I Hate Long Trans-Continental Flights

12/10/2005

I am writing this piece sitting on the first leg of my journey, a flight from San Francisco to Frankfurt with Lufthansa. They just recently started flying directly to Bangalore, thus cutting my travel time from 32 hours to a mere 22 hours. To be sure, this is not cheap, but $200 vs saving 10 hours of travel time? Believe me, it's worth it. I have traveled quite a bit and consequently I am no stranger to trans-continental, trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific flights, hence the typical things are to be expected – boredom, jetlag, disorientation, numbness in the feet due to lack of blood circulation etc. No need to dwell on this.

I'm in hour number 8 of the 11 hour flight and geez, I'm bored. As I look around I realize this is an ancient 747 probably put into service when Richard Milhouse Nixon waved his hands to the American public saying that he was not a crook. So, I am thumbing through the in-flight magazine and wowsa, it says right there -- free internet? End of boredom, hello online world, and I’m like there, dude, totally! So I fire up my computer to try my luck and find – no “wireless access points”! You only get the free internet on the newer aircraft. No fuckin’ way on this dinosaur. Fuck, why don’t they tell you in advance?

You must experience 11 hours on this shitty aircraft and find out how unglamorous flying coach overseas is. The pitch in this aircraft, i.e., the distance between my row and the one front (or the back) is very small. Now I am not a big guy, 5’9” and I should fit in quite well in most circumstances, but this time, I hardly have room for my thighs to be horizontal. To top it all, I am sitting in the last row 56 -- it has seats that do not recline. Fuck! Didn’t I already check with http://www.seatguru.com/ earlier, and didn’t it say my seats were good enough? Little did I know that I got sic’ed during check-in? The bank of bathrooms is right behind me, yep -- my fucking non-reclining seat is abutting the wall of the bank of bathrooms. If you have only taken one or two hour flights, you have no idea how the bathrooms deteriorate rapidly after about hour 5 or so. The collective effluences of people in the bathroom just lend that special je ne sais quoi to the atmosphere.

I have heard a lot about claustrophobia, but I now have first hand experience on this flight and am somewhat of an expert in my mind. So I go to the bathrooms to “take care of business”. This tiny bathroom is at the most 10 square feet, and there is nowhere to turn to! Imagine if I, a normal (need to check on that assumption,eh?) adult have trouble moving around the cramped bathroom, what about the plight of people who actually suffer from clinical claustrophobia? And how about the obese, the Orca-fatsos? As a side note, has anybody been stuck in a bathroom because of the ample girth of their bodies? Enlightened people should send me a link to one of these.

Yeah, yeah, I know you are saying why the heck I am whining about something as insignificant as the bathrooms on airlines. It’s not the worst thing in the world. How about poverty, education, state of the schools, the budget etc.? But you know what, that’s exactly what’s troubling me right now. Right now, the collective stench of piss and farts is drifting toward me! Some perfume would have been just great right now. I suppose the only solution is to fork out my hard-earned moolah for a seat in business class or first class, or have some benevolent philanthropist pay my way through. Ain’t gonna happen! Oh what would I give right now to be outside my apartment and smell the fresh seaside air! Man, you really don’t know what you are missing unless you are physically away from your place you call “home”.

I really have a lot of respect for my friends Trice and Dana in the airline industry. I am beginning to realize why they love the outdoors. I wouldn’t work as a flight attendant if my life depended on it. Good luck with it, guys! As for me, I smell some “breakfast” wafting through the aisles? Wonder what’s in store. Later, folks!

Microchips and Taxicabs

12/09/2005

I am leaving San Francisco, CA and heading to Bangalore, India for my 3-week vacation, something that I have been looking forward to for a long time. So around 10.00 am, I hailed a cab at the gas station behind my apartment and unbeknownst to me, had myself an interesting cab ride. So, this is what happened...

Being Indian myself, I made small conversation with the Indian-looking cabbie. He replied in clear, crisp, well-articulated English that he hailed from Singapore, but that his grandparents were from India and moved to Malaysia at an early age. His urbanity and suaveness surprised me to no end! I asked him how he liked driving a cab, and – surprise, surprise, he said “I would rather work in the electronics industry as a design engineer!!!” It appears that he used to be a design engineer in Singapore and came over to these United States in 1998. He held some good jobs, making what he said about $110,000 in 2002. It must have been a sweet life! Alas, as many post-dotcom stories go, he lost his job and is now driving a cab in San Francisco for the past three-and-a-half years.

He's a gentleman roughly 50-52 years old, Kesavan is his given name, but goes by Kes. He’s a trained electronics engineer with a bachelor’s degree with a lot of experience in designing microchips and controllers for various applications, various operating systems, but has been unemployed since 2002, separated, living alone in San Francisco’s Excelsior district in a small room. He lost all his possessions including the usual accoutrements typical of a high-tech employee here and living the “good life”. After the layoff and subsequent separation he was very depressed for a long time. But, somehow, somehow, he found the strength to get his wits together, picked up pieces of his life and has found a way to survive in The City.

It’s heart-rending to hear this and other similar stories in the heart of Silicon Valley, the homebase for high-technology, where a well qualified, legally-residing person of somewhat advanced age, and somewhat down on his luck has to struggle to make ends meet by driving cabs. So what’s the point, you ask? Unlike other stories of individuals, what I find refreshing here is his positive attitude. Some people, no matter how poorly Lady Fortune has dealt her cards, put on a brave face and get up each and every day with the hope that maybe today or maybe tomorrow Lady Fortune will smile on him/her once again and shower her blessings.

I want to put him in touch with someone upon my return from my vacation. We shall see how it goes! I hope that 2006 turns out to be good year for him, and he gets back to doing what he loves best – being a microchip design engineer. Bravo Kes! I hope you realize your dreams. I have to now board my flight and head off to the Old World and further on to an even older World – India, my country of birth.