What was United thinking?

I walked up to the American Airlines counter at McCarran where they had four agents working a nonexistent First Class line. United usually had one agent and half a dozen of their best customers waiting while half a dozen agents manned the economy line. I walked up to the counter and asked the professional agent if I could check in for both my flights, the paid one to LAX and the award ticket on to JFK. He resisted the temptation to say, “You check in both your flights!?” and instead went right to work pressing many keys. He asked if I had a ticket associated with the LAX-JFK reservation and I told him it was an award and should already be ticketed. He found it and I was all set.

American’s web site, which crashed half a dozen times on me last night as I tried to purchase and upgrade the first leg of this trip, automatically assigned me a seat in the last row of First Class and provided no way to change it, although come to think of it neither does United’s site. So I asked for a seat closer to the front and got the bulkhead aisle, 3E. This Super 80 had 20 leather First Class seats, friendly flight attendants, and preflight drink service. United had eight cramped seats on this route and you were lucky to get service at all. What was United thinking?

We were in the air a scant five minutes after scheduled pushback and the captain predicted a record-setting 36-minute flight. He was on drugs though and we landed a good 45 minutes after takeoff with a long taxi to the gate at LAX. In flight I had coffee in a Styrofoam cup and water in a real glass. It was not quite up to National’s level of service but still very pleasant. I had one of the only empty seats in the cabin next to me.

I needed to walk from Terminal 3 across the airport to Terminal 4 so I wormed my way through the Kasbah-like scene in front of the Tom Bradley International Terminal and into the front door of Terminal 4. There I saw a line like kids waiting to see Santa Claus at Macy’s on Christmas Eve. Apparently all the escalators but one were out of service and they were feeding everyone onto the one remaining. I asked a redcoat if there was any other way up and she said no. A gentleman at the foot of the escalator was checking everyone’s tickets, not really causing a delay so much as relocating it from the x-ray machine to where he was standing. When I got to the escalator 15 minutes later I realized that I could have just walked right onto the empty elevators and got off at the second floor instead of standing in that line.

Security was taking extreme precautions so I got a rare hand-scan, revealing everything down to the metal corners on my pocket organizer. I passed though and headed for the Admiral’s club, where I expected a fight over being allowed to enter on my Premium Class transcon ticket. On the contrary, though, the smiling agent let me right in and even handed me two drink tickets. Since it was only 8:30 a.m. she whispered conspiratorially, “You can use these to get a couple bottles of water. We charge for them!”

I asked if I could get on the nine o’clock flight instead of the 10 and she said, “Oh, you don’t want that: it’s been downgraded to a 757!” I agreed I didn’t want it and went in the lounge, taking a seat by the window and getting Monkeyboy on line easily with my first guess at the local dial-up number. I tried a mini-muffin but it tasted like it was made with shortening. Then I strode up to the bar, presented my stamped drink ticket, and said, “I understand this entitles me to a free bottle of water!” Indeed it did, and I got a nice cold one from the barkeep, who took a break from watching Kermit the Frog as a panelist on To Tell the Truth to hand it to me.

Around 9:30 I headed to the gate and moments later they began boarding with the helpless followed by First and Business Class. I settled into seat 3B, the second row port aisle, and looked around to see if I could identify any celebrities. There were some unusual-looking characters but no one I recognized. Augie, the purser, asked if I wanted anything to drink and I asked for a black coffee so he put on a pot for me. I had the only empty seat in the cabin next to me. We pushed back just a few minutes late and I perused the menu while we ascended.

Augie, who said he was the most junior purser on this route with only 27 years of service, said the beef was coming out well done these days so I took his recommendation and ordered Cioppino, which was excellent. Before that I had a salad sampler from the cart with Thai chicken and smoked salmon. He couldn’t make a Manhattan but he did have Makers Mark bourbon so I had some on the rocks. The wine list seemed slightly improved, with a Wente Bros. Cabernet and the Villa Mt. Eden Zinfandel, but still not up to a Premium Class service.

I had been wanting to see the main movie selection, Anti-Trust, because it was a thinly veiled story about Microsoft, cleverly set in Portland instead of Seattle so no one would suspect. It was laughably bad. I turned it off at the point where they implied Bill Gates was stealing code from an open-source guy and had him killed to cover it up. He showed the stolen code to his new hotshot programmer who took one glance at some variable declarations and said, “Ooh! This is great!” Bill could never even get us to share code with each other within the company, let alone use something that was Not Invented Here. So instead I whipped out the complimentary portable DVD player and Bose noise-canceling headsets and watched Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock, geek princess. It was an enjoyable yarn that passed the time well.

We landed on time in New York. It was a warm hazy day. I followed the signs down a crazy path to the taxi stand and didn’t have to wait at all even though it was Friday night. For the $30 flat fare plus $3.50 for the Midtown Tunnel the driver took me to the W New York in record time. I gave him a generous tip, checked in, got upgraded to a tiny corner suite on a high floor, and sat down in the lounge for a proper Manhattan while I waited for Hunnybear. She arrived on time at LaGuardia and took a cab to meet me. We relaxed in the room a bit and I hooked up the high-speed Internet access for $9.95/day. Since the room was a phenomenal $139 it was a good deal.

Dinner was at Balthazar, a French steakhouse in SoHo. As usual we had to wait a half-hour to get seated even with reservations but it was worth it. We split a duck-confit salad and steak tartare for appetizer and then Hunnybear had the special bouillabaisse and I had the yummy steak frites. As a rule we don’t eat dessert but they had profiteroles with homemade ice cream so we shared just one order. The check came to $122. I tried to sign it to my comp account but it was not possible so we charged it instead, leaving a generous tip. We walked home, arriving with a nice patina of sweat in the humid New York summer night.

[stay tuned tomorrow for the next installment]


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