The Man in the Charcoal Suit and Other Lessons in Futility

By the time the gate agent announced that Japan Airlines Flight 67 would begin boarding in thirty minutes, Gate B17 had already metastasized into a fully operational economic hierarchy—status jockeying, strategic pre-positioning, and passive-aggressive body language—a level of strategic maneuvering normally reserved for hedge fund arbitrage or nuclear détente. A businessman in a charcoal suit with exactly seven visible wrinkles had planted himself directly in front of the priority lane—I counted the wrinkles[1] during what I told myself was a casual glance but was more of a prolonged anthropological study disguised as disinterest—despite holding a Group 4 ticket. The ticket hung from his laptop bag like a promise he had no intention of keeping. The gate agent announced pre-boarding for passengers needing special assistance, and suddenly forty previously ambulatory individuals discovered urgent medical conditions requiring immediate accommodation. A woman clutching a designer handbag—a brand name composed entirely of interlocked letters, as though she had outsourced her personal identity to an encryption algorithm—pushed forward, arguing with the conviction of a graduate student defending their dissertation that her anxiety over overhead bin space constituted an ADA-compliant medical condition.

The mass of humanity shifted, adjusted, recalibrated itself with a logic both inscrutable and painfully predictable. Groups 1 and 2 formed a protective phalanx around their elite boarding privileges, while the rest of us engaged in the intricate, unconscious choreography of pretending not to care—while very much caring. A phenomenon my friend Sarah would later categorize in her dissertation as "performative nonchalance in hierarchical queuing systems"[2]—a paradox so absurd it deserved its own philosophical treatise, if I had the time to write one, which I didn’t, because I was too busy subtly angling for position while maintaining the illusion of total indifference.

A child wandered through the crowd asking, "Why is everyone was standing if the plane won't leave for thirty minutes?" with the kind of crystalline logic adults spend years learning to ignore. His mother responded with that particular tone of voice parents reserve for questions that are simultaneously innocent and impossible to answer without confronting fundamental truths about yourself that we'd all rather ignore. The child, undeterred by what I recognized as the exact tone my mother had used when I asked her, at age seven, why we couldn't just solve traffic by having everyone leave at different times^[3], continued his anthropological survey of adult irrationality with the persistence of a grad student approaching thesis deadline.

My mind drifted to a conversation with my old high school calculus teacher, Ms. Krishnamurthy, who possessed the uncanny ability to dispense life-altering wisdom while simultaneously solving differential equations on the board, her dry-erase strokes producing a sound exactly matching the frequency of revelation. "Mathematics isn't about finding perfect solutions," she'd tell me, adjusting her perpetually crooked glasses with hands permanently stained with dry marker dust and philosophical insight — hands that had once drafted a doctoral thesis called Exotic 4-Manifolds and the Enigma of Smooth Structures before she decided, in what she called her moment of perfect clarity^[4], teenagers needed her more than academic journals did. "It's about recognizing when an approximation is good enough to solve the real problem." As Group 3 was called and the businessman in the charcoal suit pretended to hear his group number, I realized her wisdom extended far beyond the limits, both numerical and human.

The gate agent, who wore a name tag reading "Patricia," managed the growing chaos with the practiced calm of someone who understood that disorder contains its own hidden patterns. Each polite but firm rejection of early boarding attempts represented not a victory but the prevention of a cascade effect — a technique she had refined through years of what she called "strategic pleasantness"^[5] — the maintenance of order in a system perpetually teetering on the edge of collapse. She embodied what Ms. Krishnamurthy would have called an "elegant solution": minimum effort producing maximum effect, like factoring a seemingly intractable equation into its simplest form.

Consider the hyperoptimizers who attempt to calculate every variable in their daily existence. They develop elaborate models for efficiency, apply complex decision trees to routine choices — a tendency I recognize intimately⁶ — and treat every interaction as a problem demanding a perfect solution. Yet they'll often achieve results indistinguishable from those who simply maintain reasonable approximations and avoid catastrophic errors. One approach treats life as a series of equations demanding exact solutions; the other recognizes that most real-world problems, much like the partial derivatives that haunted my undergraduate years⁷, are solved through successive approximations.

