Far more good seatmates than bad, but these stand out:

- Dave Johnson of the "Dave and Dan" decathlon competition leading up to the 1988 Olympics. He was fascinated by my early Macintosh Portable. I warned him, not yet knowing who he was, that it weighed 16 pounds. Later in the flight I learned that he threw a 16-pound weight, on a regular basis, further than most of us could carry it.

- A chap who looked like a slob but turned out to be the director of strategic planning for a major software firm. (He had a reason for his appearance which is neither here nor there now.) We had a fascinating conversation and stayed in touch after.

- Someone who started the trip by pulling corporate reports out of her briefcase and reading them as though they were really interesting. I wrote off that flight right away in my mind. Then we got to talking, mostly about Vedic astrology. It had odd impacts on my life for long afterward.

- The Houston construction worker on a paid F ticket en route to the NASCAR races in North Carolina. Unusual? He had worked on an office complex for a new company a few years earlier. He figured any company doing that well should be a good investment, so he put the whole family nest egg into Dell real early. (He didn't do construction work any more.)

(The real best seatmates, of course, have been those I knew I was getting on the plane with in the first place, but that's not what this thread is about.)