Hello, my name is Randy Pollestad. You may remember me from that humorous update that I posted a month ago or the one I posted before that which really wasn't all that funny. You may have also noticed that not a whole lot has been posted since then. Now, I could sit here and make up some farcical and absurd reason for my absense such as the fact that I was kidnapped by a tribe of Venezuelan cannibals after they subdued me with the poison from their vicious blowguns but that would just be an outright lie. (The tribe was actually from Chile but I can't reveal that fact due to the NDA that I signed.) No, the truth of it all is far more simple: I've been traveling!
I'll admit that I am not much of a fan of travel. While I can certainly appreciate all the magic and science that goes into modern travel, that doesn't make me like it in any greater capacity. 9/11 didn't help matters any, making everyone who boards a plane feel like a criminal. It's debatable whether our airports are any safer today than they were pre-9/11, but I suppose the TSA is too busy running around and yelling at everyone to really make that much of a difference. Oh wait, I have to take my computer out of the bag before I can proceed through the checkpoint. That's safety!
Still, there is no avoiding the airport and the first step to having a successful travel experience is to conquer the behemoth that is the modern airline repository. After passing level one of the airport game which largely consists of making your way around the annoying traffic cops who walk the sidewalks outside and apparently have nothing better to do than to yell at people and blow their whistles constantly, level two consists of getting past the security checkpoint. This is a hard level to pass without cheat codes, largely because of the absolutely insane amount of stupid people who act like they have never been through a security checkpoint before. While I do chide the TSA reps for constantly yelling at everyone, I probably would too if I was in their shoes. As a passenger, I have two responsibilities while in line at the checkpoint: one is to have my boarding pass ready and the other is to have my id ready, and it simply boggles the mind how many people fail to successfully accomplish these two easy steps quickly. We're not asking you to solve the equation to pi here for crying out loud.
Once you've navigated your way past the line to the checkpoint, you actually get to arrive at the checkpoint. I can only assume that this is some sort of halfway house for the more retarded amongst the TSA personnel because only the best and brightest would want to get paid mininum wage to stand in front of an x-ray machine for 8 hours a day. They have a huge sign hanging over the whole place that reads: "We take all comments about guns and bombs seriously. Please no jokes." Disregarding the fact that it lacks proper punctuation -- I'll assume the cost of a comma was simply too expensive for the Government to cover in their budgets -- you still get the odd idiot or two that decides that perhaps that sign isn't really serious and that the TSA secretly wishes more people made jokes about guns and bombs while standing in line. That fact that these people also have an IQ of a negative number explains a lot. I decided to buck the trend and tell my local TSA rep a joke about a chicken crossing the road, figuring that after hearing jokes about guns and bombs all day, a little genuine humor would brighten their day. I was wrong. Apparently they don't appreciate jokes of any kind, not just the jokes about guns and bombs, of which I know none. I was handcuffed and taken to a small room on the side where I was forced to remove my shoes while reading a Charles Dickens novel. It was a horribly degrading experience. Needless to say, I learned my lesson. Why is it that there are no skinny TSA personnel? I can only assume that, similar to the wild, the larger, more stonger TSA personnel eat the weaker ones to assert their dominance. This also goes along with the whole "yelling at everyone" thing that they have going on.
If you've made it this far, then you should be all checked in and past security. You can now relax at the local airport bar and pay twice as much for everything as you would anywhere else. The airport can do this because they are special. After you've had a few drinks to calm your nerves, it's time for the next level, which is actually getting on board the plane. If you're a lucky traveler, you already have an assigned seat and thus should be unconcerned about how quickly you get to your gate. If you fly an economy airline such as Southwest, you don't have a seat, only a group letter, and you ought to be a bit more proactive as to where you stand in line. People who fly Southwest like to play this little game called "size up the people as you walk down the aisle" by which they choose where they plan on sitting. Attractive women have the worst of luck with this one as their row tends to fill up first, regardless of whether there is additional, more luxurious seating available. I try and look angry and disinterested, so that generally only attracts people who are way too large to actually fit in their seat and they wind up spilling over into mine. You should be forced to buy two tickets you sow.
