It’s been a little while since I talked about the horrors of contemporary air travel.  Either I’ve become so desensitized to the situation or it’s gotten better in the last year or so, I don’t know. Either way, my head hasn’t flown off my shoulders in quite some time. Which made my experience of JetBlue the other day all the more rich and surprising.

I’ll just tell it to you as it happened. You can judge whether I’m over-reacting. I do sometimes.

My wife and I were in the exit row of the 5:59 JetBlue flight out of JFK to San Francisco. Because I love her, I took the middle seat and she had the aisle. The flight was on time. Everything was moving very smoothly. The general air of JetBlue jolly, democratic collegiality prevailed. All our bags were neatly stowed. I had placed my wife’s wheely bag, which is perfectly sized to go into the overhead compartment wheels first, and my backpack, which contained my beloved MacBook, up there, and neatly inserted her folded topcoat and my favorite sport jacket on top of our stuff.

As always, there is always one butthead who appears just as the doors are closing and requires immediate assistance for seating and stowage. Indeed, here he came, and with him, following close by, a very neat, very tidy, very trim gate agent with the passenger’s wheely bag in tow. The late arrival went back to his seat in the rear of the plane. The flight attendant began to look for an overhead compartment to put his bag. He selected ours, which was already rather full not only with our possessions but those of several others. The flight attendant opened the compartment door and immedately began violently jamming the new bag into a space that he perceived existed somewhere in the interstitial zone between everybody’s luggage.

“Excuse me,” I said to him, as he repeatedly mashed the bag into the imaginary space, “are you squashing our coats up there?”

“It is company policy that rolling bags take precedence,” he snapped. “You can put your coats on the floor.” I thought this was rather severe. If I had wanted to put my coat on the floor I would have already done so. Also, I have a thing about officious people with a tiny bit of power being mean to me. Call it an occupational hazard.

“Also,” I said as he banged and slammed the new bag into our stuff, “I have a computer up there, so please be gentle.” By now he had taken our coats out and tossed them onto our laps. Then he removed my wife’s wheely bag, which was superbly positioned, in order to fit in his load. That done, he once again began jamming and cramming my wife’s bag into the space that now no longer really could accomodate it.

“This doesn’t fit,” he said. At that point he took out my bag and deposited it into my lap. So all our luggage and carry-ons were now out of the position we had established for them. My wife is a patient woman, a fact she has proven time and again by continuing to favor me with her presence.

“I’ve been on a hundred JetBlue flights with that bag,” she said calmly, “and it fits perfectly if you put it in wheels first.” He was now violently mashing it handle first into the spot. At that point, I believe he bumped my wife. She says no, because she is a non-violent type and likes to avoid confrontation, but I’m pretty sure I saw her leap a bit out of her seat and say, “Oh!”

Several things then happend simultaneously. She took out a little notebook and pen — as the increasingly desperate re-loading of the compartment continued — and I leaned forward in my seat in order to see his name badge. She then wrote down his name in block letters: PATRICK. And he, having finally completed his task, looked down and saw her do it.

“May I see your boarding pass, please?” he said, and it wasn’t a request.

“Of course,” said my wife. I wondered if she still had it. Sometimes we all toss our passes once we’re on the plane. She hunted about for it. For a while it looked like she was going to have to get her bag down again, but then yes, there it was, in her purse on her lap. “May I ask why you want to see my boarding pass?” she mildly inquired.

“Well!” said PATRICK, “you are writing down MY name and I would like to see the name of the person who is writing down MY name.” He then regarded the boarding pass closely and I thought rather ominously. He then reluctantly handed it back, and then went up to the cockpit, where he gave us the evil eye until the doors of the plane were closing, at which point he left. At some point, I got up and put my bag and our jackets back in the place that was left for them.

I still wonder what PATRICK would have done if my wife had been unable to unearth her boarding pass from our mass of scrambled belongings.

I will say that the on-board flight crew seemed especially nice to us for the entire flight. Perhaps they were afraid of these two obvious troublemakers. Or perhaps they knew this gate agent. Don’t you know the character of the people you work with every day, particularly the scary ones?

I’ve been thinking a lot since yesterday about United Airlines’ plan to charge plus-sized people more for their flights from now on. It upset me so much that I went out and had a 2000 calorie dinner.

I’m not fat, you know, but I do have big bones. What if some anorexic flight attendant decides that the line between fat and burly no longer exists? I don’t need two seats, unless they shrink their size again. And who’s saying they won’t? I remember when you could sit in a coach seat and recline it a bit and be almost comfortable. Now there’s a deathmatch fight for any available armrest, the space allotted to you is a vertical coffin, and the angle of recline is about 5 degrees or a quarter of an inch. Even that is too much, since the way they’re spaced front-to-back has shrunk, too. Last month there was a guy in the seat in front of me eating a large bag of salami practically in my lap. He didn’t even offer me any.

