‘Wanna get away?’
By Brad on May 30, 2008 in FYI | comments(1)
I’m gonna get away today, but not because anything bad has happened to me like what happens in those classic Southwest Airlines “Wanna get away?” TV commericals. I’m flying down to Houston this afternoon to see my brother and his family.
I’ll be flying on my “go-to” airline, Southwest. In fact, I haven’t flown on any other airline since I was a very little kid. The price is right. The service is usually pretty darn good. And the flight attendants are typically pretty fun and funny.
I always look forward to those honey-roasted peanuts they hand out. If I’m not too hungry from missing a meal waiting for my flight, I try to save at least one of the bags each way so that I can give them to the girls when I get back. It’s been kind of a tradition.
I’m looking forward to Southwest’s new boarding procedure. Wisely responding to the increasing craziness with people standing in line for up to an hour before boarding to hold their place in line for the longstanding first-come, first-served seating arrangement, Southwest now has a more refined boarding process. When you get your boarding pass, you are assigned a number. You then board in the order of your number (in groups of 5 or 10, I think… I haven’t done it yet, so I’ll clarify after I get back), rather than 45 people in the A group jockeying for position to be at the front of that group, even if they are number 45 out of 45. Southwest has published an online guide about the new process, which you can view here.
This work’s great for me because I work very hard to be as low a number as possible. Typically, I am waiting online to check-in through the website the very minute my flight becomes eligible for check-in. I’ve been as low as #2. Last time I flew with Karla to Las Vegas, we were numbers 19 and 21. Somebody sneaked in between us checking in — and that somebody turned out to be a guy I used to work for!
This time, I checked in and I got… NUMBER ONE! I was almost more excited about getting that position than I am now of being among the first to board the flight. Crazy, I know, but you have to know just how obsessive-compulsive I am about small things like this. It humors many of my family and friends who’ve witnessed it and Karla has been an angel to put up with it all these years.
One quick story about the fun and funny flight attendants: On one of my flights home from wherever it was that I was coming back from, we had an unusually hard landing. You could hear murmuring throughout the plane about the landing. Not missing a beat, the flight attendant came on the intercom and said…
“Sorry about that folks. It wasn’t the captain’s fault. It wasn’t the co-pilot’s fault. It was the asphalt!”
The entire plane erupted into laughter, I’m sure in a small part as a relief from the nervousness of such a startling landing. It certainly helped improve the mood again.
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Well, I’m off to the airport. I’ll be out-of-pocket from the blog through the weekend. I’ll see you back here Monday morning! Have a great weekend!
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