I’ve had a few bad trips in my time. No, not that kind. The point A to point B kind. I’ve traveled on Nicaraguan buses so top-heavy with luggage and passengers that nearly every turn on mountain roads made me reconsider having given up prayer. I’ve helped push more than one Guatemalan bus out of the mud. (They don’t discount your ticket for that, by the way.) In Tunisia, I’ve cringed in the back seat of a 90-mph Peugeot taxi that passed cars and trucks and donkey carts against oncoming vehicles so close you could read their license plates. I’ve ridden second-class trains in Mexico so grungy you’d rather die of sepsis than visit the toilet. I’ve helped bail out a leaky fishing boat on the way from Bali to Singapore.
So, really, the fact that I spent 39 hours in airports and airplanes to get home from Netroots Nation was really not that big a deal. My planes didn’t crash. The air conditioning always worked. The chairs were more or less comfortable. And I could always buy "food" for three times what it costs anywhere else. But after being energized for three days by meeting a couple of hundred wonderful progressives and hearing in detail what a couple dozen of them are doing to move our country in a better direction, it was a drag to get worn down by the stupidity of United Airlines.
Before I go on, let me say that I’m not picking on one carrier. On the way from Los Angeles to Pittsburgh, U.S. Airways canceled the first leg of my flight. So I had to rebook and hang around in the Vegas airport for four and a half hours listening to the binging of slot machines that they would probably install on the jetways if they could get away with it.
But United really curdled my ire.