The 15-Year Layover (2003) | Hacker News Reader

The 15-Year Layover (2003)

gq.com

57 pointskawera39 comments

This story just makes me feel sad, and pessimistic for humanity's future. The idea that it was "just okay" for a guy to live in an airport for over 15 years, and lose his freedom of movement and autonomy just because he didn't have papers proving he was born in a particular place... it's just profoundly sad.

It just reminds me of how incredibly petty, violent, and cruel humans are as a whole. We're all people, each deserving life and freedom, and our need to divide ourselves into different, antagonistic tribes is our greatest weakness. And if you can't prove that you're a member of a tribe, you're screwed.

It's one of the many symptoms of overpopulation.

It's also likely to only get worse especially with climate change and the massive population movements it'll cause. The Syrian civil war and resulting refugee crisis is arguably an early glimpse of this [1].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/03/science/earth/study-links...

While I don't have sources, I think it wasn't as simple as that. I've read that Alfred did have some chances to go outside, but he simply didn't take them.

All I'm saying is: from what I remember what I've read, it didn't seem to be the case that he was locked up. He kind of willingly let it happen. Whether that is actually true is another story as I can't remember the source where I read it from.

In any case, I do think there's more to this story than this submission is showing (after skimming through it).

According to Snopes [1], Belgium did eventually offer him residency — which he declined — after a ridiculous 7-year impasse where Belgium said he could only retrieve his lost refugee documents in person but France said he couldn’t leave the airport without said documents.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/stranded-at-the-airport/

That sounds very Kafkaesque :(

(I hope I'm using the word right, first time xD)

Took me a while to figure it out, but it appears every instance of the letters 'xe' has been removed. Anyone care to guess why?

a herd of red on (oxen)

Lufthansa bos (boxes)

his day's greatest ertion (exertion - that's when I caught on)

ercising his jaw muscle (exercising)

"xe" has occasionally been used as a gender-neutral pronoun. Possibly at some point GQ changed their style guide with regards to it, and some (presumably well-meaning) editor used a malformed search and replace on it.

This makes some sort of sense but then wouldn't we be seeing "etheyrtion" instead of "ertion"? Even assuming a find/replace properly targeted the word "xe" we don't have any "replace" happening, which doesn't really track.

Not every instance:

next context exterior exhaustion exploded FedEx

ex vs xe.

Woops, yes, transposed when I was trying to determine when it may have been introduced.

archive.org has only "red on" (archive since 2015, though the article is dated September 2003).

google books finds a 2016 book with this article containing "red oxen".

And gq.com elsewhere has the word "oxen" September 2015: https://www.gq.com/gallery/andrew-moore-photography-book-dir....

Earliest instance I found was February 2003 https://www.gq.com/story/michael-paterniti-surfing-2003 "ercise". There were many others, through at least May 2015 https://www.gq.com/story/old-people-are-robbing-more-banks "safe deposit bos"

Failed to post another edit: Missing-xe disease affects more conde nast publications in that time frame than just GQ as well - for example, teenvogue talks about "ercise" a lot, including https://www.teenvogue.com/story/simple-ways-to-excercise (note the "exCercise")

Holy cow. So it has to have been done recently then, I guess, and probably globally? Which might lend some credence to the "pronoun" theory.

I searched for "bos" and turned up quite a few:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22bos%22+site%3Awww.gq.com

Edit: found a new one - remixes/remis:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=remis+site%3Awww.gq.com

so does "fos" instead of foxes. This is kind of silly.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%22fos%22+site%3Awww.gq.com&kp=1&i...

Missed the edit deadline, but here's an update:

I've got the day off today, so I'm on this like a poorly-disciplined bloodhound. After searching GQ.com with all 26 letter combinations x_ it seems 'xb' and 'xe' have been removed, site-wide (edit: not site-wide), while none of the other combos are affected. My test words are listed below.

So, is this starting to ring a bell for anybody? Do xb and xe have anything in common? Defunct formatting codes? Emacs function keys, I only half-jokingly joked?

examination

Oxbridge

excuse

Disney XD

boxes

exfoliate

foxglove

exhale

exit

Jaguar XJ

Jaguar XK

axle

axman

Oxnard

exoskeleton

expose

exquisite

iPhone XR

coxswain

sexual

Final Fantasy XV

Maxwell

XXX

sexy

Olympus XZ-1

Wow, great work so far. This is really interesting.

My guess is that they were moving content out of some proprietary early-2000s CMS around 2015. Instead of carefully parsing the storage format and extracting the text, they dumped it and the output was peppered with garbage. To sanitize the output, they simply elided certain character sequences.

Further speculation, 'xb' and 'xe' (for 'beginning' and 'end') were control sequences marking the extent of something in the old CMS format

Edit: These people would be the ones to ask:

> The Software Engineering team at Condé Nast International (CNI) knew it needed an automated way to migrate the vast quantities of content, and it developed a tool to do just that, recognizing that no off-the-shelf tool could cope with the disparate set of content it was facing, spanning multiple territories, languages and content types. But to meet its hard three-month deadline of migrating the first territory, Germany, CNI also saw the need for additional resources who were experienced in key technologies, including Node.js and React, so it selected NearForm.

https://www.nearform.com/blog/case-study/accelerating-transf...

