The Price of Team Spirit

I was heading home after a week working with the Oracle team in Israel. The flight was completely packed, but against all odds, I seemed to have scored the holy grail: an entire row to myself. I had my aisle seat, the middle was vacant, and the window was empty. It’s only a five-hour hop, but the prospect of stretching out horizontally rather than nodding off upright felt like winning the economy-class lottery.

Then came the heartbreak.

British Airways was literally seconds away from closing the cabin doors when a bloke hurried down the aisle. Unfortunately for me, his boarding pass pointed directly at the window seat in my row. Exit sleep plan; enter reality.

He slumped down looking utterly miserable, so I decided to break the ice. It turned out he worked for a Tel Aviv software outfit and did the commute out there for a week each month. That particular week, management had decided on a bit of unconventional team bonding: an afternoon at a local firing range.

If you’ve never flown out of Ben Gurion, their airport security doesn't mess about, it is, without exaggeration, the tightest in the world. When they swabbed his hands at security, the sensors lit up like a Christmas tree for cordite residue.

His feet barely touched the deck before he was whisked away into an interrogation room. Naturally, his casual “it was just corporate shooting away day” explanation went down like a lead balloon. While someone went off to verify his credentials with his employer, he was subjected to the full works: a complete strip search, thorough inspections of every conceivable bodily orifice, and luggage that was practically taken apart seam by seam. By the time they cleared him, he had missed his flight and spent the night in detention.

Once he finished the tale, I shut my mouth and left him in peace. Losing my lie-flat row had felt like a minor tragedy ten minutes earlier, but watching a broken man reprocess the most invasive twenty-four hours of his life put things sharply into perspective. Some corporate bonding exercises just end up costing far more than an afternoon out of the office.

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