyone waiting. But that is one of the givens of the modern world.

“You stay in the line assigned or that guard with the tricky finger will escort you out into the