Now, regardless of what airline you've chosen for your trip, at this point you should be seated (un)comfortably in your seat and awaiting the exciting event that is the plane taking off. However, before that happens, each airline decides that they need to tell you about all of the exciting safety features aboard whichever aircraft they've chosen to put you on. Don't get me wrong, I care a lot about safety but let's be honest: no one pays one lick of attention to the spiel that they spew out at the beginning of each flight. We've all heard it a dozen times or more and we just sort of drown it out. Perhaps if everyone didn't look so damn happy and complacent in the safety guides, people might actually take it a bit more seriously. Instead of seeing cartoon pictures of people that are absolutely estatic about crashing, I suggest showing real people choking and/or on fire. Perhaps throw in a dismembered corpse or some photos of plane wreckage to really spice things up. I bet people would start paying attention then, right? Of course, the fault is not entirely of the safety manual; the stewardess could do her part to act a little more interested while explaining all those "cool" safety features. You know, maybe flash some skin or do a seductive dance while telling us for the 50th time how to buckle a seatbelt. That would make safety more interesting.
After all is said and done, you're finally ready for take-off! You're strapped in and the grandmother next to you decides that now is as good a time as any to start blabbing about her kids back home and how she displaced her hip during a particularly violent game of bingo last week. She smells like mothballs and death and it's all you can do to not puke. I quiet her down with my tales of child molestation but it doesn't make the flight any easier. Of course, once the plane begins to move, no matter how careful you were beforehand and how much you went, you'll need to use the restroom. It's God's cruel way of punishing those who don't eat enough broccoli. Once you need to go to the bathroom, you'll also be greeted with one of the longest taxis and take-off ascents ever. Never will it take so long to reach a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet as it will when you need to pee.
After a period of what seems like forever, depending on whether you're flying to Florida or not, you should be safely on the ground after the plane does what I call a "reverse take-off." This is assuming, of course, that the pilot wasn't drunk and you didn't crash into the ocean. Fun fact: you have a 100% chance of dying from a fatal plane crash. I like those odds! Even if you didn't die and did safely land, you must be careful when opening the overhead bins as contents may have shifted during flight. Just once I would like to pay to see someone get knocked out by their own luggage. Serves them right for jumping up immediately and trying to be first off the plane. You're never going to make it and you stand around like an idiot for ten minutes while everyone in front of you gets off first.
Finally it was my turn to stand, so I grab my things and get off the plane. Since I was in Florida and it was rather hot, I decided that I was going to take a swim. However, I also realized at this point that I had no raft or types of fun water toys to take with me into the pool. Remembering from the safety talk that my seat cushion could be used as a floatation device, I decided to take it with me. Hey, I paid for the seat after all, right? Wrong. The staff aboard the plane was not happy with me and I was reprimanded for theft. I was forced to stay behind after deboarding and help the staff clean up the plane. I believe that I had a similar experience in second grade but the teacher was a man and he made me clean something else.
But the fun art of traveling isn't just about the plane ride, it's also about the destination which, unless you're very poor or have relatives, is generally some sort of hotel. The quality of the hotels vary widely depending on region and amount spent but regardless of what you chose, there are a few things that I find are invariably constant. Take the washcloth and soap for example. Why is it that hotels think that people like washing their faces with something that amounts to sandpaper? I think I scraped a good portion of my forehead off on this latest trip. I used to bring my own washcloth but I kept getting tired of the maid stealing it. At first, I tried to play a little game called "hide the washcloth where she won't find it," a game similar to what daddy used to play after he'd been drinking except that I was his washcloth and he'd always hide me in a lockbox and forget about me, but those maids can be damn clever and it eventually wasn't worth the effort. I still bring my own soap but fat lot of good that does -- she still replaces it every day with a soap of their choosing, something that generally smells like a mixture of laundry detergent and toe fungus. But hey, maybe that's your idea of fun.
So, you've left town, traveled to an exotic locale, spent a ton of money, and likely bought a bunch of gaudy souvenirs that you hope will make the envy of your neighbors back home. What's left? Not much, but now you go through this whole ordeal all over again. It's like one of those crappy video games where you beat the end boss but then the screen flashes and you have to fight him all over again because he grew a tentacle or something. Still, it's one of those necessary things that you have to put up with if you ever want to leave your town and you don't feel like driving. It's good to be back within the confines of the P.Net Campus again and you can look for production to ramp up once more for summer time. And by production I mean drug production. Hey, we've gotta get money to buy fuel for the private jet somehow and the Government keeps cracking down on our black market organ selling operations. When will they learn to simply take a bribe?