Ha - I suspect you're looking in the right direction. Especially when they talk about that "hard three-month deadline." What is it with the arbitrary deadlines, people? The deadline happens once, but the mistake hangs around forever.

Almost certainly a botched attempt to fix Unicode code points showing up in text.

For instance, the Euro symbol (U+20AC) is encoded in UTF-8 as the three bytes E2 82 AC. In Python (and other languages?) this can sometimes be misencoded as the 9-char string `\xe2\x82\xac`. The leading '\x' is a special sequence in Python to indicate a hex value.

Someone who didn't know what they were looking at might try to do a couple of heavy-handed replacements on article text to undo this. '\xe' is commonly seen in bad utf8 -> ascii translations because of how utf8 encodes code points.

See the specific Euro example here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Examples

And a popular answer on StackOverflow specifically on '\xe2' in python output: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21639275/python-syntaxer...

Your observation was so unexpected and unusual that it is actually more interesting than the long winded article itself. I had noticed the weird half eaten words but thought it was just a poorly edited website with typos.

The Unicode elimination explanation by another person replying to your comment was also quite interesting to read.

The author attempts to extract some higher spiritual meaning from the ramblings of someone who is mentally ill.

This reminds me of a story about a reporter seeking out hermits who been living alone for decades. Searching for higher truths and enlightenment, all he found was varying degrees of alcoholism and mental illness.

There is still a moral in those stories. Unfortunately, they are rather depressing.

Some may write him off as a crazy person, but he sounds like a broken man who just gave up. Life fell apart and no where to call home...

So it goes with many homeless and mentally ill. Quite a reminder that our very sanity depends on the kindness and support of the people around us.

Or the willpower to get up and go to work.

This is, pardon the french, puritan bullshit.

Without the kindness and support of the people around us, we all fall apart, sooner or later. Humans evolved as a social species, and if that social component is removed, it has grave effects.

There's a reason solitary confinement is chosen as a particularly brutal punishment[1]. There's a reason people with less social contacts have, in general, a shorter life span[2].

"The willpower to get up and go to work" comes, at least partially, from being embedded in a community.

[1] https://www.nmlegis.gov/handouts/CCJ%20102716%20Item%203%20D...

[2] https://www.nature.com/news/social-isolation-shortens-lifesp...

> There's a reason people with less social contacts have, in general, a shorter life span

Or people who are obviously going to die earlier will get less social contacts -- the causation could be in either direction. Perhaps they don't form the social contacts because they don't want to make others who get to know them be the ones to suffer sadness when they die first, or they don't want to burden others with feeling they should look after them when they get sick first. Or perhaps it's the others who don't want to risk the sadness or incur the burden.

> Perhaps they don't form the social contacts because they don't want to make others who get to know them be the ones to suffer sadness when they die first

Are you suggesting that people with low social interactions either consciously or subconsciously are aware they have a lower lifespan? That seems like a greater leap in faith than people experiencing negative side effects from lack of social interaction.

From the comment you're replying to:

> people who are obviously going to die earlier...

Your parent was giving examples based on people who are near death. If sick old people know they are near the end, they may be less likely to spend precious time and energy chasing after new friends.

The point is that we don't know the causality. The study is specifically about old people too, so this seems like a plausible explanation.

You don’t have to just spitball this, people have already put effort into studying it and have found that it is true even when controlling for other health factors https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/12/well/live/having-friends-...

> This is, pardon the french, puritan bullshit.

The sentiment of "the willpower to get up and go to work" is not puritan bullshit. It's a turn of phrase to indicate an adult responsibility of personal agency. Many people are too lazy (and/or afraid) to better their lives - which, put another way, is "putting in the work".

His mental state may have produced a myopic goal/methodolgy that rationalized being trapped in the airport, ie Nasseri refused this on the grounds of wanting to enter the UK as originally intended. Given some effort and an uncertain future of a different vein, he could have left for any number of destinations with panhandled money, year over year.

The statement has nothing to do with community, per se, as the work referenced would be through the greater international community.

You're really not understanding that living in an airport is a total disconnect from your community? Really?

I am sorry.

There is a movie that loosely related to this, The Terminal, starring Tom Hanks. I'd say it was a pretty good movie, I liked it.

The man this article is about also wrote a book, but I can't thing of the title off the top of my head.

https://www.amazon.com/Terminal-Man-Alfred-Merhan/dp/0552152...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehran_Karimi_Nasseri

He left the airport in 2006, lives in Paris now.

This kind of thing keeps happening, it's not as far fetched as it seems.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46547794

This Syrian guy was in Kuala Lumpur airport for 7 months.

"I'm afraid the sad fact is that he's now completely destroyed."

A conclusion it is hard to deny.

Is the subject of the story still alive, or did officials sample his tissue/DNA at death? If so it may now be possible to track down his mother in Glasgow ... a Scottish nurse (?) working in pre-revolution Iran, I imagine, wouldn't be so hard to narrow down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mehran_Karimi_Nasseri Sir Alfred is still alive, and left the airport in 2006. His life doesn’t seem much better now, despite having been paid a quarter million dollars for his life story.

The modern world is so strange. What a horrifying story.

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