At the same time, relatively slender people have rights, too. I was riding on a Southwest flight not long ago. I had purchased the Business Select option, where for $15 dollars or so you can board earlier than the rest of the crowd. So I got on and selected the front row, aisle seat. Another guy got on and took the window. Right as the door was closing, some behemoth, maybe 6′3″, 320 pounds puffed onto the plane, looked at us and said, “Is this seat taken?” He then plopped his 1/6th of a ton between us and fell promptly asleep. It was not a comfortable flight. He snored, too.

The bottom line on our bottoms is this: As a nation, we’re getting fatter even as the space assigned to us on airplanes is getting smaller and smaller — as their margins shrink too. What is to be done? We’re not going to be getting thinner, I don’t think. Airplanes aren’t going to be getting any more widebodied to deal with our wide bodies, either.

Here’s my suggestion: Coach-level service, larger seats, 150% pricing. That is, create a section of the airplane that has bigger seats, but not as nice as Business or First, serve no food, offer no amenities, kill the footrests, even. All you’re offering is more butt space as your butt heads into space. Some have to be there. Others may choose to be. The price is way less than Business but way more than coach. It’s a middle ground that recognizes the Airlines’ need to make a profit, large people’s need to fly, and the normal-sized individual’s right to some level of comfort in this world.

Premium Coach is a step in the right direction. But it’s not quite good enough, not for folks with really big bones.

When is enough of a good thing way too much? When you’re flying American (AMR). Somewhere along the line somebody must have done a focus group or something, because it’s apparent that the airline believes that fulsome, frank communications with passengers is of fabulous benefit to everybody. The effort is obviously well-intentioned. But the outcome is perhaps not.

I first noticed this a few years ago, when I would be sitting and waiting for a mysterious amount of time on the tarmac and then Chuck Yeager would come on the public address system with something like, “First of all, I’d like to thank you all for your patience…” This immediately drained whatever patience I was trying to cultivate. I hate being thanked for my patience. “… but there’s an amber light here in the cockpit that we’re checking out.”

That was bad. There are a lot of reasons for amber lights, none of them particularly encouraging. Did I need to know about the amber light? Maybe. Did I want to fly in a plane that sported one, even briefly? Again, not too sure. I did know that the announcement did very little to help my frame of mind, but I guess they were just trying to be responsible and blah blah blah.

The trend has continued to develop, with ever-increasing levels of frankness being employed to win our admiration and regard. Which is fine. Unless, you know, it freaks us out entirely.

It’s my perception, which may be completely off base (but I don’t think so) that American Airlines hasn’t put a new plane into domestic service in quite some time.  A little while back, they fooled me for a while with some new seating arrangements, but then I realized the snazzy new electric chairs had been installed into the same old Boeings. What American does instead, and it is very much to its credit, is to swarm over every airplane before it is permitted to leave the ground, fixing, checking, making sure that it is truly airworthy. This means a lot of late departures and safe arrivals. Still, I sometimes think they should post all take-off and landing times with a big fat asterisk.

Anyhow, yesterday I was scheduled to depart at 1:50 from San Francisco. The plane was slow to board. It is my belief, based on years of experience, that even the most infinitesimal delay at any point in the chain usually results in hours and hours of snafus and fubars, very often ending in the scrubbing of the flight and total decomposition of my day/week.  So my hair-trigger gut was telling me a) we had a problem and b) there was, therefore, a 68.4% chance that we would never take off at all, when Chuck Yeager came on the intercom.

“Well,” he said, “we were all ready to go, but it appears that the brakes on the left side of the plane need to be replaced.” He then went on about how that was really not a very big deal at all and that it might take less than half an hour and so on and so forth, but I didn’t hear a thing, all I could get into my mind was the image of a plane landing at Kennedy Airport in New York and careening into Jamaica Bay when its brakes gave out.

“This is too much information for me,” I said to the dead-heading flight attendant in the next seat.

“Well,” he said, “I guess they’re just trying to be honest.”

I get that. Honesty is a virtue. In this case, however, something seems out of whack. Next time I would suggest something like, “There’s a bit of weather in New York, and we’re going to make sure that we have clear skies for your landing there. Kick back and have a free drink on us.”

I like that much better. Not that such obfuscation is always called for. How different the world would look now if some honest broker had announced, “Well, we were doing fine until about a month ago, when it became obvious that our insurance was underwritten by a host of bad mortgage loans…”

I just logged my two millionth mile. I hasten to add that the vast majority of those miles I paid for myself. I say this because some of you think I ride around in luxury all the time with the corporate teat between my teeth. I assure you I do not. I am, for better or worse, insanely bi-coastal, with one half of my existence on the left coast and the other, on the right, necessary to pay for the whole deal. Hence my millions — not bucks but miles. 

The crazy size of my achievement comes with some benefits. Primarily, it has boosted me to Executive Platinum status on American Airlines. This confers access to the first-tier lounge at most airports. This is why I am writing you right now from the British Airways First Class Lounge at Heathrow Airport. It is among the nicest spaces — public, semi-public or private — I have ever been privileged to be in. 

