When Stick and I were flying out to Denver, there was a problem with the TV screens on the plane, so no one could watch the movie. It was no trouble at all, because I hadn’t realized that there was going to be a movie, so I’d brought a book (Ok… several books. Shut up!), but the flight attendants came round and gave us all vouchers for $100 off our next flight because of the inconvenience.
I wasn’t sure what was most amusing. First, if you take the price of our tickets to Denver, and subtract the voucher I got for taking a bump coming home after Thanksgiving, and the $200 we’d just gotten for not having to sit through a movie, we were practically making money by traveling.
Second, receiving a $100 voucher in lieu of a movie implies that the inflight movie was worth $100, doesn’t it?
Coming back, we were told that Stick’s suitcase was a couple of pounds overweight, and we could either take something out or pay $130 dollars. Now, that $130 overweight charge, plus the $20 for having a bag at all, would mean that it costs more for us to get our clothes home to Raleigh than to get ourselves to Denver and back. I’m not sure how that makes any sense, or how the counter agent could possibly tell us that with a straight face.
Stick decided to pull out a boardgame out of the overweight suitcase and call that his personal item. Since everyone else had also decided to cram everything into the largest carryon possible, the overhead bins on our flight were quickly filled, and passengers who boarded later were forced to check their carryon bags.
So… if we’d been seated in the fourth cattle call instead of the third, then the overhead compartments would have been full, and the airline would have checked the game box along with all the other excess carry-on baggage. And checking carryons is free, so it wouldn’t have made the airline any more money, and it would have taken up more space in the cargo area because it was out of the suitcase —
And then my head exploded.
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