Flight 012: Garbage In, Garbage Out

There are few things more sad than eating Taco Bell at midnight with your coworker in the lobby of a nondescript motel in the suburbs of Seattle.

This was supposed to be a longer post about nutrition but I think the above says it all. Well, that and the consumption of 3 bacon cheeseburgers in 2 days.

I've decided to get my health back on track though. I've been trying to play tennis consistently for the last few months, and I think I'm going to bite the bullet and join a gym as well! My sister just joined one so hopefully it will be good motivation to have a workout buddy.

I feel like I've been running around nonstop all weekend trying to do everything and I just hit a wall sometime between last night and this morning. I woke up in the middle of the night with a painful sore throat and couldn't fall back asleep for a couple hours because it was so uncomfortable. I suppose this is what I deserve for treating my body so poorly. My main priorities for this week are now to catch on sleep, vitamins, and nothing else.

As of now, I have nowhere to travel this week! I'm scared to say it too loudly for fear of jinxing myself. It's pretty damn exciting though, especially when I'm already feeling under the weather. There's nothing more I want than to come home every night to my own apartment.

A sad thing happened tonight. My one and a half year-old nephew was looking at the magazine I was flipping through and saw a picture of a plane. He pointed to it and said my name. I guess that's how he thinks of me, the aunt who's never around because she's always on a plane! To top it off, his dad told me that he saw a picture of my Blackberry Curve in a magazine and said my name too! Depressing.

Flight 011: Southwest Airlines - "LUV" Is Not In The Air

I am now at the Westin in downtown San Diego for the night. I flew down earlier today on Southwest for a meeting. It was a pretty strange flight. The crew made a point of repeatedly saying that we weren't allowed to put beverages, electronics, or big books in the seat pocket. I think it was stressed more emphatically than any of the safety rules. I tried searching on Google to see if this was another silly measure imposed by the FAA but didn't come up with anything. Therefore the only thing I can think is that the crew didn't want to have to clean out as many seat pockets between flights. This reason seems absurd. I can understand that the cleaning is probably the least pleasant aspect of the job, but it's still part of the job. And isn't the purpose of the seat pocket to store things during flight...such as water bottles, ipods, and books of all sizes? I'm interested to see if it was isolated to this one flight crew or if I'm going to have to hear about how dangerous the seat pocket is through all my Southwest flights now. Next stop is Austin tomorrow so I'll find out soon enough.

In happier news, I've decided to write about at least one new thing every week that pleasantly and surprisingly delights me. The inaugural find is a greeting cards website called Someecards.com. This site is, without a doubt, one of the most hilarious sites I have ever come across. Here are just a few of the gems I found:



As someone who has to create a new expense report every week and tape all physical receipts to pieces of paper, I can truly relate to the sentiment and find it damn funny.



I think anyone who has to create presentations on a regular basis feels the pain here. I sent this to a coworker recently who spent hours preparing for the wrong topic because it was miscommunicated by her manager. Fun fun fun.

I think my goal is to communicate via only these cards for a whole day and see how many people I can offend and entertain simultaneously.

Flight 010: Too Much Information

On my flight from Minneapolis to Chicago O'Hare yesterday, our pilot came on the intercom at the end of our descent to mention that we might have noticed that the plane switched runways at the last minute. He then went on to explain that it was because he was notified at 5 miles away that there was debris on the runway we were initially assigned to. Now, I'm obviously very happy that we switched runways and that the debris was noticed by someone. However, I then had images of debris ripping through the fuselage...and well, you know the rest. It got me thinking about the topic of TMI - too much information. I'm the type of person who wears her heart on her sleeve, which has gotten me in a fair amount of trouble in the past. Even so, I recognize there are many situations where you can provide too much information.

I made this mistake at work about a year and a half ago when I let the head of another business unit know that I was not interested in moving to a position on his team. I went on to explain that I felt it would be a step backwards for me. I thought it was a civil conversation that resulted in a mutual understanding. Little did I know that it would turn into a gigantic clusterf*ck resulting in me sitting with 2 execs chastising me for acting entitled and disrespectful to the "chain of command." Honestly, the phrase "chain of command" was used more than once. I couldn't believe I was hearing this at a company with less than 40 employees at the time. Talk about disappointing.