There are coffee machines dispensing all sorts of cool stuff, and teas, of course, and an assemblage of the bizarre things that British people like to eat, all very nice. Fruit and baked goods and jams and meats and porridge and warm bubbly drinks, even top-shelf booze if you’re in the mood at this hour of the morning. Many residents are on their laptops, working. Business never ceases. 

The news here this morning is that the British banks are reaping the benefits of new, lower interest rates, which were slashed 1.5 percent recently… and not passing the savings along to their customers. Shocking, wot? 

In a little while, we move on to Rome. We’ll see how good the free wi-fi is from there.

Word comes from Megan in Chicago, one of our most valued and assiduous correspondents, that this humble blog has been blocked by the IT police of her company. Megan writes:

I can tell you one thing that is going the wrong way. Bing’s Blog page has been officially blocked at work with a code of “Social Networking”… Stanley baby – can you pull a few strings and help the numb nuts in IT understand that I need this site in my daily work life? How can I possibly put in a full 10 hours without a spoonful of delicious irony! I’ve explained that this is a very useful site which quite often covers business related topics. I’ve stated my case that while the site is not essential to doing my job, it does help me do my job better. They’ve claimed that they will review and let me know – *sigh*. I’ll miss you sweetheart…

I’ll miss you, too, Megan! It’s all so unfair! A social network? Us? Could that be? Every day we have as serious a discussion of current business-related events as the facts warrant! Sure, a lot of the time we focus on the ridiculous and outrageous, but that’s a direct effect of the times in which we live, right? Just look at the following issues we’ve dealt with in recent months:

• Guys who play golf and bridge while their city-states are flailing, and are then super-compensated upon their departure;
• The collapse of huge banking institutions that stupidly gave loans to people who couldn’t repay them when belts tightened even one teeny notch;
• The most aggressive Fed in living memory, moving dynamically to do who knows what?;
• Utter confusion on the part of experts and pundits of all stripes, and a general sense of incapacity and weirdness from all over;
• The usual insanity pertaining to mergers, acqusitions, divestitures and other organizational hooey in organizations from Apple and AOL to Yahoo and whatever companies that start with the letter Z you can think of;
• Intense activity in the digital arena, including the geometric growth of online retail while brick and mortar stumbled;
• The worst performance by the airlines industry since Howard Hughes attempted to commercialize the Spruce Goose;
• Other (your peeve here).

We’ve covered these terrific business trends and stories just like a responsible information source should, with aplomb, sagacity and no little amount of sang froid. We’ve also looked extensively at your bulls**t jobs and crazy bosses, and even occasionally offered some advice in our Ask Bing sector. And if, in so doing, we have also attracted a witty, savvy, saucy, snazzy, slightly snarky group that get together with some regularity to comment on the general situation? Does that make us a social network worthy of blockage? Well! All I can say is…

Thanks for the promotion, IT dudes! Now come on! Free the blog! Lift the blockade! Let freedom ring!

Lord knows I complain enough about things. Maybe we all do, but I’m a master at it. I complain about American Airlines (AMR) all the time, since I am their prisoner half a dozen times a month, if you count a round trip as two trips, which it is. It’s possible that it should count as three in certain cases, like last night.

For some reason, they have a hard time with the redeye at San Francisco airport. The “equipment” comes in from New York late, of course, God forbid they should actually have a plane on the ground ready and waiting for people to board, no, they have to use those poor mothers incessantly until their wings fall off, I guess. So the plane comes in and it seems like, you know, a complete surprise to the airline that it needs to be cleaned before it’s boarded again. I’ve taken the 10:30 PM several times and each time there’s a total fire drill as the grouchy American gate agent runs around looking for a phantom cleaning crew. Last night, he thanked us for our patience no fewer than four times. I don’t know about you, but as soon as somebody thanks me for my patience I lose mine.

Anyhow, last night the situation seems to have been that on the incoming flight a service dog had befouled the aircraft and somebody needed to clean up the mess. Nobody appeared willing to do so. They all ran around like maniacs for about half an hour, which made us just late enough into NY Kennedy that we hit the guts of rush hour and it took me 75 minutes to get the ten or so miles into Manhattan. So here’s a note to American:

Hello, American Airlines. Pleased be advised. Every Sunday night at 10:30 PM, a redeye flight leaves from San Francisco Airport. The equipment that is utilized for this regularly-scheduled flight comes in at about 9:30 or perhaps 10:00 PM, depending on weather and other considerations, including the fact that it comes from Kennedy Airport in New York, the worst airport in North America. When this equipment arrives, it will need to be serviced, re-catered and prepared for boarding. In advance knowledge of this, you might have a cleaning and catering crew on hand as a matter of course, rather than not. Thank you for our patience.

There. That felt pretty good.

But I don’t want you to think I only report the aggravations and incomprehensible shortfalls. So I will tell you the story of Bobbi at Washington Reagan Airport. She works for American Airlines, too.

Bobbi is an agent at that airport, which is a very nice one, by the way, quite new and sort of spiffy all over. Last Friday, I had to make a connection — Washington to Dallas, Dallas to SFO. The day before, it had snowed a little in Dallas, which threw the entire system into a tizzy. They can rope a steer down there and shoot a hunting buddy at 600 yards, but they can’t deal with a couple of inches of snow.