I watched a young academic (canvas laptop bag, conference lanyard still hanging from the side pocket, an expression suggesting recent confrontation with peer review) attempt to optimize his boarding position through a series of subtle movements. Each microadjustment calculated to gain approximately 1.7 inches of advantage over his fellow passengers—a measurement I made using the width of a standard boarding pass as a reference unit⁸, a fact I include here only to acknowledge the depths of my own observational compulsions. His elaborate dance contrasted sharply with the elderly woman beside him, who simply stood in her assigned group's vicinity, reading a well-worn paperback and advancing naturally as the line progressed.

The business traveler in the wrinkled suit had now shifted his strategy, engaging in what anthropologists might term "protective mimicry" — attempting to blend in with legitimate Group 2 passengers through careful imitation of their postures and periodic glances at smartphones. The gate agent's smile maintained its precise calibration of professional warmth tinged with infinite patience, though I noticed her right hand tapping out a rhythm on her desk that, having spent a summer learning Morse code for reasons that seemed entirely logical at the time⁹, I was relatively confident spelled out something unprintable.

What my high school calculus teacher understood — and what I was finally beginning to grasp while watching this elaborate human equation solve itself at Gate B17 — was that perfection is often the enemy of progress. Just as a mathematical proof doesn't need to be elegant to be correct, and a solution doesn't need to be perfect to be useful, success in life rarely requires optimal execution — a principle my graduate advisor tried to instill through his favorite phrase: "Perfect is the enemy of published"¹⁰. He had this printed on coffee mugs, though most of them ended up broken in what he insisted was an intentional demonstration of the principle.

I settled into my seat (14C, an objectively mediocre location I had long ago stopped trying to improve), extracted my own well-worn paperback, and contemplated Ms. Krishnamurthy's hidden genius. Maybe she was right. Maybe most of us are just approximating, bluffing competence, running recursive efficiency loops until someone tells us to stop. The businessman had optimized himself 47 seconds¹¹ ahead of me. The young academic had won himself 1.7 inches. The child had asked the only question worth asking. And the woman reading her paperback?

She was the only one not keeping score.

1. My compulsive counting habit, which began during graduate school when I still believed that enough careful observation could explain anything, has evolved into something between a diagnostic tool and a nervous tic. Now I count everything in airports: ceiling tiles, fellow passengers, abandoned newspapers, minutes until boarding, minutes after scheduled boarding, and the number of times the gate agent's smile becomes incrementally more strained. ↩︎
2. She ended up getting funding by carefully avoiding the phrases "people watching" and "airport anthropology" in favor of more academically palatable terminology like "emergent behavioral patterns in constrained social environments." ↩︎
3. A question whose full implications I wouldn't appreciate until graduate school, when I spent three weeks developing an algorithm to optimize my morning commute, only to discover that the time saved was less than the time spent calculating how to save it. ↩︎
4. "Teenagers are just like puzzles," she once explained, "they seem impossibly complex until you find the right way to look at them. Academic papers just sit there being wrong in increasingly sophisticated ways." ↩︎
5. A methodology she had actually quantified, having compiled Excel spreadsheets tracking relative effectiveness of various customer service expressions using a 10-point Likert scale. “Firm but warm” consistently outperformed both “excessively cheerful” (too suspicious, rated 4.2 on average) and “professionally distant” (overcorrects into quiet hostility, 3.7), with the rare but deadly “faintly condescending” scoring a catastrophic 2.1. ↩︎
6. Having once spent three weeks developing an algorithm to optimize my morning coffee routine, only to discover that the time saved was less than the time spent calculating how to save it. ↩
7. Our calculus study group had a running joke about approximation errors that absolutely killed in Room 2718 of the mathematics building but, mysteriously, seemed to diverge everywhere else on campus.↩
8. A measuring technique developed during a session on standardization in academic publishing, which is exactly as riveting as it sounds. That I recall this more vividly than the actual content of the session tells you everything you need to know about my academic trajectory. ↩
9. The Morse code phase coincided with a brief but intense effort to improve interdepartmental communication—i.e., make people answer their emails faster—until I realized that the problem wasn't technological but human, and no amount of dot-dash-dot was going to fix that. ↩
10. The same advisor who once returned a draft of my thesis with a note reading "Less precision, more decision" — a phrase whose zen-like wisdom I initially mistook for a coffee-induced hallucination. ↩
11. A phase that ended only when a friend pointed out that timing how long it took to time things was perhaps a sign that I had strayed into what she diplomatically called "recursive efficiency territory." ↩