Wired.com's Terminal Man appears to have passed the ultimate mental health test — 30 days without leaving an airport terminal except by plane — with his sanity completely intact.
Wired Science conducted a highly unscientific study of Brendan Ross's mental health status (i.e., we gave him several self-administered exams to take before and after the big adventure), and it turns out he's a pretty stable human being.
Despite enduring a month of constant noise, gross public bathrooms and chronic sleep deprivation, Brendan's stress score bumped only 11 points, from 3 to 14 out of a possible 168. According to Psychology World, a website that publishes an online version of the stress test, his second score still puts him well below the reported national average of 50.
Similarly, Brendan's score on a multiple-choice anger test jumped by 50 percent, from 20 to 30 out of a possible 250, but he says he never came close to screaming at a flight attendant or fellow passenger.
"It's not in my nature to snap and start screaming at somebody, I guess," wrote Brendan in a follow-up survey. "There were people who rubbed me the wrong way, sure, but it never came to that. Maybe it was because I knew they'd make good material for the blog, like the 'air marshal' from my last post."
There were a few moments when Brendan felt the fatigue and stress getting to him, however. He says the mood of his fellow passengers greatly influenced his stress level, and he'd find himself getting testy among a crowd of stressed-out passengers waiting for a delayed flight. "Regional attitudes made a difference too," he said. "I was much more irritable in New York than, say, Florida."
Brendan also found sleep deprivation affecting his brain in some unusual ways. For instance, on the second-to-last day of his trek, the Long Beach airport staff arranged for him to take a quick tour of the airport fire station, where he got to ride in a fire engine and shoot the water cannon. But when they invited him to slide down a fire pole, Brendan found himself suddenly unable to control a normally manageable fear of heights.
"Normally, it wouldn't have been a problem, but stepping up to the ledge, in the midst of the fatigue and weariness, the phobia kicked in full-strength, and I couldn't do it," Brendan said. "It was embarrassing — I had to walk back down the stairs. It wasn't the kind of thing that would've happened if I was on a normal sleep schedule, I think."
Wired Science editor Betsy Mason crossed paths with Brendan in New York City's JFK airport just days before the end of his odyssey. Though he seemed fairly lucid, the weeks of sleep deprivation had definitely taken a toll on his comprehension speed, and probably a little bit on his self -awareness as well, as evidenced by his response to "just look normal" in the photo to the right.
And we're not sure if the fact that he started talking about doing another terminal tour with Brazil's Azul Airlines on the day his JetBlue tour ended is a sign that he came through with ease, or a sign that he actually has gone crazy.
Wired's determined flier says the only time he considered giving up was at the very beginning of his trip, and even then the thought crossed his mind only briefly. "The closest I came to giving up was on the second day," he wrote, "when I was looking at a month of doing this. I thought, 'Wow, this may have been a monumentally stupid decision.'"But Brendan persevered, kindly providing us with a month of blog posts detailing the ins and outs of America's airports. For a first-hand report of air rage, however, it turns out we'd have to find a more irritable traveler.
Images: 1) Brendan rides in a fire truck at the Long Beach airport fire station./Brendan Ross. 2) Brendan at JFK./ Betsy Mason, Wired.com
See Also:
- Could Nonstop Travel Cause Our Frequent Flyer to Fly Off the Handle?
- Meet Wired.com's Terminal Man
- 'That Guy' — Terminal Man Gets Busted!
- Terminal Man's Trip Takes an Ugly Turn
- Terminal Man Peers Into Passengers' Lives
- Terminal Man Finally Gets to Bathe
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