Be that as it may, the airport was a nightmare. People had been waiting 48 hours to board their flights, confusion reigned supreme, the food stands were out of food, there was no place to sit. As a business traveler, I can join the premium club for my main airline. It’s really no big deal. They don’t have butlers there or anything. For a few hundred dollars a year, you can have a place to sit, wireless internet, a working cash bar, coffee, a few magazines. It’s nice. I appreciate it.

Mostly, I appreciate the agents there. After a while, you get to know them and vice versa. On the day in question, I was very nervous that I wouldn’t make my Dallas to SFO connection and would not, therefore, get home at all until the next day. Something happens to my heart when I think I’m stranded. I lose the will to live.

Everything was delayed. My own flight out of Reagan was supposed to leave 20 minutes late, but naturally the plane itself, coming in from “snowbound” Dallas, was somewhere over Kentucky. Nobody really knew when it would actually leave. That’s the new thing in the last few years. Planes don’t run on a schedule. Airports are like hospital clinics. Once you’re into the system, you wait. But I couldn’t wait. I knew that if one thing was certain, it was that my connecting flight in Dallas would leave on time… because I probably needed it to be a little late.

Bobbi was behind the desk and went to work on my situation immediately. She noticed there were two Business Class seats in a flight that had been delayed from 11:30 AM. As it happened, a Texas congressman was in the chair next to me. She helped him too. She watched that flight like a hawk. She ascertained that, against all odds, those two seats remained a possibility. She watched her screen. She waited until the exact right minute and then did the absolutely unheard of: calling on some backup assistance from the other beleaguered and valiant colleagues there in the madhouse, she took the congressman and me by the hand and led us to the teeming gate. A few moments later, we were on the plane.

The rain was coming down hard. I never really believe that a plane will take off anymore, not even when its doors are closed and its waiting on the tarmac. But take off we did. And I made my connection. And had a late dinner in San Francisco.

So thank you, Bobbi. Thanks a lot. Thanks to you too, American Airlines. What you take away a lot of the time, you also give.  That’s saying a lot these days, I think.

In 2008 I believe we mark a very special anniversary: the 250th year that American Airlines has been serving the vermicelli and shrimp appetizer to Business Class passengers. But seriously. I know there has only been heavier-than-air flight for less than that, so those of you prepared to fire off a corrective comment can just stop right there.

It does feel like a long time, though. I recall, once upon a time, that American used to feature the food stylings of a number of chefs from establishments around the nation. Today, it’s kind of odd. They hand out menus with lots of type in them, but they always feature the same food. It’s Groundhog Day in the air.

In a time where nothing is certain, where the markets offer a different buffet of doom every day, it should be kind of nice to have something that never changes, never alters, year and year after year after year after… hm? Oh. Sorry. I got stuck in a loop there.

I have some questions for American I thought I would share with you, because perhaps you might have some answers.

Did somebody at the airline, back in the last century, achieve massive economies of scale by purchasing the largest number of teeny weeny beef filets in history? And do they now reside in an enormous frozen vault somewhere, tiers upon tiers of them, reaching up into the sky, a miniscule percentage defrosted annually for use until the next century dawns? How else are we to explain their ubiquity?

Were market tests done to determine that the vast majority of salad eaters enjoy creamy dill dressing? For a bright and shining moment last month, business passengers were offered a modified Caesar heretofore unknown, but that option seems now to have disappeared. Was there an upheaval among frequent flyers to bring back the creamy dill? If so, why hasn’t it been documented?

Who invented the super-cooked shrimp with rice-noodles that seems to be the annointed appetizer on most transcontinental flights? Is there an executive somewhere whose resposibility it is to say, “No. Enough,” and bring in the prosciutto with reconstituted melon dip as an alternative? When was it decided that resilient shrimp and limp, translucent noodles were not only the amuse bouche of choice for most customers, but of such popularity that they would be on the menu for most of our adult lifetimes?

Is the universe divided between those who select beef and those who opt for pasta? Is there no other road through the infinite regions of space?

Are these things immutable? Perhaps not. A few years ago, American introduced soy beans into its hot nuts mixture. Reaction must have been swift and powerful, since they were rescinded almost immediately thereafter. So change is possible. But is it called for?

Is there a vast business populace out there that, as they check in for their 15th or 20th flight of the year, has puffy little thought balloons above their heads filled with cold shrimp and chewy beef filets? Are there routes out there that offer other fare entirely, dishes that those of us who go between New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco know not of?

I know there are more serious matters questions that face us, ladies and gentlemen. This will never be the Davos Question featured by YouTube for response worldwide. But it isn’t only the big stuff that occupies us, is it? Aren’t the little issues sometimes just as intriguing, worrying away at the corners of our consciousness like termites, burrowing like moths into the fabric of our composure?

If you have any answers, please send them along. If any of you now reading this are associated with the airline, feel free to weigh in. And those of you who don’t fly this particular carrier quite as much as I do, are there similar patterns, concentric mobius strips of repetitive service in which you, when you travel, are forced to inhabit?

