Babel

A symbol of chaos, decline, and the inability to communicate.

19 May – Frankfurt Airport. Arrival from Argentina to Europe

"Sie sind in EUROPA, hier spricht man Deutsch oder Englisch." 

A middle-aged airport employee at Frankfurt Airport informs an elderly gentleman with a walking stick (let's call him José) in a raised and rather unfriendly voice that he is in Europe and that people here speak German or English.

José and his wife have just disembarked from our flight from Buenos Aires. Like me, they are waiting near the exit for the assistance service they booked in advance.

¡Bienvenidos!  Welcome to the European Union.

José had politely asked when an assistant would come to collect them. They are in a hurry because they have a connecting flight to Italy. The problem is that he has no idea what the employee is saying, so he turns to me and asks the same question—in Spanish, of course.

Fortunately, I manage to explain, with a mixture of gestures and improvised language skills, what is going on: the lady does not speak Spanish and we will have to find another way to communicate. At the same time, I inform the employee that the passenger is waiting for assistance and that, apart from Spanish, he only speaks Italian.

After a while, I realize why she is so irritated.

Frankfurt Airport is in chaos.  The few employees currently on duty simply cannot keep up.

Frankfurt Airport is one of the largest in Europe, but the famous German Pünktlichkeit and customer service are no longer what they used to be.

We transfer here fairly often, so I know that the enormous terminals, passport controls, and security checks can swallow up a huge amount of time. And the staff are not exactly known for their friendliness.

After knee surgery, I now book assistance whenever I have a long-haul flight with a connection. Without it, I would often miss my connecting flight to Vienna. The endless corridors between terminals are not exactly ideal for a recently operated knee.

On top of that, security screening always singles me out. My artificial knee reliably sets off the metal detector every single time. Even when I warn them in advance that I have a knee replacement, I am subjected to several minutes of additional screening with a special scanner.

Sometimes I get the feeling they are looking for a power socket inside my knee.

Today we are making part of the transfer together with the Argentine couple. We need to get to the European terminal. What we don't know yet is that this journey will require no fewer than three different assistance teams. For now, we are still waiting for the first one.

Meanwhile, I am polishing my Spanish.

After a very long wait, Assistant No. 1 finally arrives. He is clearly in a hurry and not particularly cheerful. After a few minutes of driving us around, he leaves us in front of an elevator and informs us that someone else will come to pick us up.

We have a three-hour connection.  José has only two.

So we wait another twenty minutes.

At this point, we are no longer allowed to continue on our own because, once assistance has taken charge of us, Lufthansa becomes responsible for our movements.

The Argentine lady (let's call her Dolores) needs to use the restroom.

I switch into multitasking mode.

I advise her to hold on a little longer. Using a translation app, I translate conditional sentences and future tenses into Spanish while simultaneously planning how I am going to improve my Spanish in the future. Frankly, if I could at least master the present tense, that would already be a success.

I explain to Dolores that she might get lost or miss the assistant who is supposed to pick us up.

Bravely, Dolores holds out until the assistance arrives.

Eventually, not one but two people appear: Assistant No. 2a, a woman, and Assistant No. 2b, a man who speaks very broken German.

We enter the elevator. Assistant 2a is visibly nervous. Assistant 2b remains completely calm. With a smile, he reassures her in his simple German that it is a beautiful day and that everything will work out in the end.

I ask him in English where he comes from.  "From Iran," he replies—in flawless English.

We take the elevator down, travel through several corridors, and around the next corner awaits every airline passenger's favourite attraction:  passport control and security screening.

Please Meet:  THE SYSTEM

One of the few advantages of travelling with assistance is that we can bypass the endless passport-control queue. The assistants use a special entrance reserved for passengers with reduced mobility—or, politically incorrectly speaking, cripples—and flight crews.

And it is right here that I begin to understand why everyone working at the airport seems to be on the verge of exhaustion.As of mid-April 2026, a new European Union regulation has come into force: the EES (Entry/Exit System).

Every traveller must go through a new registration process. Everyone must be entered into THE SYSTEM. Fingerprints, photographs, document checks.

As a result, every traveller now spends significantly more time at passport control than before. It doesn't help if you're an EU citizen carrying a biometric passport. You no longer get a stamp in your passport, either.  

Everything is quietly recorded in THE SYSTEM.

Thanks to our assistance service, we pass through passport control fairly quickly. There, yet another assistance team takes over—Assistants 3a and 3b.  I begin to feel like an Olympic relay baton, except that every handover involves waiting. So speed is clearly not the objective.

Our paths separate here.  We head for the business lounge while saying goodbye to José and Dolores. Or were they Giuseppe and Giulia?

Hopefully they made their flight to Milan.

The Lufthansa Business Lounge is packed.  Finding an empty seat resembles a small-scale logistical operation. They don't have anyone with the job title Seat Seeker, which I once encountered in Breckenridge, Colorado, where a restaurant halfway up a ski slope employed a person whose sole task was finding a free seat for arriving skiers.

But an even greater surprise awaits me in the ladies' restroom. I look in vain for a waste bin. Nothing. No container for sanitary products anywhere.  Just to be sure, I check whether I have accidentally wandered into a gender-neutral restroom. I haven't.  Which makes the used-needle disposal box proudly displayed on one of the sinks in the corner stand out even more.

A PROBLEM.

We complete the final stretch to our Vienna flight without assistance.

From the business lounge to the gate is roughly a kilometre of brisk walking, so I decide that today's knee rehabilitation session will be thorough.

We arrive among the first passengers.

Since we are flying Business Class, we are entitled to priority boarding.

I hand over my boarding pass and my Dutch biometric passport, barely a year old.

The employee scans it and, after a moment, says:  "One moment, please. We have a problem."

The same thing happens to Paul.

Our documents are handed over to a colleague, who begins dealing with something on his computer.

The minutes pass.  Passengers continue boarding.  The aircraft gradually fills up.   At regular intervals I ask what the problem is. Nobody provides a clear answer.  Eventually, we board last.

The only explanation we receive is that incorrect information had been entered into THE SYSTEM and everything had to be checked and corrected.   How that happened remains a mystery.  Perhaps someone made an error while entering data during passport control.

Once again, however, I find myself worrying about digitalisation, centralised databases, and interconnected systems. We entrust more and more aspects of our lives to databases, algorithms, applications and systems over which we have no control.

As long as everything works, it is fast and convenient. But when someone enters incorrect information—or makes a mistake, deliberately or otherwise—a person can become a PROBLEM within seconds. And then THE SYSTEM decides what happens further. 

The question keeps echoing in my head:

WHO  CONTROLS  THE  SYSTEM ?

I am reminded of The Net (1995), starring Sandra Bullock.

The film tells the story of a woman whose digital identity is altered by someone else, forcing her to prove who she really is.

Back then it was a technological thriller.

Today, it feels increasingly like reality.

P.S.

And for those wondering where Paul was during all of this:

Right beside me the whole time.