Weekend Travel

Well, end of month and end of quarter so I had to go home to Dallas this weekend and do my quarterly filings and all my normal bills.

So here are some travel rants…

First off Southwest Airlines…
(sorry Tammy) I used to fly American and I used Orbitz.com to book my travel. Orbitz has this really cool program where you key in your cell number and they will send you updates about your flight. About 2 hours before departure time they call you and tell you the flight status and the gate number. Then if anything changes they keep calling you to keep you posted. It’s an awesome program! I have been sitting at a gate before waiting for my flight to show up and I get a phone call telling me the gate change 5 minutes before the gate agent came on the intercom and announced it. Super cool!

When American quit flying my route I switched to Southwest. They do not allow booking through Orbitz. You can only use the Southwest site. So I no longer get notifications of issues.

I was little late getting out of work Friday so I was stressing to get to the airport on time and only after I stress my way through security do I find out my flight is going to be an hour late. All that stress just wasted! I could have put that stress to good use on something else and now it's just gone!

Later on the board changed and showed the flight two hours late. Then later the board changed and showed it 2 ½ hours late. During this time the bored looking gate agent did not make a single announcement. I only found out the new status when the plane did not show up and I walked over to the boards again. Grrrrrr.

Once we were seated on the plane the pilot announced that they had gotten behind earlier in the day due to the storms in the Midwest Friday and they had been trying to catch up for hours. Fair enough, I was watching that system on radar Friday and that flight crew did the right thing not trying to land in that mess. Good job. Also another high five to the flight crew for letting us know why we were all so late.

It sure would have been nice if the gate agent had done that about 2 hours ago.

Here is my question though. Since they had gotten behind schedule earlier in the day why didn’t the boards reflect the arrival time more accurately? Why keep putting us through the exercise of "it will be here shortly" only to delay it again? Very frustrating. If you are hungry and someone tells you dinner is in 3 hours then you deal with it. But if they tell you dinner is going to be ready in an hour then an hour later you go, "KIDDING! It's still an hour away!" Then again in an hour you go KIDDING! Only to do it again people start getting ticked off! Just tell me its going to be two or three hours out in the first place and quit teasing me!

For those of you with no knowledge of airline operations, rest assured Dispatch knows exactly where every plane is at all times. The company knew that plane was 2.5 hours behind; they simply chose not to notify us customers.

Hulk want smash! :)

Now a small rant for airport management…
What is the deal with airport TV’s? OK, airport management, here is a real brain flash for you… if you are going to invest the money in hanging TV’s from the ceiling and then buying cable or satellite for them then you know, what the hell, turn the volume up so we can actually HEAR the TV. I mean what a concept, moving pictures AND sound! Whoa, way too high tech I guess?

And hey, when did they pass that law that every single TV in the airport MUST be tuned to CNN?

Oh, while I am on that topic how about a quick rant about CNN?

For two hours Friday while I waited for my plane all CNN talked about was the big Hillary and Obama unity festival. They talked about how they were dressed, how his tie matched her pant suit, how they were seated in relation to each other and what it all meant. I do not mean commented in passing, I mean IN DEPTH analyses of what it meant that his tie matched her pant suit!

This is *news*? This was just "Entertainment Tonight" only with politicians instead of celebrities. (a fine line there I know)

Then the Larry King show started so I thought cool, maybe something interesting will come on now. Nope, just more of the same; Still it did get interesting though, Larry King brought in two body language experts who deconstructed Obama and Hillary’s body language during their respective speeches. It was like John Madden football with the clicker, they would freeze frame and analyze hand gestures, facial expressions and body postures and compare them to the words spoken. After maybe 20 minutes of this both experts concluded that they were both being deceptive. They probably did not really like each other at all in spite of the verbal love fest.

What? WHAT? Politicians telling bold faced lies? On TV? In front of their supporters?

I. Am. Shocked!

Thank you Larry King for bringing this ground breaking never before known news to the airwaves! I never even suspected career politicians could be dishonest before. I am still just a little shell shocked at this glowing insight but I think I will be a better person for it in the long run so thank you Larry King!