Tomorrow my family gets on a plane to Hawaii, and for anyone who knows I live on the side of a mountain where it’s very cold in the winter, you’d think that would be a great thing.

Lady Surfer

Suddenly, my wife won't let me take up surfing.

And it would be, except for the following reasons:

  1. I am a Pasty White Guy, and me on a tropical beach is like a metal dish in a microwave (it’s mostly sparks and suffering)
  2. Any time you leave the mountains in winter, you risk coming home to a six-foot high ice wall where your driveway used to be
  3. We’re flying United Airlines

This last bullet might confuse some of you. It shouldn’t.

Enjoy Your Inflight Enema

I usually don’t complain about the airline until after they’ve lost my luggage or stolen my camera or stranded us in Salt Lake City for 48 hours (all true), though this time I can beat the holiday rush.

My wife spent the extra dollars to put us all in one row in the “Economy Plus” section. Weeks later, she want back to United Airline’s website to confirm, and discovered they had moved us to three scattered seats around the airplane.

Hardly ideal for people traveling with a three year-old, and a little confusing since — as I noted before — we had spent the extra money to sit together in the Plus section.

We never did get a cogent explanation, but after an strongly worded inquiry by someone with more frequent flier miles than the New York Yankees (put together), we got — and great big tears of gratitude are welling up in my eyes as I type this — two of the three seats we originally paid for.

And they say customer service is dead.

Apparently the airlines are willing to charge you extra for the Plus section, but they’ll happily repossess the seats we’d already paid for to cage a few extra dollars for the aisle seat.

Imagine charging clients to write an ad campaign, then telling them halfway through they’ll have to cough up extra for adjectives, and the campaign won’t be about their product anyway.

Perhaps the airline is perfectly happy to sit my three year-old next to strangers who may not appreciate seatmates who announce their need to “make poopy” only seconds before the act actually occurs.

I’m not all that OK with it.

Thus do we redefine “family friendly.”

Me? I’d stay here.

Death Before Disembarking

It seems that travel visionaries like myself are rarely appreciated while alive (between the beach and the airline, death could strike as early as next week), so we’re still going to Hawaii.

I’m supposed to have Internet access (let’s hope it’s not provided by a subsidiary of United Airlines), and we’ll see if I can get a little writing done.

And just in case United decides to sell our seats while we’re still over the Pacific, let me take this opportunity to wish all my readers a Merry Christmas and Happy New Years.

We’ve got a lot of writing ahead of us in 2012, Tom Chandler.

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