What other weird things have you eaten in the course of business lately? And yes, readers in Asia, I AM speaking to you.

Tim from Ft. Worth Texas weighed in on a way previous post that I wrote on the subject of airline travel. I really love it when you guys cruise back to see stories in the archive and even more when you comment about them. You know every one is evaluated solely for profanity or egregious nastiness to me personally and then published to the site. Same with this one. But I didn’t want it to get lost in the miasma of time, because it says something important about why the whole experience of flying domestically is so horrendous and headed in the wrong direction. Sometimes things seem arbitrary or non-sensical. Turns out they’re not.

In a lot of flights (not the longer ones I guess 1500 miles or shorter), flight attendants are required to clean the plane before they deplane and go on to next flight. And they don’t get paid for any work they do on the ground unless the door is closed, so, basically flying time. But even boarding, deplaning, cleaning and delays (5 hours or wherever) they don’t get paid for that! Not even a dime! So during delays and all that: Remember this: The crew is not getting paid at all! That’s why pre boarding is an issue as well! There has to be a line, or the company will have crewmembers working even more for free. Gate agents know better than to ask the crew if they want to start pre boarding and work a few minutes more for free… Typically they can have about 3 flights a day maybe 4, and the day can be as long as 15-16 hours, but because a lot of the work they do they don’t get paid, In the end, for a 15 hours work day they got paid for about 6 or 7 hours. As you can see the problem is a lot bigger than just bad employees or rude people. There’s the UNION telling workers to say NO when asked to work for free because management certainly doesn’t [work for free]! Then you have customers that paid a lot of money to fly and have to deal with crap and no right to complain! I really feel for the passengers! But employees are overworked, underpaid, working many hours for free. So it comes back to consumer‘s power: Write to the AIRLINE COMPANY and tell them what you think from your point of view. Do something about it! Fight to get things changed! It will take a lot of people making a lot of noise for something to be done.

So what do you say? It’s pretty clear that the people who work for the airlines are equally victimized by a) their companies and b) the FAA. There are probably other culprits too, don’t you think? Shouldn’t we, as Tim suggests, make a lot of noise?

I can’t hear you!

I was thinking this morning that I complain about too much. Like, I was going to sound off right here about one of my recent powerful pet peeves — when airline personnel say “Thank you for your patience.” I hate that. I hate being thanked for my patience when I’m all out of it. I don’t really think it’s a genuine thank-you anyhow. I think it’s more like, “Thanks for not getting into our face about the fact that we’ve been on the tarmac for two hours and will probably be on it for another two before we take off” or just “Shut up if you feel like complaining.” Last week I was thanked for my patience so many times before take-off, and then again upon landing, that I thought I was going to pop an aneurism.

But I’m not going to complain about that this morning. Because I woke up a few hours ago and realized that it had arrived. That Holiday spirit. I can feel it bubbling up in my heart and suffusing my entire body. And it feels good.

First up is Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays, because it centers around food and doesn’t have too much religious baggage. I like the menu a lot. And I generally enjoy the feeling of being thankful, don’t you? So let’s all take a minute in this runup to what feels like an early turkey-day and consider what we feel grateful for right now.

I feel grateful this morning, for example, that the front page of the New York Times has a story about clone monkeys. The content of the story is important, of course, but just the headline made me feel glad to be alive. Clone monkeys. What a great world we live in.

I’m thankful that all the banks that have declared write-downs are still doing okay. At least they look okay. Nobody’s jumping out of windows there, at least. And I went to the bank yesterday and they still seemed to have plenty of money they were giving out to people who wanted it. That’s a good thing.

I’m thankful for the fact that we’re not at war with Iran yet. I don’t really think going to war with another nation is an altogether good thing, at least, you know, not right now. So I feel positive that those who seem to want a war with Iran don’t appear to be getting much traction yet.

That’s just the short list right now. I’m going to keep on being thankful for about a week or so, before I guess it all collapses and I start whining and grouching around again. I’m not promising there won’t be interruptions in my mood, of course. But I’m going to try to sustain this.

Can you help?

Hidey ho, neighbors. It’s Monday morning and I’m back in New York with several thoughts in my head. One: Domestic Coach class really stinks. I mean, low-cost seating is one thing, but I don’t expect a piece of cheese to be wedged in my headrest.And yes, there WAS cheese. Old cheese. Seat hadn’t been vacuumed for weeks. My ancestors came over on a boat from Europe about a hundred years ago. The part of the boat they were on must have pretty much felt like I did before I got my very late, unexpected upgrade to the last seat in Business yesterday. Come on, dudes. Guys who fly on their own dime are people too. Attention must be paid! Thanks.

Two: Be it ever so mired in tension, politics and tedium, there’s no place like your office. As you know, I’ve been away for a bit. I got back to find a desktop (the real one) full of mail and my computer crashed from some incident that happened over the last few days. I rebooted and threw away a bunch of analog paper. It’s amazing how — now that everything of value is done electronically — there is not one single piece of snail mail that’s anything but useless. What a pile of mung! Note to Chase Bank: Stop sending me solicitations! I have enough credit cards! Haven’t you guys gotten tired of supplying credit to people? Save a tree!

