Eccentric Flower talk:201101/Grievances
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:201101/Grievances
First of all, the plane trip is six hours, not seven. Second, I swear to you, Virgin premium economy is plenty cushy. You'll have room to stretch out and lean back, and they'll ply you with free drinks. (Another alternative my parents suggested is to buy three economy seats; they do this for my father now for obvious reasons, but it does give them sufficient legroom.)
Second, you can mock the food in London all you like, but you're wrong. I ate very well there two years ago. Besides, I assure you that seeing the Transport Museum will make up for any flight-related annoyances.
-- 18:05, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Joy:
Go and have a good time grumpuss.
Xanax for the plane trip? It won't make the discomforts go away but it may relax you so much you won't care.
I can't believe the Indian food in London is not enough to make you rejoice for food options!
-- 18:31, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
It is one of my great failings that Indian food does not, on the whole, delight me overmuch.
Actually I'm very fond of basic meat-and-potatoes British cooking, such as it is. The problem is that the British frequently don't cook even their own food especially well.
On the other hand, if we could get a reservation here, that would make up for a multitude of small torments: http://www.stjohnrestaurant.com/
-- 19:22, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Tell you what...call yourself "Patrick," stay home and take care of the cat, and I'll call myself "Columbine" (or the RL equivalent) and geek out to Shakespeare (with a little bit of DW geekiness built in) and traipse about London (a city I love) with your wife.
-- 19:24, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
It would be a fine trip, if they could just teleport me there or put me on a boat.
-- 19:25, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Your entry could have been written almost entirely by my husband, except he is working on much different frustrating projects at work. It's almost uncanny. And we aren't going to London, natch. I took him to a UT production of "Much Ado About Nothing" last year and we had to leave halfway through due to excessive boredom on his part (not entirely unjustified, I confess).
Fortunately he is getting some relief on the sleep front after doing another sleep study and finding a really good sleep specialist/neurologist who is working with him. I don't think we can do anything about the hatred of long plane travel until the TSA magically dissolves or he has to go to some can't-miss thing in Europe (I can't even imagine what that would be).
A theater in Berlin is showing every single damn one of Billy Wilder's movies for three weeks, starting in about a week or so, and if I'd found out earlier I might well have been tempted to spend a week there. I mean, all the early German films and the ones Mitchell Leisen directed and everything! So I understand your wife quite well in her geekiness.
-- 19:43, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
OK, see, if it were a three-week Billy Wilder retrospective, then I'd probably not complain much about the plane trip!
(Edit: No, actually, that's not true, I'd still complain.)
-- 19:48, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
I concur that Virgin Premium is fairly civilized as air travel goes. And they have wifi. Be disciplined about one glass of water (or more) per one alcoholic drink on the flight.
-- 20:20, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Yeah, crabbing about flying to London to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate perform in a Shakespeare play is not going to earn you a lot of sympathy with this crowd.
Last year K flew to NY to visit relatives, without me. I couldn't go, for various reasons. This was mostly a family trip, and I'm too shy and weird to deal with K's family very well. I couldn't afford air fare. We were having some pretty serious relationship problems. So I stayed home and tried to be OK with that, but as K emailed me pictures of herself at the Statue of Liberty and Times Square, pictures I was not in, it felt really sad and wrong. I've never been to NY, and I'd always sort of assumed we'd go together. If your wife went to London and came home burbling about everything she saw and did without you, believe me, you'd regret staying home.
The cat, however, is a serious problem. I don't know what to tell you to do about him. 20 is a delicate age.
-- 20:59, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
My wife DID go to London and came home burbling about everything she saw and did. It didn't bother me. Nor did it much increase my desire to go. The possibility that I might get to go to St. John is the first thing that's seriously perked me up about this all day.
