Recently, we returned from a week long trip to the heartland, that would be Ohio – “The Heart of it All.” It was great to see family and friends and catch up with the old stomping ground. However, the travel to get there (or anywhere) is just getting to be outrageous (fiscal costs aside.) For my mental health and your entertainment, here’s my Top Ten list on things I hate about travel…
10 – Airport Security. Does anyone really think this is deterring or preventing any attack? I’ve had a “Leatherman” multi-functional tool with a 3 inch long razor sharp knife buried in my briefcase for months. I didn’t know it until I was digging around for something else and came upon it. This bag (with knife) has traveled to Germany three times and Ohio once. It’s a farce and it’s costing valuable time…
9 – Flight Check-in Procedures. While I love the ability to check-in online in advance or to use the machines onsite, this is of little value when there is a 400 meter long line to drop off one’s bags. There has to be a better way. Had we not been traveling relatively light and been able to condense our luggage into carry-on-able state, we would have missed our flight due to the airline’s inability to check people in.
8 – Pre-flight safety talk. I’ve flown millions of miles, literally, I’ve heard this talk thousands of times. Does anyone really think that it is increasing their safety? Unless the “incident” happens on the runway, you’re toast. Passengers are locked into a pressurized aluminum tube hurtling along 5 miles high at 600 miles per hour for the vast majority of the flight. In the event that something does go wrong, you’re not walking away from it. Can the “speech” or at least condense it to say “sit down, shut up, follow our instructions.”
7 – Rental Car Companies. Hey, I’m a capitalist too, but do you really have to hard sell me the additional insurance too each time we go through the rental experience? You know me, you’ve got my profile, I never buy the insurance and I’m not going to buy the insurance this time either. I know the car has to be returned full of gas. Can’t we just check a license, scan a credit card, and be done with it?
6 – Airline food. It’s one thing when the airline gives you bad food as a part of your fare. It’s another when you buy the bad food on the airplane. Why does it have to be bad? Can’t some enterprising soul improve this experience and offer it as a service to the airlines? Why can’t an apple be the snack? It’s bad and getting worse…
5 – Reclining seats. For flights of less than 5 hours, planes shouldn’t have reclining seats if in the economy section in the plane the recline leads to less than 12″ of clearance between the passengers in the plane. These are a nuisance, the recline does nothing other than annoy your seatmate located behind you, and it’s liable to break laptops due to the lack of space.
4 – Megaphone Mouth. Every flight has at least one, the person who is unaware or unable to adjust the volume of their voice to a sound level consistent with the surrounding environment. Over 90% of the time the volume problem is mated to someone who has diarrhea mouth as well – they just can’t shut up. For the sake of my own sanity and everyone within earshot, SHUT UP!
3 – Advertising. I admit it, I’m advertised out. You may have a great product, I don’t care, I don’t want to know about it, it’s unlikely to have any impact on my life at all. The signal to noise ratio on ads has dwindled down to nothing. When watching the on-board “entertainment” I don’t have my DVR present so I can’t ignore your ads – rather than the message being conveyed, it simply irritates me. How about an ad-free environment? That would be unique.
2 – Chicago O’Hare. In twenty plus years of flying, I have never once, not one time, been able to fly through Chicago without a problem. This time it was 3 hours of delay due to thunderstorms (where the delay was mismanaged by the airlines and the airplane had to return to the gate for fuel!) and discretionary maintenance performed during the flight, another 3 hours also requiring a return to gate because the maintenance people didn’t fix the friggin’ problem the first time and the fix had to be undone so the plane could proceed. Guess I’m a slow learner – unless I have to go TO Chicago, I will never fly THROUGH Chicago again.
Attribution: Mike Harding
1 – SFO Baggage Claim. Ah, home airport, sweet home airport. Not. SFO has to have the most inefficient and slow baggage handling capability of any first world airport. Bar none. Number one, your plane can be on the ground for say, an hour, and your bags won’t have arrived at the carousel. Number two, when bags do deem appear, there’s a 50/50 chance that your bags will arrive (I’ve had situations where the bag was “misplaced” in the handling area and had to be shipped – a week later – to my home.) On Sunday night, the airplane landed at 8:40pm. The “priority bags”; from our flight appeared at 9:45pm. Our bags appeared at 10:15pm. No, this wasn’t an Airbus A380, it was a Boeing 757. Did our bags take a different flight? Were the baggage handlers having lunch? Smoking pot? Playing cards? Who knows, but sometimes I have to check a bag and when I do, I know SFO will suck at handling it.
If that’s not enough, someone siphoned gasoline from our truck during it’s time at the long term parking lot; avoid FastTrack parking in South San Francisco or make sure your gasoline access point is secured with a lock.
OK, I feel better now – maybe you even got a laugh out of all these complaints – it’s like Festivus for travel! What do you hate about travel?