Anyhow, here we are. In a few minutes, I’ll have some coffee. If I’m very lucky, nothing at all will happen in the next several hours before lunch. All of this while a beehive of activity goes on around me. Know why I can crank my yanker this way? Because I’m the boss.

This brings me to my request of you today. That’s right. Because my brain is almost utterly empty at this moment, I thought I would shift the work to you and ask you to do something. Know why I am allowed to gather wool in this particular fashion? Right again. Because… I’m the boss.

In case you haven’t noticed, bosses get away with a huge raft of behavior that normal people can’t. The bigger the boss, the greater latitude the individual has for work stoppage, labor shifting, on-the-job snoozage, feeding on company time, vague perambulation, digital invisibility, inexplicable vacuity, manipulation of time as a solid/liquid object that retains the properties of both a particle and a wave, that kind of thing.

I’m doing some research on the subject and would like anybody within the sound of my voice to consider the matter and then send along something bosses actually do to 1) have more fun, 2) do less “work” and 3) enjoy the “work” they do more, than the average person. I want real stories about real people. Bosses, send in your tactics and strategems. Employees, report on the ones you’ve personally experienced or even heard about. How does being a boss replicate the experience of actually being a retired person? Lots of golf? Mentoring the young? Sleeping during the day? Think about it. And lemme know.

Oh, and one last thing, vis-a-vis a certain recent controversy in this space: I write this blog. Nobody else does. There are no interns. There are no mini-Bings. What there are, of course, are people who are doing all the things I should be doing while I write this blog. Thanks to them. And to you guys, of course.

And hey, don’t get me wrong. If you want to toss a Bing Blog over the transom for my use, please feel free to do so, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of today’s real assignment. I’ll use it if I feel like it and ignore it if I don’t. I’ll take the credit if I like it and forget to say thank you. After a while, I’ll convince myself I actually thought it up in the first place. Know why I can do all these things?

Correctamundo!

Today I’m flying again. And so it fills my heart with joy to hear the news coming out of Washington today. At long last, President George W. Bush is rolling up his sleeves, focusing on the problem, and getting to work on solving it.

The LA Times, among many other news outlets, reports on this development, and quotes the Commander in Chief, who appears to be as righteously indignant as anybody who actually has the experience of flying commercial. ”There’s a lot of anger amongst our citizens about the fact that, you know, they’re just not being treated right,” Mr. Bush said. “We’ve got a problem, we understand there’s a problem, and we’re going to address the problem.”

The Chief Executive particularly mentioned the need for people’s complaints to be heard and addressed promptly, telling his Transportation Secretary and the acting head of the Federal Aviation Administration “to make sure that consumers are treated fairly and complaints are listened to, and that we address some of the egregious behavior that our consumers have been subjected to… Endless hours sitting in a airplane on a runway, and there’s no communication between the pilot and the airport, is just not right.” 

I don’t know about you, but the news that Mr. Bush is engaged in solving a problem of this magnitude is welcome indeed. At least it gives us something to smile about.

Got a suggestion for the President as to how he can help improve the situation? Send it in. I’ll pass it along with all due respect.

Last week I did my usual drill and flew someplace. It was a long flight, but I got my upgrade and things were okay. There was only one glitch, something about a battery charger that needed a switch-out of a power pack back at the gate. We taxied out. We taxied back. I was convinced, of course, that we were back at the terminal to stay. It’s happened to me so many times lately. Taxi out. Taxi back. Sit in the airport for six hours. Take off. Land at dawn. That kind of thing.

But this time, no, the captain was jolly and reassuring, the powerpack was switched out, we rolled off and landed pretty much on time in New York. So no complaints there, for a change.

In fact, no complaints at all, really. Just a scary experience. It was the guy in the next seat. Sometimes you get a chatty one, and that’s not so good. Other times, mostly in Coach, you get babies and entire families eating salami and cheese out of a Baggie. This time, the guy sits down, he sort of looks like, well… me. Blazer, which he has the Flight Attendant hang up. Casual slacks, this being a non-work day. Collared shirt. No tie. Concerned expression.

He’s in the window seat. And here, over nearly five hours (six if you count tarmac time) is what he did:

• Dozed (20 minutes, total);
• Worked on his BlackBerry, which was not in a two-way mode by which it could receive or send mail (3 hours, 50 minutes);
• Looks at a print out of a PowerPoint presentation (30 minutes).

Here are several things he did NOT do during the time we were confined together:

• Talk;
• Smile;
• Respond to polite observations (”I wonder how long we’re going to be on the ground here”)’;
• Get up, even once, to stretch his legs or use the restroom;
• Watch a movie or use the personal in-flight entertainment system;
• Eat the in-flight meal, although he does have a few hot nuts;
• Drink anything except water with a bit of cranberry juice in it.

