The Bill Mattocks muttered....



I've recently reached the place where it was time to make a change.
The continued stresses of air travel in a post-9/11 world, continued
and advancing intrusions into my (our) personal privacy, and the
general business climate (more travel, spend less money doing it, etc)
have combined to make me finally decide that its time to hang up my
rubber chicken and move on.

Go not gently into the night.

I'll miss your wit, and the comprehension that you used your keyboard asa
escape hatch, a way of venting frustation at the foibles and dumbass
factors increasingly inherent in air travel. I always marveled that one
with as many built in idiosyncrasies and neuroses and physical
manifestations thereof as you could even manage to travel as you did. Few
might appreciate that for you what may have seemed easy and uneventful was
harder for you.

I'm not surprised at your decision (although to do it without having founda
new position seems in some respects uncharacteristic for one as well
organized a traveler as you often seemed to be).

After keying that sentence, an entirely different reaction struck
me....that your travels may have been so directed, organized, ticketed,
planned and developed by others, that it wasn't you who were so well
organized, but the system in which you functioned, and that you often were
relegated to the condition of "Traveling Drone", a Chaplinesque figure
caight up in the cogs and machinery of a system, only able to rebel with
the occasional outburst. In a sense, that explains your reaction to
WN....the only blow you could strike, the only battle you could win, some
say in the choice of airlines.

I don't know if my daughter, a mid level corporate exec/road warrior's
approach is better, but it qualifies as more effective. She has almost
single handedly revamped and forced the restaffing of her company's travel
department and policies on the grounds that sensitivities to time and costs
had so outweighed sensitivities to the perspective and "needs" of traveling
execs and staff, that the job performance of the travelers was diminished
far more than any savings could match. I at first laughed when she claimed
that the worst examples of sexism were not in the airlines or hotels she
used, but among the women in her company's travel office, most of whom had
never traveled further than a hundred miles, had no f'ing concept of how
hotels compared, possessed no sense of distance or spatial relations, and
were greater "male chauvinist pigs" than any of the male execs.

Good luck looking. There's more out there than you may think, but a
creative sense of relocating may be needed....

TMO