The random fool has been quiet the last few days but not because there is nothing to write about. Rather, a cross-country trip for a business meeting left little time to write blog posts. However, that same trip yielded some good inspiration for new material. The first inspiration: air travel just sucks anymore.
Security Lines. I haven’t […]
Written by randomfool on February 18th, 2007 with
1 comment.
Read more articles on General Folly.
The random fool has been quiet the last few days but not because there is nothing to write about. Rather, a cross-country trip for a business meeting left little time to write blog posts. However, that same trip yielded some good inspiration for new material. The first inspiration: air travel just sucks anymore.
Security Lines. I haven’t been stuck in a security line in a while so, other than traveling during peak times, I think that airports and the TSA have done whatever it was that they needed to do to make security lines move along at an acceptable pace. Nonetheless, there is something very dehumanizing about being required to remove your shoes, belt, watch, PDA, etc. to get on an airplane. Understanding the necessity, it is just a really sad statement that our global society has come to this.
Airline Employees. However, nothing has been done to adjust the attitude of the bitter employees of the legacy carriers. They go about their business as if they were sentenced to it, not the least bit concerned about passenger comfort or experience. They really have nobody to blame but themselves. Certainly, airline management are guilty of mass mismanagement but the airline employee unions were every bit as stupid and greedy at the top of the cycle and deserve their equal and fair share of the pain during the current round of restructuring. Deregulation was a good thing (dregulation is almost always a good thing) for the airline industry but the brutality of free competition has not been pleasant as a traveler.
Full Airplanes. From a business perspective, airplanes full of passengers is a very good thing. There is nothing more wasteful for an airline and its shareholders than flying empty planes. After years of reckless expansion, September 11 and the resulting bankruptcies have caused the airlines to finally stop flooding the market with capacity. Airlines are learning that fewer seats with asses in them are much more profitable than fleets of empty airplaines. As a passenger, however, nothing is less comfortable than flying in an airplane packed full with passengers, especially back in steerage. Even first or business class travel, while much better, is uncomortable when the plane is full.
Discount Airlines. With all their problems, I still prefer the legacy carriers. I absolutely refuse to fly Southwest. I don’t care how cheap the tickets are, I would rather pay for an assigned seat or just not go on the trip than to make the dash for a seat on a Southwest plane without a boarding pass. And, as sullen as the legacy carrier employees are, I prefer them over the fake cheerfulness and stupid jokes that make Southwest flight attendants sound like high school cheerleaders. If you’re just going to chuck some bad peanuts at me and give me a thimble full of Diet Pepsi, I’d rather you just move on about your bitter day than to dispense with cheerful customer service. I would trade all the flight attendants and the soft drinks for a seat that wa a few inches wider and had some comfortable leg room. I can always buy a Diet Coke in the airport myself.
JetBlue. Even JetBlue with its DirecTv and nice new airplanes is not immune from stupidity. I would absolutely have been arrested if I had been on one of those planes stuck on the tarmac for eight or more hours. There si no doubt in my mind that I would have deployed the emergency exit, slid down the raft and walked across the tarmac in three feet of snow to the police that would be waiting at the terminal. Jail would be far more preferable than being stuck on an airplane without fresh air for eight hours on the ground. Now, I absolutely despise federal regulation of any kind and I despise more, by an order of magnitude, Barbara Boxer; however, I do think that you should have the right to demand to be let off an airplane after a certain amount of time. I think it is unconsionable that JetBlue did that to their passengers and they deserve every bit of the bad publicity that they are getting now.
People Watching. If there is one redeeming trait of air travel, it is people watching. I always bring a boat load of reading material with me on business trips and, no matter how long a layover might be, I almost never get into reading anything until I am on the plane (when reading material serves as my only defense against someone sitting next to me who wants to talk). The sheer wierdness of some of the people that populate airports is amazing and I am convinced that large crowds in general, but especially those in airports, tend to regress to the lowest common denominator of human behavior. People who are probably very normal and successful in daily life suddenly become incapable of following the most basic directions and lose their ability to read posted signs. If someone really ever wanted to destroy our civilization, they should just force us to go to the airport and no weapons would be necessary as we would just become blithering idiots en masse and our country would be free for the taking.
I used to have to travel for work far more frequently than I do now and I am happy about that. My 60 hour door-to-door round trip to Florida felt like three weeks of sleep deprived torture (although the meetings I went there for were productive and generally pleasant) that I do not look forward to repeating anytime soon. I just hope that I can get enough people to click on the ads on my blog to help pay for the charter of a private jet in the future. So, click away, folks. Click away.
Written by randomfool on February 18th, 2007 with
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February 18th, 2007, at 10:06 AM.
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