I'm not looking for sympathy, exactly, but I want to make it clear that my stance on this is borne by the genuine, first-hand experience of how traumatic this plane trip is going to be. As I just said elsewhere, after this I'll mostly be quiet on the topic until July - when you'll hear more because I will be so anxious about the trip that I won't be able to sleep or work or think about anything else. I'm not kidding here. This is the shadow that hangs over the whole trip and threatens to ruin it.
(And before someone gets the wrong impression, it is not fear of flying. I love flying. Flying would be great fun - if the TSA and the airlines hadn't managed to remove everything that could possibly be pleasureable from the experience.
I take heart in knowing that air travel is an unsustainable industry. One more serious fuel crunch will be all it takes; then people will realize just how much of our precious, past-peak, rapidly dwindling fossil fuel supply is being squandered in the name of getting us somewhere fast that we really didn't need to get to that quickly or that urgently.)
Did I mention, by the by, that I'm in a truly foul mood today and hate everything and everybody? Here's your grain of salt.
-- 21:07, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
The TSA is the final straw that spurred us to buy an RV. (A 40' Class A diesel pusher, a Monaco Signature Premier series, incredibly nice bit of work, actually, and we got a very good deal on it. And it is also a monstrosity.)
Which means I may be making it out Boston way sometime in the not too distant future.
But unfortunately the RV doesn't solve transoceanic travel. I'll have to wait for the TSA to get solved before doing much more of that myself.
Also, your threat to shoot the first person who asked "Why not just do this on a Linux box?" made me want to put together a solid cost-based argument for doing just that, even when you have spare capacity available. I won't bother because it's a waste of my time and yours, but I wanted to.
-- 21:12, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Oh, a pure cost analysis would be for Linux, no question. But there are complications, some of which I can't describe here.
I will name one: We're not willing to pay for hosting at the level of back-end access that we'd need. Apparently the "middle way" - where you have shared hosting, but they give you root to your share and allow you to mess it up as you see fit instead of only allowing you canned, insufficient solutions - is vanishing. These days it's gimped hosting or dedicated server, and I just couldn't see paying for ANOTHER dedicated server when we have all these Solaris servers where we pay a fair chunk of change every year for (essentially) co-location support contracts anyhow.
-- 21:16, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
The TSA is annoying and stupid, but it's really not that much of a hassle. I just went through by myself on the way over and through British security on the way back with wife and two-year-old. You take off your shoes, you take out your laptop, you get the metal out of your pockets, and you're through it in three minutes (plus waiting on line time, if it's busy). What's the big deal?
I'll consult with Nonelvis on all of this because I'm also a good trip planner and have a number of suggestions. One is: Does AmEx Platinum still have the buy-one-biz-class, get companion-ticket-free deal? Basically, it's the $125 or whatever annual fee for a second business-class seat. Virgin Premium Economy is good; biz class (with 180-degree flat seat-beds) is better.
You will like London Walks -- a whole series of walking tours with very knowledgable guides. I assume you don't like cheesy-touristy things (Madame Tussaud's, etc.), but I think you'd like the history of the Tower of London. Do you like art museums? Huh, I've known you more than a dozen years, and I realize just now that I don't really know your taste in art (beyond the necessity of there being craft involved).
Yeah, Nonelvis and I will plot this all out when we come up in February. Hee hee. This will be almost as much fun as taking you suit-shopping would be!