I'll admit that I am not much of a fan of travel. While I can certainly appreciate all the magic and science that goes into modern travel, that doesn't make me like it in any greater capacity. 9/11 didn't help matters any, making everyone who boards a plane feel like a criminal. It's debatable whether our airports are any safer today than they were pre-9/11, but I suppose the TSA is too busy running around and yelling at everyone to really make that much of a difference. Oh wait, I have to take my computer out of the bag before I can proceed through the checkpoint. That's safety!
Still, there is no avoiding the airport and the first step to having a successful travel experience is to conquer the behemoth that is the modern airline repository. After passing level one of the airport game which largely consists of making your way around the annoying traffic cops who walk the sidewalks outside and apparently have nothing better to do than to yell at people and blow their whistles constantly, level two consists of getting past the security checkpoint. This is a hard level to pass without cheat codes, largely because of the absolutely insane amount of stupid people who act like they have never been through a security checkpoint before. While I do chide the TSA reps for constantly yelling at everyone, I probably would too if I was in their shoes. As a passenger, I have two responsibilities while in line at the checkpoint: one is to have my boarding pass ready and the other is to have my id ready, and it simply boggles the mind how many people fail to successfully accomplish these two easy steps quickly. We're not asking you to solve the equation to pi here for crying out loud.
Once you've navigated your way past the line to the checkpoint, you actually get to arrive at the checkpoint. I can only assume that this is some sort of halfway house for the more retarded amongst the TSA personnel because only the best and brightest would want to get paid mininum wage to stand in front of an x-ray machine for 8 hours a day. They have a huge sign hanging over the whole place that reads: "We take all comments about guns and bombs seriously. Please no jokes." Disregarding the fact that it lacks proper punctuation -- I'll assume the cost of a comma was simply too expensive for the Government to cover in their budgets -- you still get the odd idiot or two that decides that perhaps that sign isn't really serious and that the TSA secretly wishes more people made jokes about guns and bombs while standing in line. That fact that these people also have an IQ of a negative number explains a lot. I decided to buck the trend and tell my local TSA rep a joke about a chicken crossing the road, figuring that after hearing jokes about guns and bombs all day, a little genuine humor would brighten their day. I was wrong. Apparently they don't appreciate jokes of any kind, not just the jokes about guns and bombs, of which I know none. I was handcuffed and taken to a small room on the side where I was forced to remove my shoes while reading a Charles Dickens novel. It was a horribly degrading experience. Needless to say, I learned my lesson. Why is it that there are no skinny TSA personnel? I can only assume that, similar to the wild, the larger, more stonger TSA personnel eat the weaker ones to assert their dominance. This also goes along with the whole "yelling at everyone" thing that they have going on.
If you've made it this far, then you should be all checked in and past security. You can now relax at the local airport bar and pay twice as much for everything as you would anywhere else. The airport can do this because they are special. After you've had a few drinks to calm your nerves, it's time for the next level, which is actually getting on board the plane. If you're a lucky traveler, you already have an assigned seat and thus should be unconcerned about how quickly you get to your gate. If you fly an economy airline such as Southwest, you don't have a seat, only a group letter, and you ought to be a bit more proactive as to where you stand in line. People who fly Southwest like to play this little game called "size up the people as you walk down the aisle" by which they choose where they plan on sitting. Attractive women have the worst of luck with this one as their row tends to fill up first, regardless of whether there is additional, more luxurious seating available. I try and look angry and disinterested, so that generally only attracts people who are way too large to actually fit in their seat and they wind up spilling over into mine. You should be forced to buy two tickets you sow.
