Air Travel Gods looked the other way on July 19th

As if air travel wasn’t challenging enough, some of us, including those on the 2,000 USA flights that were cancelled on July 19th were treated to a rude awakening.  As much as Artificial Intelligence is simultaneously going to destroy us and enable us to reach new heights, it couldn’t save any of us on July 19th.

So after another attempt at flyfishing, we’re driving back to Salt Lake City airport from the northwest corner of Utah.  It’s about a three and a half hour drive.  But first, a quick painful flyfishing story: I have all new microscopic leader on the end of my fly line.  Naturally, someone else put it on as tying knots is not my thing.  Before we leave for the river, I masterfully attach a sumptuous fly (a massive black Mormon Cricket the size of Nevada) to the very tip of my line and use my handy dandy clipper to remove the excess line.  You see you need to remove the excess line because these are exceptionally intelligent fish - think brain food. If you leave excess line near your fly, the trout will have none of it.  No AI here, these fish learn the old-fashioned way, trial and error.  As we’re fishing and I’ve endured a commensurate amount of angst, it becomes clear that my fly is not as enticing as I thought it was.  Time to change the fly.  I come to realize I can’t find my clipper, I must have left it back at the cabin.  So I yank off my fly, again the old-fashioned way.  And with the assistance of Walgreen’s Foster Grants, I’m able to thread the microscopic tip of my line through a submicroscopic hole in my new tiny fly…that had to be constructed using an atomic microscope.  Okay, new knot has been tied and a minimal amount of four letter words have been disbursed.  I need to clip off the excess line stemming from my new knot.  Without my clippers I need to resort to using my teeth to remove the excess line…much like Huckleberry Finn would do.  As I attempt to chomp down on the excess line, I feel the point of my new fly hook piercing my lower lip.  Luckily there were no carnivores in sight.  {Note: We get back to the cabin that night, I take off my fly vest and find my clippers in a small top pocket of the vest.  Who said life is fair?;-}

On the way back to the airport we pass what had to be the port-a-potty capital of the world.  Being that I had just relinquished my own front yard garden variety port-a-potty during a 12 week kitchen renovation, I felt an earned appreciation for this sea of equipment on display for all to see.  Heated seats, huckleberry scenting, built in stereos, they had it all.  Add a microwave and you have a very tiny house.  It was about the time we were passing this amazing display of hi-tech equipment that the radio alerted us about a snafu in the technology that our global airline industry uses.  At first I was nonchalant about the news, thinking, “Oh too bad for them.”  Whoever them is.  Then my iPhone buzzed with an alert from my airline and I quickly realized I was one of them.  The message: Due to circumstances beyond our control, your flight will be delayed two hours.  I’ve learned over the years that a message like that means, we have no idea how long you’ll be camped out at the airport…make yourself comfortable.  

It seems that a security company named, Crowdstrike and Microsoft had a finger pointing contest trying to decide who was responsible for allowing a revision of new software to flummox the global airline industry.  And when it happened, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men…and all the king’s AI bots, couldn’t get humpty back up and running again.  At least not right away.  For more years than I’d like to admit to, I worked in the technology field.  One of the scariest times was when we were forced to upgrade a customer’s code before it was fully baked.  Invariably, horrendously bad things would happen and the lashing received from my customer would leave permanent scares.  I remember during one such occasion we thought we caught the bug in the new code that had just crashed their world.  Upon suggesting we try it again, my customer looked me sternly in the eyes and said, “I’d rather be lit on fire than try that again.” 

Back at Salt Lake City Airport, an angry mob of potential flyers is waiting around our new gate.  The captain for our flight arrives and begins to address the mob, many of which have started lighting torches.  I liken the scene to an old Frankenstein movie where the townsfolk are surrounding the castle where the monster is hanging out.  The good doctor comes out trying to convince the crowd that has much as the monster has ripped off a couple of heads, he’s really a nice guy once you get to know him.   Actually the captain did a very nice job of clearly explaining the situation and that it wasn’t his fault, this time.  He went on to explain that we do have a plane and it does have fuel and he knows how to fly it to Newark, NJ.  People seemed to calm down and I was thinking of asking him if he’d like to run for President.   

It was a smooth flight home; we made up some time and land with no problems.  Spirits were high.  As we’re taxiing to the new, state of the art Terminal A, with it’s bazillion available gates, the head flight attendant gets on the PA system and asks that anyone who does not have a connecting flight to hold your horses and let those running to a connecting flight to pass.  All of these stressed out people are lined up in the aisle ready to bolt.  As we pull into our gate, we’re all cheering them on with words of encouragement.  You could smell the good karma wafting in the air.  Then, as luck would have it, someone lit a stink bomb and we waited 20 minutes for someone to connect the jetway to the plane and open the door.   And with that, pop goes the karma balloon!  

