You are not promoted to Supervisor by Accident
Airports are peculiar places. To most travellers they begin at the check-in counter and end somewhere near the baggage carousel, a sequence of queues connected by duty-free shops and departure boards. Behind the scenes, however, exists another airport entirely, one whose geography is measured not in terminals but in service roads, fuel depots, maintenance hangars and the endless choreography required to persuade several hundred tonnes of aluminium to leave the ground on schedule.
Passengers seldom notice this second airport and it is much better this way for normal travelers.
But this is the realm of Mr. Gutang, a world than only a few are choosen to know about.
He began his career at this World loading baggage. It was hard work, repetitive enough to teach patience and unpredictable enough to discourage complacency. Aircraft arrived late, containers refused to cooperate, tropical storms ignored timetables and someone, somewhere, had inevitably forgotten to load something indispensable five minutes before departure. There are professions in which experience is accumulated quietly; ground operations is one of them.
Promotions came without ceremony, but when Gutang’s arrived, it was much more involved. Even the best ground force teams are unable to guarantee 100% reliability. Some things are lost, some forever. However, when the lost item is so important that the top authorities of airport operations nationwide pick up the phone and return to the office during the weekend, it’s more than just a statistical failure.
And there we had Gutang, who was the only one who knew in first person about the deep network of belts and paths that lay inside a second-tier airport. While the senior staff were discussing how to deal with the catastrophe, the young Gutang made some calls, put on his work gloves, and went into the maze to retrieve the lost piece of luggage that someone in Zurich was eager to see again.
One day Mr. Gutang found himself responsible not merely for moving luggage but for ensuring that everyone else moved it correctly. He accepted the additional responsibility with characteristic pragmatism, though colleagues soon observed that becoming a supervisor had done little to improve either his vocabulary or his temper.
He remained an orangutan of strong opinions.
Fortunately, they were usually correct.
Heavy Machinery and Other Natural Talents
Nobody remembers the first machine Mr. Gutang ever drove.
The archival record is inconclusive, although the earliest surviving footage already shows him displaying a suspicious degree of confidence behind the controls of a large plastic dumper truck. Historians may continue debating the chronology; Mr. Gutang himself has never considered the matter worthy of discussion.
Machines, in any case, have always trusted him.
Forklifts, belt loaders, baggage tractors, container transporters, pushback tugs, cargo lifts—if it possessed wheels, tracks or an engine, he would eventually persuade it to cooperate. There are people who read books with instinctive fluency; Mr. Gutang appears to possess the same relationship with mechanical equipment.
Whether the manufacturers would recognise his certification remains an altogether different question.
It became something of an accepted truth that, whenever a piece of equipment refused to behave, somebody would eventually suggest asking Gutang to have a look. More often than not, the machine resumed working shortly afterwards. Explanations varied. Some cited technical ability. Others preferred to believe that machinery, much like wildlife, responds favourably to confidence.
Mr. Gutang encouraged both theories.