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.