Not quite the world.

I'm at a coffee shop at the airport and it turns out I've stolen someone's seat, which I thought was free. But the two guys whose friend it is don't seem to mind. They look like professors, but I could be wrong. They're on their way home to Melbourne from Vietnam, where "the traffic is awful." I don't ask what it was that they did there, but they both look sunburnt and happy to be heading home. The skinny one in the red shirt and shorts is a Mac user, and soon he's telling me how he's installed Linux on his machine. I ask him what advantage Linux has over the usual operating system and he doesn't give an answer, per se. He just tells me he's got "a lot of stuff" on Linux. ("Open source software used to be iffy, but it's really good now.")

The chubby one with coke-bottle glasses is reading a travel book. Speaking of books, I learn that the missing third friend has gone down to the bookshop. We joke about whether or not he can afford to buy a book -- books being expensive in Malaysian ringgit. We then talk about how expensive books are in Australia, and neither of them can tell me why that is. The chubby one attempts to provide an answer (stringent copyright laws), and I muse out loud whether it's because there are not enough printing plants and the skinny one shakes his head and says it's probably nothing to do with raw materials, but the size of the market -- i.e. it's small, 21 million compared to 27 million in Malaysia.

Then the skinny one gets up to go look for the missing friend. When he comes back empty, the chubby one says he figures he's gone straight to the gate. And then they both decide it's time to go and they each gather their bags, and we all wish each other happy trails.

Moral of the story: If only people behave the way they do at airports all the time, the world would be a fantastic place.