-- 22:00, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Well, since you picked it, let's see: You take off your shoes (which is ridiculous); your bag has to be passed through the x-ray machine twice because of all the cabling and consumer electronics you're taking (phone, camera, DSi, laptop, chargers and cables for same), some of which you'd prefer not to take in your carry-on at all, because you won't need them until you arrive, but which you can't put in your checked bag because the apes will steal them. Then you get picked for the pornoscan and you opt out because it is a piece of meaningless sham and plus you don't really like any extra rems in your life if they can be avoided and plus when you go through the scanner you can't see your bags for a while and the apes can rummage through them and steal things. So then you have to get the grope and it takes forever. Then you get through and you spend the rest of the time worrying about whether your checked bag will actually make it, but you're certainly not going to comply with the idiotic toiletry rules, which require you to buy or repackage a whole separate set of your usual toiletries for no reason whatsoever (and besides, you couldn't do a week with just a carry-on anyway, unless you want to be one of those assholes with a carry-on the size of Cleveland, whom you think shouldn't be allowed to fly). Eventually you get to your destination and ideally your bag has arrived too and the apes haven't gone through it and stolen anything even slightly valuable you put in it and nothing has burst or leaked all over your suitcase because the apes have thrown it from a great height. Oh and now you can transfer your contact lens case and eyeglass case to it, which you were forced to carry in your carry-on in case your luggage got lost, and you can put your multitool back on your keychain where it belongs because you really hate traveling without it even for a second, it's saved your ass on more than one occasion; and then you can finally go about the business of threading the maze-cum-mall disguised as an airport which is Heathrow and finding your way through ground transportation in an unfamiliar place while your wife is freaking out because unknown subways and such make her panic a little. (We've gotten onto the NY subway at the same place from Penn Station I don't know how many times, and every time, she freaks out a little when she buys a pass because she feels out of her element.)
On the way back you do it all again in reverse.
All of these things (moving the item off the keychain, remembering not to have any change in your pockets, carrying some things in one place and not another, remembering to wear easy to remove shoes, etc) are all minor hassles. But cumulatively, collectively, they are one enormous hassle, made all the more aggravating by the knowledge that it is so completely unnecessary and pointless (not to mention the knowledge that my reward for enduring it all is seven hours in hell).
We have deliberately invited a criminal class into this process to harrass us and make our trip unpleasant. We did this voluntarily. Or I should say, the rest of you did it. I didn't do it, and I still don't know why you all consented to it.
I like art museums but I feel that all art museums are much of a muchness, and that I shouldn't go out of my way to see an art museum in a place I'll go once in my life, when I've barely begun to use the potential of the art museum in my own town. (I would make an exception for the Louvre just because I'd like to see the sheer structure of the place, and spit on Pei's hideous pyramid.)
Waxworks, on the other hand, entertain me with their sheer cheesiness value, and because they are comparatively rare these days. I miss the old Musee Conti in the French Quarter .... I don't do walking tours because their pace and the things they point out are always a bad fit. I'm not sure I have to actually go to the Tower of London to pick up its history. Frankly, my main tourist activity (other than eating) is just to wander around picking up the scenery and watching what people do in their daily lives. There is a lot more interest to me in overheard snippets of London conversation than in a dozen tourist activities. (The only trip I made dedicated to a customary tourist activity in Dublin was a tour of the Guinness brewery, and that was more akin to religious pilgrimage.)
-- 23:07, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
Ahem. I do not, in fact, "freak out" when confronted with Penn Station. It merely takes me longer than you to orient myself to it. Once I have my Metrocard in hand and know where I'm going, I'm fine.
Same for the London Underground. The hardest problem I had there was figuring out where to get an Oyster card. And frankly, I'll probably have an easier time with the Paris Métro than you will, because I can read the signs.
-- 23:38, 10 January 2011 (GMT)
I don't know if you know this, C, but look into traveling with a firearm in your checked luggage. Federal law requires you to declare it and then lock it with something the apes can't get into (there are a few more hoops) but it means that then the whole "the apes will steal it" problem goes away, amusingly enough.
That said, the 'take nude pictures of you or sexually assault you' is the bit I am simply unwilling to tolerate. I will simply not fly, if those are my choices. The rest are major irritations, but those are not tenable choices for me anymore. We want to see the last (or possibly penultimate) shuttle launch this year, which we will not be flying to see, so we will instead be driving our new RV cross-country for that trip.
-- 06:18, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
Except for one trip to Las Vegas with a friend (of 30 years) back in 2005 (and my friend paid for the trip), I haven't flown since 2001. And there is simply no way you are going to get me on a plain until the TSA, and all the security theater around airplanes, goes bye-bye (even Bunny is getting tired of me going "Look at what these TSA Bozos are doing *this* week!")
