Today was taken up with travelling from SJC to SEA.
The good news--the pilot was a genius and managed to get up into SEA through a sucker hole without a lot of hassle or undue bumpiness.
The bad news--man, travelling is a pain in the tuchis.
Okay, first thing, I carry two laptops. As I say--I have to have a PC, but I get my work done on a Mac. The Mac was dusted for the nasty materials by the inspector. It was returned with a snide remark about "you Apple people".
I also carry an iPod (40GB, eat your hearts out!), and a TMobile sidekick that sorta does a lot of stuff okay--as long as you're within range, anyway.
So, yeah, I have some electronics on me.
My name was called about 15 minutes before they started to board. Since I had an indeterminate message about not being able to get a seat, and even though I did the web check-in and did get a seat, I figured I was first on the list for bumping. Nope, they just wanted to know if I would move up 6 rows so a family could sit together. Okay, *that's* easy karma points.
About 5 minutes before boarding, they *did* announce that they were oversold by 3 seats, and some lucky people were going to get a free round-trip on Alaska and get to go on the 6:30PM flight. Urgh. Luckily, some people didn't mind getting an extra five hours in SJC, so okay.
Now on the to plane. Yup--it's full, and I have window seat. Okay--better than being in the middle, that's for sure.
So, we do the usual and take off. This is where life gets more fun. I had a massive infection back in oh, 1987 or so, and it left me with a really nasty case of positional vertigo. That took about 6 months to finally go away, but the next time I took a flight, I found out that my local vertical is shot to hell. I also pick up all the lovely sub-harmonics that jets have. Thank you iPod--once the "okay, you can turn on your toys" announcement came over the intercom, I plugged in the ear buds, which for some reason seems to take care of the worst of it. I'm not a barfer--I'm just not happy.
So, we run into weather just over the Siskiyous. Right on schedule. About 30 minutes later, they announce that they're going to be asking people to put their goodie away a little early, as there may be some turbulence coming in.
Now, at that point, if you could see the ground, you'd see that we were 90 miles south of Portland. They don't even seriously begin a descent until Olympia or so. This is defined as *not good*.
Oy....
Somehow (and I thanked the pilot on the way out--I appreciate this sort of thing, even if a lot of people never notice), the pilot dipsy-doodled his way through the flight, and landed us with not a lot of the bumpies. Somehow, we ended up in Seattle in the only sunshine we're going to see for the next week or so.
Posted by lsefton at November 16, 2003 07:33 PM