So maybe the taking off, tracking, and the landing of aircraft is not the area we should cut back on as if these peoples’ jobs are akin to those who flip burgers at McDonalds.  For the last year I’ve noticed that “no gate available” and “no people to man the jetway” are neck and neck delays.  And just because in preparation for one of my flights this year, where the pilot ran our plane into the jetway… this should not raise a red flag…especially if you have laser focus watching the bottom line.  In the not so distant future I can see the airline industry’s new motto will be, “Safety Second!”

So How Do You Like Your Coffee?

So I broke down, got out the crowbar and opened my wallet.  You see just about every appliance in our kitchen, along with the cabinets are disintegrating simultaneously.  On top of that, I’ve never liked the color or pattern of our granite countertops, they make me nauseous.  Appetizing!

So I enthusiastically signed up for kitchen remodeling – Read Sarcasm.  (Shortly I’ll be writing a book, “Remodeling Kitchens for Idiots.”)  

We’ve taken the precaution of sending our dog on vacation and we have the cat sequestered in the basement with a plug-in cat-calming thingy working overtime.  It’s now day one of our kitchen project, otherwise known as demo-day.  An unnerving amount of loud, angst inducing noise is happening pretty much non-stop.  Just when you think it might be over, a bombastic crash startles the bejeebers out of you, sending you back into a fight or flight mindset.   In concert with the noise is the vicious house shaking that tells you destruction is underway.  Shaking so bad, it put to shame the cadre of earthquakes we had last month.  By the end of the day our kitchen or what was our kitchen is nothing but framing wood and a lot of pipes and electrical stuff I wish I never knew existed.  No sink, no stove, no refrigerator, and no microwave-Nada!  And worst of all, no coffee in the morning.   It’s time to get creative, there must be coffee in the morning.  We came to realize that without the kitchen sink and its faucet, our bathrooms were going to need to start pulling double duty.  We started off by calling it bathroom coffee, but with my affinity for toilet humor, I so deemed it, “Toilet Coffee” or TC for short.  I can see the commercials now as Juan Valdez makes a pit stop for a fresh cup of TC.

As luck would have it, my wife convinced me months earlier that we should rent a cottage in Florida for the last two weeks of April when the rates are much lower.  This sounded reasonable and it wound up coinciding with the start of our kitchen debacle, I mean work.  What unbelievably good luck, I should have bought a lottery ticket.  We left on day three of our remodel and arrived at our cottage with no issues – Hooray!  The manager for this small enclave is a very nice older gentleman.  When he stops by our cottage to pick up our final payment he tells us, “You know you could stay no charge for an extra three or four days, nobody has rented the cottage after you.”  Wow, we thank him and take it under advisement.  I’m leaning against it - too messy and lots of moving pieces would have to be dealt with.  That and I’m a bit of a homebody.  But since my home was a wreck, what the heck?  Let’s stay, it’s a gift.  

So now it’s time to leave Florida.  At this point I’m climbing the walls.  More like King Kong scaling the Empire State Building.  We arrive at the airport in plenty of time and cruise through security.  As we approach our gate, I can see through the large windows that our plane is already here – great!  But as I get closer, I notice the plane is a strange distance from the jetway boarding bridge.  And the jetway itself is only half extended.  If I were going to make it onto the plane, I would have needed a big bowl of Wheaties that morning and then set an Olympic long jump record.  There are now a number of serious looking fellows down underneath the plane taking pictures of the wing.  It seems that when the pilot was coming in with the plane we were to be taking home, he hit the jetway.  How do your do that?  (Further investigation revealed that while at Top Gun school, our pilot’s nickname was Eagle Eye.)  As it is, I’m not hard of smelling, and this situation reeked of impending doom.  After a short eternity, my wife gets through to the airline and believes she’s made us a reservation on the next flight out.  Airline then cancels our original flight and the reservation system goes bonkers.  The AI capabilities of the phone App could not handle the onslaught of enraged travelers.  It was sent back to night school for anger management training.  We go to our new gate and the overwhelmed gate attendant with access to their computer systems tells us, “Yes, I see your reservation, but you don’t have seat assignments.   And now this flight and all remaining flights to Newark for the day are oversold…by a lot.”  After a commensurate amount of further torture, our luggage is lost and we’re put up in a Best Western that was supposed to be two miles from the airport.  I’m not saying it was as far as the Braidwood Inn, but it was a hike.  We caught a 6AM flight out the next morning, and thank goodness Eagle Eye was nowhere in site.  

We’re back in our broken home now.  And I’m enjoying the perks of toilet coffee in the morning…pun intended.  Or as Colonel Kilgore from Apocalypse Now would say, “I love the smell of Toilet Coffee in the Morning.”