Cargo Gets Priority? Fine. Enjoy Your Luggage-Free Vacation.

They told us, flat and spreadsheet-like: “Cargo gets priority.” I obeyed with the kind of religious literalism usually reserved for tutorial bosses and software license agreements.

Regional airport in Europe, chronic staff shortage—so critical that management’s contingency plan read like a morality play written by an Excel cell. There were two choices: triage people or triage pallets. The pallet had a sticker that said PRIORITY. The spreadsheet had bold text. My job is simple compliance, not creative reinterpretation.

So I prioritized the pallet. Gate agents watched as a perfectly coiffed manifest elbowed past the boarding queue. Someone in the thread helpfully told me: “You should probably be working and not typing on your phone. You are the reason why people are delayed.” Fair. I was working. You couldn’t see the irony through the barcode scanner.

Call it malicious compliance, call it managerial triage—this is root cause analysis irl: when an order is grammatically unambiguous and morally ambiguous, the ramp agent picks grammar. Patch notes: prioritized cargo, delayed humans, working as intended.