Where do they go?

We've all heard them - announcements at airports calling for 'passenger Smith travelling on flight 827 to kalamazoo, your flight is ready for departure. Please go to gate 27 immediately!'

Where did he go?

After packing carefully and rising early to make the trek to the airport, after enduring considerable inconvenience at the checkin desk and after being de-belted and de-shoed by the TSA, they just, what, forgot that they were travelling? Got absorbed in a magazine? Fell down drunk in a bar?

It just seems terribly odd that people simply disappear from the airport. Maybe passenger Smith was a spy and has killed someone silently in a bathroom stall, taken his passport, changed his appearance and slipped undetected on a flight to Beijing. Or maybe Smith is an international criminal who was apprehended, quietly so as to not cause a stir among the other travellers, as he waited, shifting uncomfortably on the hard plastic chairs. For him, the loving arms of the American penal system might just be welcome relief after the rigors of air travel.

Or maybe, just maybe, passenger smith is simply one of those unfathomably stupid people which exist everywhere, but seem to be especially plentiful in the airports of America. They all come from the same mould, these sloppy-dressing, Nintendo-playing, ringtone-flaunting, loud-farting, cellphone-talking representatives of the United States. With emissaries like these, it's little wonder that much of the world dislikes Americans. I would too if they were the only ones I'd met.

So long, passenger Smith, your flight has departed without you. And the world is slightly better off for your staying.