I've also seen the perils of TMI in my personal life. Take, for example, the case where you find out that your friend's significant other is less than perfect. Had you asked me 10 years ago where I stood on this issue, I would have been adamant that honesty is the best policy in every situation. Since then though, I've seen friendships fall apart over bad relationships and experienced it first-hand myself. I had an interesting conversation with a close friend about this issue recently and she made a great point: if your friend already knows her boyfriend or husband has done questionable things in the past, what's the point of raising it again? Clearly some comfort level with his faults has already been established so isn't it just damaging to your own personal friendship to aggravate a sore point? These days, if I have a concern, my policy is to just say it once and never again. Is that right though? I have no clue - I think it balances my need to say something with my wish to keep the friendship on an even keel.

Flight 009: Decompression...and another Destination

Because I'm away from home so much, I often feel like I have to make the most of my personal time once I get home. What does that mean? Well, sometimes it just means spending a lot of time at home sleeping and relaxing. More often than not though, it means that I want to go out with friends and stay out late getting drunk and silly. Is it fun? Yes. Is it healthy? Hmm, not sure. I had a big night out on Friday, and while it was a great time and exactly what I wanted, I was more tired and worn out on Saturday than when I initially returned home from traveling. I guess the upside is that I definitely stayed in and did nothing Saturday night except catch up on expenses and watch some good old mind-numbing TV. But the source of wanting to go out really stems from this desire to shake off the work and meetings of the week. It's hard to delineate between business and personal time when you get home from a trip and open up your laptop again in the living room. I find that I need to go out and be away from my computer and emails before I can really shut things down.

I flew first class on United for the first time today out of necessity because there were no other seats left. It was an interesting experience since it's always seemed like such a special treat for the few elite, but in reality, it's not all that different from economy and you're still on a plane for the same amount of time. Now if somebody could make first class go faster, I would definitely shell out more money for that. What I did like was boarding first, getting some free snacks, and getting off the plane first as well. However, combine Southwest's A-List with Jetblue snacks and you've got pretty much the same experience. I don't think I'll ever fly first class domestically for personal travel because I can't see how the perks are at all worth the cost. However, the experience did serve to remind me of just how warm and fuzzy great service can make you feel. The flight attendant who was serving us in the first class area used our first name any time she said anything to us. For example, "Gary, would you like any fruit?" "Tom, are you connecting to another destination today? I can tell you which gate you'll be flying out of." It's such a little touch but it goes a long way in making somebody feel a little more memorable, and consequently, special. I usually try to use people's first names in meetings so that they know I didn't forget them, but I'm going to try a little harder moving forward.

I'm sitting on the ground at Denver airport now waiting for my flight to depart for Minneapolis. I'm conflicted about this airport. The pros are that it's clean, has moving walkways, free WiFi, and many food choices. However, the cons are that it skimps on electrical outlets (thus the sitting on the floor), requires trams to get to baggage claim & ground transportation, has offsite car rental, and is incredibly far from the actual city of Denver. Oh well, just a few more minutes here and I will be on my way to Minneapolis for a whopping 20 hours of fun & business.

Flight 008: Pat-Me-Down Tulsa

It's a great feeling to make a flight that gets you to your destination hours earlier. There's only one direct flight from Tulsa to San Diego, but it leaves at 3:35pm and my meeting didn't end until 2:30pm so I figured I had no chance of making it. I decided to just check the status after my meeting though, and it was delayed an hour! While my coworker drove us back to the airport, I was able to cancel my Southwest refundable ticket and book myself on the ExpressJet flight using my handy Verizon broadband card. I love the flexibility of Southwest refundable tickets - I probably end up changing my flight at least every other week.

Because I booked my flight so last-minute though, I had to go through the special pat-me-down security aisle. I think Tulsa's got the most stringent pat-down process I've seen in any airport. The woman before me was seriously unhappy - she had on this long, flowy skirt so it was hard to run the scanner around her body and between her legs. By the time the TSA lady asked her to put one leg out to make it easier, she started yelling and looking kinda psycho, saying "fine, why I don't I just hike my skirt up for you," which she then proceeded to do. Yow, I saw way too much in that instant! She had a nice little audience comprised of the TSA lady, the TSA male supervisor, 2 TSA cops and me by the time she was cleared through.

