FAN: Playing The System

Didn't we just talk about stuff like this? Dude, if I was even slightly tan, I would go buy an Arabic T-Shirt and buy a $200 ticket to Florida. What's $200 when you can score like this?

FAN: Opportunistic Lawyer

How can you read this article and not wonder if this was a complete setup. Obviously these are bright people involved. Who better than a Muslim lawyer to board a plane with an entire group of Muslims and proceed to openly talk about the subject matter while the passengers are boarding the plane? They get kicked off, interviewed, cleared......and now he is already talking about a civil suit. They will pay him to settle and he'll make millions and write a book. God Bless America.

Foul Air Rules

Hmmmm, that title can definitely be read two ways.

Somewhere my old roommate would be rolling if he read this as he is a connoisseur of dick and fart jokes. He would giggle about this story for weeks.

Back On The Road

Wow. I forgot what I missed so much above business travel. Leaving the house at 5:30 AM to make an 8:45 flight rocks! Packing your Chapstick in your suitcase. Waiting in line with my luggage, there was a couple of another nationality that will remain nameless right in front of me. Both smelled like they just ate multiple cloves of garlic for breakfast. In all seriousness, I didn't want to be within 10 yards of this couple, let alone 10 inches. Jesus. I pity the people that had to sit in front of them on the plane. The thing that still freaks me out about airports is how much people talk on cell phones while waiting for the plane. Did we as Americans lose the ability to sit quietly for 30-60 minutes? The woman beside me made at minimum 10 calls and typed furiously on her Blackberry. It's 7:30 AM!! Sit down, drink your coffee and watch CNN or read the paper. Damn! The flight was uneventful and I got my rental car fast. I'm sporting around in a Kia Optimus or something. I wanted the Mini Cooper but then I would have had to pay more. Interesting that the smaller car is more than an intermediate. Anyway, I got to my hotel thanks to my Razr phone's GPS and got settled in. What a place! The Peachtree Plaza Westin. Sweet. I'm on the 52nd floor looking down on the city right now. What a view. Nicest room I've ever had. It's a round floor and each room is a slice of pie with the outside wall being all window. The room even has a nice robe. Comfy! I might keep it. The vendor fair sucked as usual, but they had great food. I ate Cocconut Shrimp all night. I even pilfered some drinks from the bar so I didn't have to drink them from my mini-bar in the room. A can of soda is $2.50! There's a little bag of almonds in there that could be mine for $7.75. No shit. The airplane size alcohol is $7.00 per bottle. It's madness. Madness I tell you. I mean I want to stay in the nicest place possible.....but I wish the nicest places also had vending machines so you don't have to spend $3.00 for a Snickers bar (yup, right off the pricing sheet in the mini-bar. What's cool is looking out towards the airport. You can see the lights from the jets as they come in and out. After the fair ended I got to spend some time with an engineer for another Fiserv product called FIDO. It's an alert system that runs within the core processor for the CUs that is rules based and shoots out emails when something isn't right. It recently foiled a plot by a guy who was depositing large sums via fake checks at multiple branch locations and then started taking it out the next day. FIDO correctly picked the next location he would withdraw from and the police were there waiting for him. Cool stuff. Why isn't our software more sexy?

WAH!

This article is disturbing...to me anyway. When you have countries like Iran with a leader who makes no secret of the fact that he wouldn't mind seeing the U.S. and Israel wiped off the face of the planet, and Islamic militants with the same agenda - what are we supposed to do? Be as suspicious of Southern Baptists as we are of radical Islam? Is this guy insane? Listen Thalif, you can say whatever you want - I am a law abiding US citizen and I'm not worried about my privacy because I'm not breaking any laws or planning to blow anything up! Trace my Google searches, bug my phone, gps my car and follow my credit card purchases. Take a stool sample, spy on me at work and read my medical records. Sniff my farts, my breath and my armpits. If that's what it takes to stop another band of gutless cowards from killing innocent citizens and taking mothers and fathers away from their kids - then I'm all for it. This is the same idiotic logic that has us searching US grandmothers in airports while Arabs on student visas stroll right through. I'm sick of it. If that makes me insensitive - then I'm insensitive. You want it to stop, then you have to have the leaders of the countries that house terrorists stop them. These leaders hide behind the word "terrorists" when they very likely are doing the work that the government wishes it could do itself. Enough. If people in certain communities KNOW who the FBI should be investigating - then they should call the FBI. Otherwise, the FBI is going to come into your neighborhood and question everybody. It's quite simple really. Turn the bad guys in. You turn them in and stop hiding them, and we'll stop knocking on every door and asking questions. Oh yeah, Thalif......."WAH!".

More on Why I Hate Flying......

Big ups to "Iowa Chick" and "UCLA Guy" for the good conversation at the St. Louis Chili's in the airport. My flight was to leave St. Louis at 4:05 and board at 3:40. My meetings broke up early due to an impending snow storm in Chicago where one of the attendees was heading. I got to the airport at 1:00 Central thinking I would catch an earlier flight home. No deal. In a twist of cruel irony...I could get home 25 minutes faster if I connected in, you guessed it, snowy Chicago. I went to the bar at Chili's to relax and have some lunch...and 5 glasses of ice water to rehydrate myself from Wednesday night (a future entry). I went to my gate at 3:35 and was told my flight was delayed 1:15 because it was coming from .......Chicago. We boarded at 5:10 Central and the Capt. told us we had a good tail wind and we would make up time. We landed at 8:10 (40 minutes late) and then proceeded to sit on the tarmac for 10 minutes because of "some mixup". We were all squished into a regional jet that put all our carry-ons into the belly of the plane...effectively making them not carry-ons at all. So, we now had to wait for our bags to be unloaded while the people that did check bags got to start walking. I was at the front of the steps to the sky walk so as the bags came on, a nice worker asked me to pass the bags back to the end of the line. So, I asked her if she could put me on the payroll. I mean, after all the waiting I did yesterday - she now expected me to smile and do her job for her. Well, if you know me, I'm nice as hell so I passed the bags back....of course...mine was third from last. As I was walking away, I asked her why on smallish jet flights they don't just say you have to check your bags but all of a sudden, she wasn't so friendly now that "her" job was done. Thanks. Buh-Bye. I felt like David Spade had just blown me off. I walked out to wait for the shuttle which got there in a record 20 minutes (heavy sarcasm). Had I paid a private lot to shuttle me, I'm sure the economy shuttle would have passed 10 times in the same 20 minutes. When the shuttle made the second stop, too many people got on and the driver couldn't shut the door so he asked 2 people to get off. There was a small disagreement about who the 2 would be. I hope that old dude didn't get hurt, but I didn't push him that hard and it's only about an 18" drop from the platform. I parked in 'B' and the bus started dropping off at 'K'. I got home at 10:00 PM Eastern. There is something very wrong with this process. It covered 813 miles. I drive 80 mph. Thats 10 hours. I left a meeting at 12:30 Central and arrived home at 10:00 Eastern. I could have taken anything I wanted had I driven. Gas would have cost me about $80. Somebody PLEASE remind me again why we fly?