Rock it, colpuck. ^^

^

Say "Hi" from the Box.

I totally agree! I had situations where on int'l ft i- the kids were somehow assigned seats many rows away from me & my son was only 5! Fortunately, the FA was able to straighten things out!

I feel for the mom in this case, at least, as the father of a 20-month old little girl. She made some mistakes, CO could've done better, and the other people on the flight (CO staff and passengers alike) could've handled things better. It all cascaded together to give her a lousy CO experience.

Even with uber-elite status, flying with a small child can still be a huge pain in the butt. We got a seat for our daughter on UA ORD-LAX-OGG/HNL-ORD, and I still had a couple 50-something FAs on the LAX-OGG flight give me s--- about the car seat we brought on board, the fact that I asked for a seatbelt extender to make it easier to install/remove the car seat, etc.

I did my homework, and I knew exactly what I needed to do to ensure we didn't inconvenience other passengers while boarding (I boarded with the 1Ks to get the car seat in and baggage stowed, wife and daughter boarded at the end), made sure I had seat assignments compatible with a car seat (ie, window in E+), and researched the best way to secure the seat (belt extender makes it easy to tighten - otherwise, the buckle is wedged in a difficult to access area and scraped knuckles/swearing are required to effect removal of the seat). And I still got s--- about it. The free mai tais and apology I got from the purser made up for that, at least.

Does CO owe her anything, technically? No. Should they have given her something? At the least, a non-form letter apology would've been a good gesture.

The bigger issue is one not limited to the airlines - companies employ people in customer-facing positions that have no business interacting with customers. (for what it's worth, I'm probably one of those guys who shouldn't face customers, because I'm blunt and snarky to idiots.)

I once said of myself and sales:

"I would be great at new sales because I'm straightforward and brutally honest. I would be awful at follow-up sales / renewal because I'm straightforward and brutally honest."

More reason to go to Vietnam: http://travel.nytimes.com/2010/02/21...1explorer.html

Question for the Mac/OS X guys:

Using this command should allow me to open TextEdit as root and edit the hosts file, yes?

sudo -b "/Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit" /private/etc/hosts

Yes, looks good to me.

Looks like a nice side-trip from Cambodia. ^

Cool, thanks.

I press the "on" button, use teh googles, and the internets tells me where to find beer. :-:

Yeah, but I'm talking about families of 5 and 6 people wanting mom and dad at each end, and all the kidlets sandwiched in between. Lack of pre-planning on their part does not mean I should get on the plane to find that my seat is now occupied by someone else.

This one time, the FA moved around about 5 different people, because a large family had seats all over the place. :rolleyes:

I'm assuming there is a reason you need to use a GUI editor, but in case there isn't you can also use vi.

sounds like a legit usage of a machine.