Now, regardless of what airline you've chosen for your trip, at this point you should be seated (un)comfortably in your seat and awaiting the exciting event that is the plane taking off. However, before that happens, each airline decides that they need to tell you about all of the exciting safety features aboard whichever aircraft they've chosen to put you on. Don't get me wrong, I care a lot about safety but let's be honest: no one pays one lick of attention to the spiel that they spew out at the beginning of each flight. We've all heard it a dozen times or more and we just sort of drown it out. Perhaps if everyone didn't look so damn happy and complacent in the safety guides, people might actually take it a bit more seriously. Instead of seeing cartoon pictures of people that are absolutely estatic about crashing, I suggest showing real people choking and/or on fire. Perhaps throw in a dismembered corpse or some photos of plane wreckage to really spice things up. I bet people would start paying attention then, right? Of course, the fault is not entirely of the safety manual; the stewardess could do her part to act a little more interested while explaining all those "cool" safety features. You know, maybe flash some skin or do a seductive dance while telling us for the 50th time how to buckle a seatbelt. That would make safety more interesting.
After all is said and done, you're finally ready for take-off! You're strapped in and the grandmother next to you decides that now is as good a time as any to start blabbing about her kids back home and how she displaced her hip during a particularly violent game of bingo last week. She smells like mothballs and death and it's all you can do to not puke. I quiet her down with my tales of child molestation but it doesn't make the flight any easier. Of course, once the plane begins to move, no matter how careful you were beforehand and how much you went, you'll need to use the restroom. It's God's cruel way of punishing those who don't eat enough broccoli. Once you need to go to the bathroom, you'll also be greeted with one of the longest taxis and take-off ascents ever. Never will it take so long to reach a cruising altitude of 35,000 feet as it will when you need to pee.
After a period of what seems like forever, depending on whether you're flying to Florida or not, you should be safely on the ground after the plane does what I call a "reverse take-off." This is assuming, of course, that the pilot wasn't drunk and you didn't crash into the ocean. Fun fact: you have a 100% chance of dying from a fatal plane crash. I like those odds! Even if you didn't die and did safely land, you must be careful when opening the overhead bins as contents may have shifted during flight. Just once I would like to pay to see someone get knocked out by their own luggage. Serves them right for jumping up immediately and trying to be first off the plane. You're never going to make it and you stand around like an idiot for ten minutes while everyone in front of you gets off first.
Finally it was my turn to stand, so I grab my things and get off the plane. Since I was in Florida and it was rather hot, I decided that I was going to take a swim. However, I also realized at this point that I had no raft or types of fun water toys to take with me into the pool. Remembering from the safety talk that my seat cushion could be used as a floatation device, I decided to take it with me. Hey, I paid for the seat after all, right? Wrong. The staff aboard the plane was not happy with me and I was reprimanded for theft. I was forced to stay behind after deboarding and help the staff clean up the plane. I believe that I had a similar experience in second grade but the teacher was a man and he made me clean something else.
But the fun art of traveling isn't just about the plane ride, it's also about the destination which, unless you're very poor or have relatives, is generally some sort of hotel. The quality of the hotels vary widely depending on region and amount spent but regardless of what you chose, there are a few things that I find are invariably constant. Take the washcloth and soap for example. Why is it that hotels think that people like washing their faces with something that amounts to sandpaper? I think I scraped a good portion of my forehead off on this latest trip. I used to bring my own washcloth but I kept getting tired of the maid stealing it. At first, I tried to play a little game called "hide the washcloth where she won't find it," a game similar to what daddy used to play after he'd been drinking except that I was his washcloth and he'd always hide me in a lockbox and forget about me, but those maids can be damn clever and it eventually wasn't worth the effort. I still bring my own soap but fat lot of good that does -- she still replaces it every day with a soap of their choosing, something that generally smells like a mixture of laundry detergent and toe fungus. But hey, maybe that's your idea of fun.
So, you've left town, traveled to an exotic locale, spent a ton of money, and likely bought a bunch of gaudy souvenirs that you hope will make the envy of your neighbors back home. What's left? Not much, but now you go through this whole ordeal all over again. It's like one of those crappy video games where you beat the end boss but then the screen flashes and you have to fight him all over again because he grew a tentacle or something. Still, it's one of those necessary things that you have to put up with if you ever want to leave your town and you don't feel like driving. It's good to be back within the confines of the P.Net Campus again and you can look for production to ramp up once more for summer time. And by production I mean drug production. Hey, we've gotta get money to buy fuel for the private jet somehow and the Government keeps cracking down on our black market organ selling operations. When will they learn to simply take a bribe?
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