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This is the introduction to the book. It will give you a flavor of it.

Welcome aboard, ladies and gentlemen. This is Your Author scribbling. Prior to takeon, while you settle comfortably into your seats to laugh about flying, it is my duty to inform you that this book is about more than flying and therefore no laughing matter.

Contrary to the nasty rumors spread by people who have read this book carefully, my quarrel is not with the airlines and the airports. Some of my best friends spend time in them. I even have the faintest acquaintance of all kinds of nice people who work for them. No, my quarrel is with commercialism, this assumption that we must all be consumed by consumption.

I know we live in the third millennium. I know that everything is a product and everybody is a market. I know that human values must be reduced to Shareholder Value. But in hospitals? churches? gambling casinos? ping pong tournaments? When I discovered that this was happening in the skies too, so close to the heavens, that was it. I sought my revenge. You are holding it in your hands.

Another rumor, this one circulated by bookmakers and booksellers intent on feeding their children (lavishly), is that you are holding in your hands a book of humor. How can it be when here we have this book about Management, or at least about the consequences of Management? Management is a serious business. I know, because down on the ground I write serious books about Management. This book is more so because it flies straight through the abstractions into the everyday reality. It shows what my other books merely say: that while management may be fine, Management is the problem.

Now if you are a manager, you may have trouble understanding this book. No chapter begins: "Five easy steps to ..." So I have inserted beneath each chapter title a little cue card that explains its misty connection to Management. If this does not do it--if you insist on finding those easy steps - then may I suggest that you read everything in this book carefully and then do the opposite.

If you are a consumer, you might be tempted to laugh at what follows. Feel free - just so long as you don't do so at the expense of the airlines and airports. For this is not a book about what they do to us. It is a book about what we do to each other.

But please, laugh quietly. The person in the seat next to you is probably a manager, busy arranging your next purchase. Indeed, the person in your own seat may be a manager too, about to arrange my next purchase. But that is only fair, because the person in my seat has already managed to arrange your last purchase.

OK, now fasten your eyes and prepare for this flight of fancy. Bon voyage!

 "Undorsements" for Why I Hate Flying
    (pdf: 3 pages)

 Why I Hate Flying - Table Of Contents
    (pdf: 1 page)

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