Flotsam and Jetsam I – Travel Blues

Ships' goods which are lost at sea. Also used figuratively in non-nautical contexts to means odds and ends, bits and pieces.

A lot of these are piling up right now as the impending start-up of another blog, the day job and travel pull me away from blogging here. Business travel is especially galling these days, as airline executives are no longer ashamed to just say it to their customers’ faces, “fuck you, we’ll treat you any way we please because you don’t have a choice but to fly with us”. Congress, with war, a storm-ravaged city not rebuilt yet, health-care crisis, housing market crisis and global climate change, having time for hearings about JetBlue holding passengers hostage for hours on the tarmac, is more evidence that things must be pretty bad travel wise. My recent air travel experience included arriving to my destination four hours late, partly unavoidable because of a weather delay, and not being late on the return only because of the foresight to have a long layover. I was overbooked on one flight, a fact that wasn’t revealed until I reach my seat to find someone else with an identical boarding pass in it. Only through the dedicated effort and persistence of a flight attendant in finding me a seat on a theoretically sold-out flight did I avoid missing getting home Friday night. The long layover was key because we departed late while my seating was being sorted out. While I was on the road this week, several people wondered at my plan to drive 300 miles to get to Friday meeting, which entailed greater expense than flying in addition to hours behind the wheel. I had reasoned that, from an inconvenience perspective, driving wasn’t any worse than cooling my heels in an airport. I don’t have the insane productivity skilz to get a lot of work done in airports (and unlike many people, flipping through my e-mails and typing ungrammatical responses with my thumbs on a Blackberry doesn’t really constitute “work”), there’s always a battle for a seat next to an electrical outlet in the terminal, and the need to guard your stuff from thieves, terrorists and TSA means you can’t get up when you please and walk away to grab some coffee, something to eat or to use the can, without shutting down the computer and packing everything along. Besides, this was a meeting I simply couldn’t be late to, and I’ve lost faith that any airline these days can get me anywhere within four hours of my designated arrival time.

So, with things such as airline travel draining the life force from me, several events have passed by during my blogging hiatus. Hopefully, there will be more later.