Phone calls in transit

While spending many hours in lounges and transit on our recent trip I noticed that a lot of people use their mobile phones during this time. I had to wonder what calls they were making – I mean they’re out of their home country for the most part.

• Were they ringing everyone they knew in the country of transit? Like Hong Kong for example – there’s no transitting to other flights in Hong Kong so it’s not as though they were ringing their families or work locally to tell them they were on their way home or into the office. So were they calling the cousin they had in that country in the hope of only having to pay for a local call, or using their time in transit as an excuse to call after all this time?


• Is everyone that uses a lounge on a long haul flight so integral to their work that they have to be on the phone with colleagues/customers/bosses the whole time?


• Was everyone on a business trip so they were on work time, with work paying for their access to the lounge and their phone calls, so it made no difference which country or airport they were sitting in?


• Some of the people that seemed to be making business calls also seemed to be the type of people that equate business travel with importance of standing in their company and were perhaps making random calls because having to make calls in transit is also an indication of being very busy and important.


• Were they bored, checking their voice mail, listening to music from their phone, recording notes for themselves about something?