Rust

Due to circumstances way outside my control I find myself directly under the Tour Eiffeil, having just escaped its clutches.

7 million visitors a year they tell me. 20,000 per day. Queues a mile long.

The French, observing the two hour queues, rather than fixing the problem have decided to monetise it.

Essentially you can, for a 10x cost, queue-jump.

They have created derivatives on tourist queues! They are now an asset and not a problem.

Having jumped the big queue and spent 20 minutes in the little queue, been through two layers of particularly useless securite, taken one elevator to floor two, endured a 20 minutes tour that came with the accelerated tickets, queued for another hour, taken another elevator to the top, I decided to bail straight away.

Why?

I’m not particularly scared of heights, nor crowds.

No, this was culture-phobia mixed with ferric oxide-phobia.

Fuckwits and rust, if you will.

With a bit of luck 20,000 of the former will succumb to the latter one day very soon.