Air Travel

Air Travel.

This is a rant. Just in case you're not getting it, I wanted to make that clear.

I travel a bit. Most of the traveling I do is work related and a fair bit of it involves trips overseas. I've been some places that I wouldn't have considered going unless I had to be there for work, such as Suzhou, China, or Houston. Nobody should have to go to Houston, unless you live there, in which case the actual going to Houston should only involve the trip that it takes to get your stuff and go somewhere else. I digress. We'll deal with Houston some other time.

Now, the "being there" part of travel has always been great. I've never had an unpleasant experience at my destination, whether it was touring factories in the worst parts of Lima, setting up a trade show booth in Fort Worth or having all night business negotiations in Seoul, the latter which consisted of trying to get the other guy to agree to a three percent break on the product cost before I had to do a shot of something that might have consisted of fermented snake poop.

However, one must consider the "getting there" part of air travel. As was eloquently described by a software manager I used to work with, "there's something off about being sealed into an aluminum tube and shot through the air at 500mph."

It's not about the food. Everybody always expects that any airline rant involves some kind of discussion about how bad the food is. Well, I guess the airlines were listening, because now, there isn't any food, unless you consider the xxxx-bag full of pretzels that comes at you at about 9 kuh-billion miles an hour just after you catch an elbow in the ribs from the guy sitting next to you five seconds after you nod off. The "flight-attendants" are obligated to deliver this little present to you with the utmost contempt since they can't spread it out over the serving of reconstituted bean and jellied-fish paste they used to pass off as Salisbury steak. Remember how they used to smirk? "Here's your fish-pas... uh, steak. Heh heh...."

The galling part of air travel is the contrast between the extraordinary technology involved and the utter, rank incompetence of every other aspect of the process. This contrast lurks just below the surface, a landscape of every missing bag, fake smile and onion-breathed "Buh-Bye" you get as you de-plane, the mountain range resulting from two prom-night drunk continents of incompetence and NASA bred technology crashing into each other with almost Himalayan abandon. On the one hand, you have an engine capable of producing horsepower that can put a schoolbus in orbit hanging off of an airframe that will last easily through fifty thousand hours of operation. (That doesn't seem like much? Consider that your best Honda will disintegrate after about five thousand hours of operation.) On the other hand, you have to watch a lucrative trip hit the fan because some idiot drove a luggage cart into an airplane between your gate and the runway. ("Gorg not see big aluminum thing in way. Gorg just here to eat luggage.") The best part is watching them work out how they're going to route you to your destination following this tragedy, the new route which will consist of a connecting flight that won't connect, no matter how hard you try to fit the gates together. Putting over seven hundred thousand pounds of aluminum and disgruntled human cattle into the air three thousand times a day with less than one accident every couple of years while not being able to plan ahead far enough to get more than seven sandwiches on board prior to takeoff deserves some kind of award in Idiot Savantry.

And don't get me started on the TSA.

The real reason you have to take your shoes off is so that you don't inadvertently pull them off your feet and use them to kill everybody wearing a white uniform as you go through the security check point in an honest attempt to improve the human race by re-instituting natural selection. No joke, working for the TSA is a clear signal to the laws of nature that you have been selected against. There is no pride in this. If you're considering working for the TSA, instead finish that GED, go to night school and get back into the game. The TSA or "Thousands Standing Around" make the kids from Tard Blog look like the next graduating class from MIT. Being told to take off my shoes and explain why I chose to include my toothbrush in the baggy with my shaving cream to an illiterate, vastly overweight, toothless troglodyte in a white shirt while I'm trying to make a flight that was somehow rescheduled to leave a half hour early without notice is one extreme hassle that should only be reserved for Microsoft employees. To make matters worse, whenever one of those re-routing incidents occurs, you get the super secret probulator special treatment where Trog-Boy paws through your stuff, getting distracted for at least ten minutes on some shiny bits of paper in the bottom of your suitcase, and then sticks a metal detector wand up your how-do-you-do. The result being that you will now miss that connecting flight that you thought you had a shot at making.

And you have a wand up your how-do-you-do.

In all likelihood, you will spend a night in Houston.