From the Airport

Just a tip for travelers flying out of Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix on a sunday. You don’t need to come 2 hours early. Not even close. I now have over an hour and a half to kill before my flight to Cupertino.

Sky Harbor doesn’t have Wifi anywhere as far as I can tell. This makes me sad. Thank god for Bluetooth, my T610 and T-Mobile. I’m blogging as we speak using the 12″ powerbook from terminal C. Whee! If my hotel doesn’t have wireless, then this will be my main connection to the internet for a week. Well, except for the training building of course.

Getting around 5 KB/s so I’m not doing too bad. But I really don’t know how people use modems on a day to day basis anymore.

I really hate airports. Today I’m flying Southwest. Southwest doesn’t assign seats, they just give people boarding groups. This is good and bad. It means that people who come early are given priority, and people who come late are punished. Right now, it was just announced that our flight would be delayed while they do some gate juggling.

They have not announced a boarding call, or even pre-boarding. Yet there is a line to board stretching about 200 feet. Undoubtedly, most of them are carrying level C boarding passes, which means they are last to board. They partially do this because they come late, and can’t find a place to sit. So they just stand. Then they figure if they’re standing, they might as well be standing in line, so then they do get their C group called, they will be the first of that group. Problem being, they block everyone who is boarding before them from getting to the gate. Invariably, the gate attendant has to tell people to step back and let people through.

This stuff drives me crazy. Every time I fly these days, I have to push through a throng of honkeys who are encircling the gate, and giving me shitty looks while I try to board when called. The Airlines should really prevent people lining up before boarding calls. It just causes problems.