Sign of the times

I watched the Ryanair documentary last night, not least because I take their flights to and from Zaragoza: therefore I want to know everything about them that I really didn't want to know. What I got was what I expected to get: basic safety and security checks neglected, basic training skimped and bypassed, in general everything done in the shoddiest of fashions by undertrained and underinterested staff because there was no time and no encouragement to do it any other way.

I've taken, occasionally, over the past few years, to watching television with the subtitles on, partly in case the phone rings and I need to turn the volume off, partly because I have convinced myself that now I'm in my forties, my hearing is falling apart like a secondhand plane from Aeroflot.

I needn't have bothered: I could barely make out what the subtitles were saying. Not because of my (no doubt) failing eyesight but because spellings were wrong, incorrect words provided, sentences produced that neither followed the rules of grammar nor made linguistic sense. In short, everything about them suggested that subtitles were produced in the shoddiest of fashions by undertrained and underinterested staff because there was no time and no encouragement to do it any other way.