(in)Continental

If only it were the Continental character that Christopher Walken played on Saturday Night Live.....

So, here I am in Newark, en route to Tel Aviv for bidness....more flying, less fun, or something like that. Continental Airlines is a strange beast. On the one hand, there's a giant sign in the C Concourse which states that the employees will be sharing in $110M in profits. On the other hand, there weren't enough people at the counter to deal with the bags of those of us who checked in on the Continental website, which makes you wonder if the employees prefer profit over service. That's a rhetorical question, perhaps. Regardless, in my ~6:25AM blur, I managed to be with it enough to notice that when someone did come to help the 3 people stacked up simply waiting for bag routing stickers, my bag was about to go on its way to San Jose, not Tel Aviv.

I know the TSA/DHS are all about ensuring that bags are on the same flight as the passenger, but what if something as retarded as routing tags being put on bags without any concern for which bag they really matched happened? In theory, the airline would be at fault, but, somehow, I sense that the passenger would get into the mess, too:

"Why were you trying to go on a separate flight from your luggage? Don't you know that's a Federal Offense (tm)?"

"As far as I knew, my luggage was going to the same place I was, layover and everything. Perhaps the clerk put the wrong sticker on it? I don't have any clothes or deodorant, since my luggage went somewhere else, so if you want to interrogate someone else and use my stink to extract answers, I'm happy to help. At least someone will get something good out of this situation...."

If it weren't for that rule, I might have been able to go standby on the earlier Tel Aviv flight, since we got in early. Unfortunately for me, it just means that my layover in loverly Newark approaches 7 hrs instead of just 6. The deodorant thing makes me think of the strange change in rules that moved the threshold of liquids down from 4oz to 3.4oz, a/k/a 100ml. When did this happen? I had bought all new items that would make it under the 4oz limit in November and I found that I could now use none of them on-board.

Magically, there's now a catchy "3-1-1" sign talking about 3oz, 1 quart bags, and 1 something else which escapes me since I'm not near a checkpoint. It's all a marketing ploy, I fear, coupled with some powerful lobbyists from the retail and grocers of America. I wonder how much extra Dow Chemical put into the lobbyist's budget to have the product placement of Zip-Lock(tm) one-quart bags at every airport. I wish they'd made it a one-gallon bag so these annoyingly resized items would fit, since even the 3.4 oz items still have problems fitting into a quart-size bag.

Seems like they want you to check things, at least the TSA does, but the airlines put on the boarding passes that you should pack smaller and remove the hassle of baggage by carrying things on board. Granted, this is also contrary to what you hear from the flight crew who don't want any carry-ons if avoidable, since there's always an issue of overhead space on many business or hub-centric routes. Wish there was somebody singing a consistent tune, or at least humming it.

On the plus side, there's free wireless coming from the Continental President's Club upstairs, hence I can post. Finding a good signal convergence is an issue, though. Feels more like dial-up.

Time to go find an outlet so I can watch some movies.