Anyway, Tulsa was brief and very cloudy. If you ever find yourself there, I would highly recommend staying at Hotel Ambassador. It's not much to look at from the outside, but the rooms are really nice inside. At the end of the day, hotels matter a lot to me because they make the difference between my getting sleep or tossing and turning all night, which in turn impacts how my meetings go. So I don't mind having my company shell out a few more bucks so I can be more comfortable :) Things that are important:
1. cleanliness - I have a deep fear of encountering bedbugs so I have to do a pre-inspection of every bed...kinda obsessive, I know
2. comfortable bed
3. room service - the last thing I want to do is drive around a foreign city at 10pm looking for fast food
4. toiletries - not a big deal, but I love the W Hotel's Bliss products
5. WiFi - not so important anymore now that I have my broadband card but I hate hotels that don't offer WiFi

Flight 007: Hotlanta

I had a short night of sleep before my meeting in downtown Atlanta. As you can see from the picture, there is still a lot of damage to be fixed from the tornado that ran through downtown Atlanta last week. All of those white spaces on the building are places where the windows broke from the pressure. I can't imagine how much glass was on the sidewalks in the aftermath, I'm glad it happened at night! After my meeting I headed straight back to Atlanta airport to hop another flight to Tulsa by way of Houston. Atlanta airport is huge -- I would definitely give yourself enough time to get through security, hop on the tram, and then walk the distance to your gate.

I had a little bit of a flight scare for the first time ever. As we began our descent into Houston, the panel next to me started vibrating like crazy. Everybody around me looked over, including the flight attendant who promptly headed toward the cockpit without saying a word. I gotta say that I was pretty zen about the whole thing though. I figured there was nothing I could do so I just tried to ignore it, haha. The guy next to me thought it might have been an engine thing because our row was aligned with the engine on the left wing but he asked the flight attendant as we left and he said it was an A/C pack issue, whatever that means. Anyway, I'm happy to say that I made it to Houston in one piece.

Flight 006: Up In the Air

Planes are great for catching up on sleep and reading. I got a refreshing 30-minute nap in the first part of my flight to Atlanta and then started a book called "The Female Brain" that was suggested to me by a friend. It's certainly interesting to read about how dramatically our ever-changing hormones affect our mood and reality. However I couldn't help but feel like the author's classification of how hormones manifest into different female behaviors was a little too stereotypical. Do little girls really naturally gravitate toward socializing together that much more than little boys? Do women really end up in less math & science careers because we have an uncontrollable hormonal affinity for more social occupations? Perhaps I'm just on the light end of the estrogen scale, but I know that I'm pretty happy in my tech profession and still manage to find time to socialize as well. I'm not sure I have any other explanations for the disparity myself besides the typical cultural gender stereotypes, but so far I'm still a little skeptical with the theories proposed.

Here's an excerpt that bothered me, for example, regarding teenage girls: "The hormones that affect their responsivity to social stress are going sky high, which is where they get their off-the-wall ideas -- and clothing choices -- and why they are constantly staring at themselves in the mirror. They are almost exclusively interested in their appearance, specifically whether the boys who populate their real and fantasy worlds will find them attractive." I mean, come on, I remember having other interests outside of looks & boys in high school and didn't feel like I was that atypical. It just seems a little trivializing to generalize teenage girls in this way. Likewise, it also generalizes that boys essentially become mute in high school because "sexual pursuit and body parts become pretty much obsessions."

One passage that I did find really interesting was about how a child's emotional and stress hormone reactions get their earliest shape while still in utero. That means that mothers who are stressed out during pregnancy can pass those traits on to their babies before they've even given birth. It might seem like common sense, but I still think it's both amazing and scary that the nurture process essentially begins at conception.

After reading about 60 pages, I decided to move on to the daunting task of clearing out my Google Reader. I am excited and proud to say that I read (skimmed) over 500 items and am now back at 0! Of course that number will not be at 0 once I land, but for now, I will take great satisfaction in this happily suspended offline moment in time.

It turns out that I happened to be in SNA airport at the same time as my coworker, but we didn't discover it until I'd already boarded my flight! I wonder how often that happens, where I'm in the same airport as somebody else I know but we're just too wrapped up in our Blackberries and destinations to notice.

Speaking of SNA (also known as the airport in the OC), I think I might have found my new favorite airport!
Pros: Onsite Hertz car rental, good selection of food & drink, seating available with electrical outlets, no trams or commuter rails, very clean. It's a well-known fact that one of my favorite foods is tater tots, and the Oasis restaurant inside the airport serves tater tots with breakfast dishes! I heart SNA.
Cons: Just one complaint - I was in the priority boarding line that looked relatively short but it took a really long time to get through because there were few scanners open and they funnel all of the airport/airline staff through the same priority line, which kind of defeats the purpose. I'll have to see how it goes next time before I judge too harshly though.