Air

The best thing I ever hope for when travelling is an uneventful flight.
It seems like it would be a little greedy to ask for a flight that
lands early, or doesn't have any people on it. I hope for flights
where there won't be too many people scheduled for the flight, so
nobody gets asked to not be on the plane. I hope for a line at the
ticket counter that's small enough so that I don't need to fly to
Newark, New Jersey, instead of Chicago. I hope that, when we get onto
the runway, the plane doesn't turn back around and take us to the
terminal. I hope that when I'm in the air, Northwest's entire computer
system doesn't crash and burn, leaving me to become a frozen carcass in
the Northwest G concourse in Detroit. Unfortunately, all of these
things have happened to me at some point.
Today, it was the ticket counter. Apparently, Northwest thinks its a
sharp idea to replace their human tellers with E-ticket machines. The
problem is, nobody can figure out how to use these machines. Thus, the
lines grow longer as people gradually ascertain that, no, they don't
know the secret Mason handshake, and no, they don't have $3,000 to
donate to the United Way, and that they would rather be in the line
where there's a real, surly, overworked person at the other end. It's
like Big Air is trying to remove some of the last shreds of
accountability from the flying process. This is crap. Already, if the
plane is late, it's nobody's fault. If your flight is cancelled, it's
nobody's fault. If you have to sit on a hot plane for seven hours
while everybody in the cockpit jokes about what a good trick they're
playing fooling everybody into thinking there's actually a problem,
that's nobody's fault. Now, they want to make it so that if you don't
even get your ticket, nobody is to blame but you. It's a brave new
world, folks.
On the plus side, I feel super-secure now that there are two more
securiity guards at the checkpoint. Anyhow, that's all of Donald's
dispatches from the airport. Cheers!