Return Flight Comedy

When traveling along, I try to amuse myself by listening in to the conversations of others. I find the comments of children especially funny. There were two memorable child/parent interactions on my flight back to San Diego yesterday:

While looking out the plane window after landing at the guys unloading our luggage, a child asked his mom, "Mom, why are all the people who do that black?"

The mom, obviously flustered and not sure how to answer that question in public, retorted, "Because its a good job sweetie."

The second incident involves a pregnant mother who had her five kids on the plane. Most of her kids were well behaved, but she had a 5 or 6 year old boy who couldn't sit still and was running up and down the aisle between his parents (who were seated about 5 rows apart). The parents were oblivious to who the kid ran into, knocked down, or just outright annoyed. There's an amazing talent that parents develop which allows them to completely block out their children when they are acting crazy. I'm sure it helps keep them sane, but us non-parents haven't developed this skill and just want to pummel such parents for not pummeling their kids. Anyway, the kid was climbing on the chair and the arm rests like they were part of a jungle gym, and then he started jumping up and down on the empty seat right next to mine. Without even glancing in his direction, the mom grabbed his arm and told him, "Stop it. This isn't your bed." Of course he only stopped for maybe an eighth of a second, but that's not the point. The point is that apparently this woman allows the kid to jump up and down on his bed like it's a trampoline. I thought jumping on the bed was one of those things universally discouraged by parents. Guess if you're the type to let your kid climb over strangers on an airplane, you probably let the kid run wild at home too.

Semantics

I was at a Target store with a few friends and we saw a poster for the movie Final Destination 3. One guys simplys says:

Wow, they're really making a mockery of the word "final" aren't they?

Well put, I say.

No Moleste!

While in Rochester for my friend’s wedding, I stayed at a Microtel for three nights. I’ve never given much though to the hotel chain’s name before as I’ve never stayed there. Now that I have, I can confirm that “micro” is indeed an accurate description of the accommodations. Another friend staying at the Microtel joked that it’s the first hotel she’s been in where she could talk on the phone, sit on the bed, and take a shower all at the same time. The size may have been micro because the price was too, so I can’t complain. We managed to get corporate room rates which were at half as much as the regular rate. I think the best part of my Microtel experience was reading the “Do Not Disturb” sign before I put it on my door. It of course says, Do Not Disturb” on it, but it does so in several different languages. The second one is Spanish and it reads “No Moleste.” I know that shouldn’t be funny, but after a hellish post-terror alert travel day, my juvenile sense of humor couldn’t help but repeat “No Moleste” and giggle.

"On the Ground in 18 Minutes"

Thursday morning I was supposed to catch a 6:40 am plane to Rochester, NY (through Philadelphia, PA) to attend my friend Kelly’s wedding. I was to arrive in Rochester at 5pm, just in time for the rehearsal dinner. Turns out that just hours before I arrived at the airport, authorities arrested all those terror suspects in London and airport security was amped up across the world.

The security line at the San Diego airport was crazy. After an hour and a half in the line within the terminal, the line crossed the catwalk, went down the escalator, and spilled way into the parking lot before making a 180 turn and heading back into the building. The 3+ hour security wait forced me and about 50 others to miss my flight. Luckily I made it as a standby passenger onto an 11:45 am flight. Many other passengers weren’t so lucky. Still, even that flight ended up being delayed an additional 2 hours. I didn’t get into Rochester until midnight and I was exhausted. I missed the rehearsal dinner which upset me quite a bit. I haven’t seen Kelly or our friend Christy for more than three years and so I didn’t want to miss a minute.

I hate flying, even when things go smoothly. I used to be an ultra paranoid flyer, but nowadays, my aversion to air travel stems mostly from the fact that I’m prone to getting air sick. Nothing’s a bigger buzz kill than throwing up on a crowded, ill-ventilated plane surrounded by travel-weary strangers. The task of not throwing up requires intense mental focus. At the worst times I basically repeat “don’t throw up, don’t throw up” to myself over and over again while clenching my eyes shut and being careful to breathe exclusively through my nose. The rest of the time I have to keep my mind occupied with anything but the flight. I can’t read on the plane so most of the time my brain swims in circles and dances around with random thoughts.