I don’t care that the guy didn’t talk to me. I am generally silent throughout a flight. But the non-response thing creeped me out a little. When somebody says to you, “Oh no, not again,” as the plane is pulled back to the gate, it is customary to say, “Yeah, this stinks,” or even, “Uh-huh.” But this guy? He just kept working his BlackBerry and catnapping.

Finally, I guess, it was the BlackBerry thing that was the weirdest… the fact that all human interaction or behavior resolved itself down to intense fascination and activity on that device, which was disconnected from the web and therefore nothing more than a dumb terminal to be worked with one’s thumbs.

I don’t think I would have had the same reaction if the guy was on a laptop. Lots of people honk around on their laptops during a flight and I think nothing of it. But there was something about this that gave me the willies.

Wherever you go these days, people are not there. Their bodies, perhaps, occupy the space near us, around us, but they are somewhere else, on a phone, checking in on their messages, essentially Not Here. Sometimes you can go through an entire city block and not see one person just walking through analog space, occupying the moment in real time.

And then there was this guy in the seat next to me, almost non-corporeal, with no physical or personal needs other than to work his BlackBerry and get a little shuteye now and then. His hair was gray. His slacks were gray. And in my mind’s eye now, his skin is gray.

There was a great American philosopher back about 50 years ago who wrote a comic strip called Pogo. His name was Walt Kelly. The most famous quote from the strip went like this: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” No kidding.

Is it too late for us? Can’t we turn ourselves around? Come on, people! Wherever you go today, wherever you are, take a moment to unplug yourself and look about you. And if you can, turn to the person next to you and say hello. Who knows? We may start something.

Or stop it.    

As we enter into this Labor Day Weekend, with so many of us hitting the skies to enjoy this last little lick from the ice cream cone of summer, I thought it would be timely and appropriate to offer what seems to me to be an achievable, realistic draft of a document that has been much discussed by lawmakers and other philosophers: A Traveler’s Bill of Rights:

1. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say or do while imprisoned within the air travel system can and will be completely ineffective.
2. You have the right to get to the airport very early, only to find that your trip has been cancelled.
3. You have the right to accept the excuse for that cancellation or not, whatever.
4. You have the right to wonder why the airport has been under construction since you were a baby with no visible progress in sight.
5. If you fly for more than 1,000,000 miles per year, you have a right to a special person whose job it is to apologize to you for that fact that nothing can be done.
6. You have the right to remain in the airport for as long as is necessary for the airline to determine what they’re going to do with you.
7. You have the right to leave the airport if you want to, but once you do the airline has the right to cancel your reservation altogether.
8. Come to think of it, you have the right to consider your reservation absolutely conditional on certain criteria that will remain unclear to you.
9. All travelers will have access to a space on the floor of any airport in which they are interned.
10. You have the right to eat any food that you can find, except when you are sequestered overnight, in which case you have the right to eat any food you may have brought with you, or that you can either scrounge or steal from fellow passengers who are older, weaker or more infirm that you.
11. Once on the airplane, all passengers may sit quietly in their seats for an unspecified amount of time without water, food or air, except in First Class.
12. All passengers will have the right to sleep during long periods of inactivity on the tarmac, except in cases where the crew on the flight deck continually makes announcements that convey very little information in order to expunge their own anxiety and guilt.
13. While waiting for your plane to take off, you have the right to wonder whether it’s going to take so long that they will eventually drive you back to the gate and dump you back in the terminal.
14. While waiting to deplane after not taking off for unspecified reasons, you have the right to wonder why there is no gangway crew to let you off for 90 minutes.
15. You have the right to feel no patience whatsoever when you are thanked for said patience during the 14th announcement before takeoff.
16. During any flight that actually leaves the ground, you have the right to wonder how flight attendants can stand it.
17. You have the right to wonder where the occasional empty seat beside you went, and to remember what that was like, and speculate that the incessant cancellations of flights are designed to ensure that there are no such seats in the future.
18. You have a right to a clean restroom for the first 30 minutes of any flight.
19. You have the right to a turkey wrap.
20. You have the right to stay home.

 There may be more. I invite you to suggest your own. Have a happy Labor Day, everybody.

I was not there. I read about it. And it sent the willies up my spine. I hate the willies, especially over the weekend. But this one did the trick.

Nearly 20,000 people. A computer glitch. Some glitch. A glitch is when my game of Halo freezes in mid-frag. This was not a glitch. This was a meltdown. Several people had to be taken to the hospital. Scores more languished in the airport, suffering from hunger and dehydration. Babies cried for formula. On the tarmac, planes from all over the world waited, waited, some as long as seven hours before permitting their passengers to get out of their tiny tubes and head down the gangway. Food ran out. Water, too, after a while.

In the airport parking lot at 3:00 AM, gridlock. Not a traffic jam. Not a frustrating slowdown. Total immobility. Time standing still at the horizon between night and day. A few weeks ago, I was in one of those, in Oakland. We sat, emitting an occasional honk out of sheer desperation. Finally, we mounted a curb, drove across an oncoming lane, and escaped into the night. I guess when society fails to provide rationality and order, and our level of outrage gets urgent enough, folks eventually feel entitled to, you know, do what’s necessary.