Where I work, the corporate headquarters is in Seattle, and I told my boss (here in Lower Sheol) that I would only fly to Seattle if flown in a private chartered jet. Funny, I haven't been invited out to Seattle (I even priced a train ticket to Seattle---four times the cost, and it would take the better part of nine days to get there; maybe, *maybe* worth it *if* it was something like the California Zephyr, but otherwise it might not be much better than an airplane).
I don't know what to tell you about PHP and Solaris. I'm stuck using Solaris at work (which wouldn't be *that* bad, except for the proprietary piece of $#!? we're forced to use, and aside from the insane price paid, and the total lack of usable documentation and support, is now considered *legacy code* by the jokers that sold it to us---okay, I'll stop now as I have my own place to rant about this crap) and just about everybody here would love to use something else, even Linux (which has a much better development tool chain). My sympathies.
-- 09:31, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
All right, let's pick this apart, piece by piece.
1) You take off your shoes. Wear loafers or velcro sneakers, like I do. They're more comfy on the flight anyway.
2) Your bag has to be passed through the x-ray machine. So what? How is that any skin of your nose?
3) You have to carry your valuables/medicines in your carry-on. Yeah, and that was true before there was any security at all (and I'm old enough to remember those days) -- baggage handlers can be thieves, and bags can be misrouted. That has nothing to do with the TSA.
4) Pornoscan. This is random; I didn't see any at Newark, and we didn't get picked at Manchester. I think this is less pervasive than is believed, though that may change in the future. Also, I've never seen anyone open a bag at the screening without the person being present. I'm more worried about the other passengers lifting things.
5) Packing/repacking issues. This is a pain in the ass for any kind of travel. Is it easier if you are driving? Sure. But any time you check baggage (including trains, buses and boats), you run the risk of theft and have the necessity of having your necessities with you. Air travel is not unique here.
6) Airport negotiation. Heathrow is a zoo, I'l give you that. So's JFK (Newark and Logan, though, not so much). I know Nonelvis is focused on Virgin, but if the airport is really an issue, maybe look to see if anything flies into Gatwick or Stansted?
The Paddington-Heathrow Express is a huge improvement, however; no longer do you have to spend an hour on the Picadilly line to get into town. The Tube is trivial to negotiate -- Nonelvis is right; once you figure out how to get the Oyster card, you'll look at the T or the Subway like it's primitive.
I recommend picking up a London A-to-Z, which is a book of detailed street maps. I'll also try to remember to bring up my Michelin Green Guides for London and Paris (they're 20 years old, but most of the good stuff hasn't moved) to lend to you. You can then design your own, self-paced, incredibly-detailed-book-guided walking tour.
Get a copy of TimeOut when you arrive, and you'll have a great list of what's on everywhere. If you want serious cheese, there's in addition to Madame Tussaud's, the London Dungeon (Madame T's Chamber of Horrors writ larger and gorier) and The Mousetrap (no cheese pun intended), which has been running for something like 50 years.
-- 15:48, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
I find it fascinating which things you object to on sheer principle and which you don't, as compared to the same lists for me.
-- 16:02, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
Sean finds the whole TSA Theater thing wrong, as a matter of principle, so he'll never be satisfied, no matter how streamlined and simple it becomes.
Having been a Fed, I'm more pragmatic about the need to do something, anything to at least appear to be taking action. The Feds are damned, either way. If they abolish TSA, they'll be pilloried the first time something happens. It won't matter that they probably couldn't have prevented it anyway. What the public will decry is the fact that they weren't DOING anything. This is the same public who are so adamantly opposed to TSA.
Personally, I'd go a step further and implement good old-fashioned profiling, the kind they use just about everywhere else in the world. Imagine the hue and cry over THAT.