On this flight, I became preoccupied with the pilot. The pilot doesn’t say much to the passengers on a flight. It’s mostly the flight attendants that do the talking. When the pilot’s voice comes on the intercom, I can’t help but anticipate that what he/she has to say is therefore of utmost importance and deserves my full attention. In that way, I suppose I liken the pilot to the Silent Bob character in the Kevin Smith movies. Anyway, on the leg of the flight from Philadelphia to Rochester, the pilot didn’t make his intercom debut until the end of the journey when he said “I hope you enjoyed your flight today. We’ll be on the ground in 18 minutes.”

The last part of his statement struck me to be a strange combination of calculated specificity, and disturbing vagueness. When most people want to describe a time frame in which something will occur, they give it in intervals. You tell your friends, for example, that you’ll be at the bar in 15 to 20 minutes. This simply wouldn’t cut it for a pilot. The passengers like to believe (and often need emphatic reassurance) that this air travel things is a perfect science and the pilot has everything worked out down the to the very last detail, in this case, the detail being an 18 minute window until arrival. The pilot’s specificity of exact arrival time subtly reassures the passengers that air travel is safe and reliable. However, the pilot of this flight (and many others, as I’ve heard this exact wording before) completely defeated the purpose of his time frame specificity with the vagueness of his “on the ground” vernacular. “On the ground” is a pretty vague statement to come from an airplane pilot and it could mean a number of different things. The plane could have landed safely on the runway, or could lay burning “on the ground” in any number of smouldering pieces. I think someone should bring this to pilots’ attention. It would put people (namely me) more at ease to hear the pilot say something like, “I hope you enjoyed your flight today. We will be landing in Rochester in 18 minutes.”

Reading: A Lost Art

I thought the whole point of having people like "lab assistants" and "office staff" around was to make life easier for the professionals. I'd rather just do it all myself. Without needless, oblivious staff on hand, I could have avoided numerous work-related fiascos such as lab injuries, stolen property, spoiled chemicals etc.

I get into work a few weeks back to find a package sitting on my chair. It's an immunohistochemical staining kit I ordered a month ago. Apparantly it arrived in the department on a Friday. The secretary put it on her desk and forgot about it until the following Wednesday. If it were office mail, I wouldn't care. However, this package is covered with stickers that say "Perishable. Refrigerate upon arrival." It had been sitting around for 5 days unrefrigerated next to this woman's coffee mug and silly action figures. I had to spend a week trying to determine if it was still good. Turns out it is, so heads need not roll. But that's not the point. If it had gone bad it would have cost $750 to replace and the lab runs on a very limited budget. The complete ignorance of others never ceases to amaze me.

Maybe I'm Not Being Clear

The other morning I was going about my business and happen to be carrying a disc golf bag. This nice old gentleman approaches and the conversation that ensued went something like this:

Old gentleman: Excuse me maam. I'm not from round here. I'm from Georgia, so I haven' seen this yet. What is disc golf?

Me: Well sir, they have disc golf everywhere, even Georgia. It's very much like regular golf. You have different discs for driving, approaching, and putting, and there are special targets that you aim for with them.

Old gentleman:(after a confused silence): Do you have to hit them with your club?

I think maybe I need to practice explaining this better for the future.

Web Nazis

The web masters at my work bock employee access to websites, such as MySpace, that are obvious time wasters. This I can understand. They don't want their employees pissing away their time on such things while on the clock. But the web gurus have gone beyond blocking time wasting sites like Myspace and Friendster, and have started blocking sites based on content. Sure, they need to block porn. This makes sense. But 3 months ago they blocked my email server, Runbox. I still can't figure out why they blocked it, but it was a huge inconvenience. I don't use my work email address because I cannot send or store the files I create through that email. The files are too big. I partially found a way around this problem by using the mail2web service that lets me at least access my inbox, but it's still a pain.

The most recent web access infraction that the gurus have imposed came this week. I can no longer view one of the two web comics I read, Questionable Content. (The other is Dilbert. I’m engineer after all.) Despite the name, the content really isn't that questionable. It's about a bunch of mid-20s indie rock kids who work at a coffee shop, play in a band, and have a quazi-menacing anthro pc. The content is no more “questionable” than that on the TV sitcom Friends. Still, when I typed it into my browser today, I saw this:

Your request was denied because of its content categorization: “Adult/Mature Content”

I work with doctors who deal with life and death issues, blood, and gore on a daily basis, yet the content of an innocent web comic about kids working at a place called “Coffee of Doom” is too mature for viewing. That’s twisted. Well, so much for the 45 seconds of entertainment I garnered from that comic during my lunch break. I’m sure I’ll be more productive without it.