All around us, it seems, the infrastructure we have come to depend on is crumbling. And we read about these things, and know in our hearts NOT that it might happen to us sometime soon, but that it most certainly WILL.

Were you there, when the computers coughed and 20,000 people were held in limbo? Or did something like this just happen to you in a place that doesn’t matter to the media quite so much? Do you have some thoughts on why these things keep coming down? Why a computer system of such manifest importance is insufficiently backed up? Bridges falling… debt markets exploding… tornadoes in Brooklyn? What next? Any ideas?

Oh by the way, happy Monday to ya. Looks like a nice day outside, doesn’t it?

Okay, I’m not going to say you read it here first. But a lot of you responded when I asked you a couple of weeks ago to weigh in with your horror stories about air travel.

Since then, I’ve had a couple of real doozies. Like, a few weeks ago I’m at SFO at 10:30 PM for the red-eye. And you know, people who are about to take a red-eye are not always the happiest campers in the world. So we’re all milling and waiting at Gate 64, I think, of the American Airlines (AMR) terminal, and we can’t get on the plane, which has been there waiting at the gate for a while, mind you, because it hasn’t been cleaned yet.

This is the not the first time I’ve been delayed because nobody was around the clean the plane after it got in, and not just on American, either. I’m wondering whether cleaning crews is one of the places they are saving money, you know?

Another area of fiscal restraint seems to be the number of people working at the departure gate. Like, the night in question there was exactly ONE to serve an entire planeful of people. He kept calling on his little phone, with increasing petulance and desperation, for some help. None arrived, at least while I was waiting there, convinced that there would BE no flight. That’s the new headset they’ve got us in, by the way. The airlines have now made the possibility of there being absolutely NO transportation a very real possibility. Consequently, we are glad when they take off at all. We’ll take just about any kind of treatment to get where we’re going. I guess that’s good for them, in a sort of demented way.

Anyway, this mother rolls up to the gate with a double stroller and two tiny infants swaddled inside, and she says to the Lone Ranger at the gate, who is sweating and bouncing off the walls by now, “Can I board early?” And he says, “I don’t really know. I can’t promise that.”

I never saw that before. And I didn’t blame the guy, either. He was totally overwhelmed, so I’m not blaming him. On the bright side, the flight crew was in a very good frame of mind. They kept appearing in little party hats by the closed door to the gangway. Turned out it was the birthday of one of their members. So they were very jolly. And that was nice, particularly after it was clear that we were going to board, clean plane or not. In the end, by the way, the mother of two seven-week-old infants DID get to board early, so that ends happily too.

Guess who they sat next to?

Make sure to read your USA TODAY today, if that’s not too redundant. The article you’re looking for is on the front page under the headline FLIGHT DELAYS TRIPLED IN JUNE, 462 jets sat on runways 3 or more hours.

I figure I’ve been on about 235 of those. How about you?

I want to put you all on notice. In a month or so, we’re going to mount a significant effort to elevate a certain issue to the level we’ve previously reserved for ongoing, sustained discussions like the one we continue to hold on Crazy Bosses and Bulls**t Jobs. Click on both links if you want to see what I mean. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but hundreds of people continue to log their horror stories, insights, jokes and other effluvia on both subjects, and the lore keeps on growing.

The subject I believe should be next on our roster is air travel, and by air travel I mean the following:

• Getting to the airport, which has been under construction since Kennedy was in the White House;
• Arriving at the airport and finding that the line to security will take over an hour to negotiate, even though it’s 5:30 in the morning;
• Incidents at Security;
• Bizarre stuff at the airport itself, including those guys they allow to panhandle near the ticket gate while masquerading as social service organizations;
• Rude, odd, or exceptionally nice behavior by airport and airline staff;
• Tales of waiting egregious amounts of time in the airport;
• Premium clubs that really aren’t;
• Horrendous behavior by airlines in screwing around with people so they don’t get off the ground for some reason;
• Obnoxious incidents on the tarmac, like when they make you wait to take off because a very old plane has a light that won’t either go off or go on;
• Incidents in the air that confound you;
• Diversions to strange places where the airline dumps you for a day or two;
• Luggage mysteriously lost in the ether between time and space;
• Chatty pilots who wake you on the red eye, and other such stuff;
• Airline meals/purchased food;
• Horrible fellow-passengers;
• Pets on board;
• Other

In short, ladies and gentlemen, I believe this topic is one that now occupies fully 35% of all business conversation in pre-meeting Board Rooms, bars and other venues where we go to complain, bemoan and just natter about what makes us miserable in this merry life of ours.

You can tell me good stories, too. Tales of human grandeur, generosity and nobility. Those are never out of place, if you can come up with them.

I think it’s quite possible that a new oral tradition may be forming on this topic. I’d like to make this a place where people like us can come to get it started, keep it going and maybe, just maybe, effect a change in this perpetually declining aspect of our working lives.

So come on. Tell me.