How unpleasant is checking in? Nobody wants to do it. Sometimes checking in can be more painful of a process than at other times. Watching people check-in to Spirit Airlines is a funny experience for the observer, but an unpleasant experience for the person doing it. You come in with your luggage and know that you will be paying some fees to have it, and then you read a little sign that says you have only 40 pounds instead of 50 pounds allowed in your luggage. Then you panic, realizing that your suitcase has 48 pounds in it, and now you have to put 8 pounds into something else, all while you are sitting in front of a line of people all waiting to check-in to their own flights, or perhaps the same one. If you are unable to transfer enough weight, you are then charged a substantial fee. Under such circumstances, it can be easily understandable why checking in for this airline in particular would be such an unpleasant experience, but this sort of problem with checking in is far from unique.

One of the funniest forms of checking in, at least for me, involves the gangs of the United States. By and large, there is an expectation that people involved in gangs will “check-in” with their local counterparts in areas that they are traveling in so that they can remain relatively safe and secure. This is designed to show a respect for local criminal institutions and their operations and to avoid unnecessary conflicts between those who are in different gang organizations. The issue is that while checking in with the local thug community sounds straightforward enough, many people do not like to check-in, because doing so infers that one cannot simply go where one pleases and that some other particular gang “owns” the territory in question. This can be galling whether one is checking in at another region in the same area or is checking in while traveling longer distances, perhaps to tour around the country. As a result, there are a lot of jokes about who has to check in with who and the process as a whole is recognized to be a problem.

Yesterday, as I write this, I was able to listen to part of a humorous conversation that was going on between a widow a friend of mine and I were visiting in a remote part of our congregation’s area after having dropped off a couple of campers and her sixty-five year old widowed daughter. The daughter, although herself a senior citizen, still had felt pressured to check in with her mother because of the threat of coming home to have the doors locked and bolted on her and having to enter the home through more drastic means. Listening to the story made me laugh because it’s quite entertaining to me how elderly people like those around them to check in with them even if they are not always forthcoming about where they are going and what they are up to. Obviously they think they are adults and don’t have to check in with everyone, but the people they want to check in with them feel the same way, and it seems like an unnecessary sort of conflict. Late-arriving people will lock up things after them, and if someone is old enough to take care of themselves then they will lock up when they get home from late night visits or concerts or whatever the case may be.

What all of these different types of checking-in that are less than enjoyable and frequently evaded suggest is that there is a genuine problem that people have with humbling themselves in order to inform and communicate with others what they are doing even if no permission is needed. Even to open oneself up to potential criticism for one’s choices of how to spend one’s time is viewed as sufficiently intolerable to want to avoid the experience as much as possible. We see the same thing when it comes to the lack of interest in early registration and seeking approval for people to travel to various Feast sites in my own church tradition. Unless people find a way to make checking in seem less like an embarrassing sort of explanation-giving process, it seems like we will continue to see people trying to avoid and evade the process as much as possible. At least airlines frequently allow check-in to be done online these days, making the process at least somewhat less humiliating in nature. One wonders if other situations could be similarly dealt with.