It all comes down to attitude, how you approach a situation. I agree with Robert that, anecdotal evidence aside, for the vast majority of travelers, TSA is just no big deal.
-- 16:49, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
I think Bunny has actually hit on the problem I have with the TSA and the security theater ... it's theater. I have to take off my shoes and hop around on a nasty floor while also trying to extricate my laptop, and then someone asks to search my purse (this has happened) and I get my checked luggage back in a mess with broken things in it (also happened). And Chip has to go through all kinds of crap with his CPAP machine. And the thing is ... most of this is WORTHLESS. It is for NOTHING. We are doing it just so people can feel safe and secure, but it's not actually doing jack for security. That's why I am pissed about the backscatter machines and the groping. It's not actually helping. If someone wants to cause trouble, apparently it is still not difficult to do. In the meantime, I'm giving up any dignity and privacy to a bunch of paid thugs so the TSA can APPEAR to be taking action. Screw that.
-- 17:33, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
Bunny, you're right, the government is damned if they do and damned if they don't. It's clear they can't go without doing something - I just wish it were something more useful.
I am actually in favor of profiling, background-checking, a no-fly list which is maintained sanely (that's an important qualifier because our current one is not) - but all of these things (AKA the Israeli system, which concentrates more on the history of the flyer than what's in their bags) are hard to do and take care and competence, and I am not convinced our government has that competence.
Barring that, I don't actually mind an explosives check in all luggage, but it has to be something that actually works and doesn't have holes. (Biggest hole no one talks about: Our tarmac security in airports is LOUSY, and our scans of checked baggage are inadequate. If I were wanting to blow up a plane, why would I bother putting them into my carry-on or on my person when it's so much easier and more effective to get them into the cargo hold?)
I do mind weapons-check hysteria because we seem not to have gotten the idea that anything is a weapon. Sure, confiscate a corkscrew because it has a one-inch knife blade for cutting foil. (This happened to me in Vegas, and since we were in a hurry, I couldn't arrange to have it mailed to me and it's gone forever. Nice corkscrew too.) Meanwhile even a clown like myself knows that with proper training I don't even need a weapon to incapacitate someone or be a threat. You're going to take away my keychain, and then some terrorist is going to hold the flight attendant hostage with a plastic fork. Watch and see. This way leads to madness, and it already has.
(Restricting firearms on planes is a different matter entirely. But then, I hold for restricting firearms pretty much everywhere ... and Ysabel, I don't want to hear it right now.)
-- 18:08, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
but all of these things ... are hard to do and take care and competence, and I am not convinced our government has that competence.
It's not as much a question of competence as it is of money. You can't do a competent job with too few people, too little (and, often, antiquated) equipment and not enough money to hire an intelligent, competent workforce. It was ever thus. Every year, we had to scramble to spend every dime in our budget, lest it be taken away from the next year, regardless of the fact that everything will be more expensive next year.
Al Gore and his ilk attempted to run the government like a private business. Didn't work, because there wasn't enough money to run it. There was nothing he could do about wasteful spending, except to downsize the workforce, creating a domino effect, resulting in the fiasco we have now, and have had for many years. Unfortunately, more tax money goes to pork, not to improving the infra-structure.
So, for the nonce, travelers are pretty much screwed.
-- 20:36, 11 January 2011 (GMT)
Jette covered the critical part for me, yeah. I might be willing to deal with the hassle if it actually did anything other than encourage people to do what they're told. It does exactly squat for actual security, it just makes people think that they're doing something, that's all.
-- 06:49, 13 January 2011 (GMT)
Bwinton:
I'm in the same boat, although not quite as bad, over a company trip to Hawaii for a week in late January. People are envious of me, but, as a foreign national, I'm really not looking forward to a 13 hour flight, _into_ the U.S.A, to spend time mostly indoors at a place that will likely be 5-10 degrees above my "sweating when I lie around" temperature.
-- 18:03, 10 January 2011 (GMT)