Tuesday 25th August 2009, 01:47

America, pt 1: The Flight

Back in blighty now, and have been micro-blogging, or whatever the tweet it's called, over on www.twitter.com/paulkerensa. If you do twitter, do follow me there. Thanks.

So the story of my trip is told there. But sometimes 140 characters is not enough, so here are bits to expanded on, largely just for my own posterity, but you can read it too if you like.

- United Airlines. Awful. I hear that rather than replace planes, they run them into the ground. It showed. Little movie choice, with sound not actually working on most of them. Kids stumbled upon severely 18-rated scenes in films too, a tad too easily. That is, if they could see the TVs - they were tiny, and had no angle-adjustment, so if the bloke in front leant his seat back, you have to crouch to see the screen at 45 degrees. The food was awful, and half of it was stuck to the tray. No free booze. Boo. The fast-track check-in desk for us forward-planners who checked in online was five times as slow because their computer had crashed and they were short-staffed, and yet they employed one fella whose sole job it was to put pot-plants on the desks of business class check-in. Put the pot-plant down, and get behind a desk. The icing on the cake was that us steerage class (if this had been the Titanic, we'd have drowned with the Irish) were refused access to our nearest toilet, because it was for business class only, despite (a) being only three seats in front, and (b) there being a big light above our seats with a 'Lavatory' sign flashing on and off whenever someone in business class went in or out. If we're not allowed to use it, why in the world do we need to know when a businessman is taking a crap?

I was going to tell you about the rest of the trip, but that will have to wait. I've used up all my blog/venting energy on United Poxy Airlines. Don't fly with them. I hope they google this.

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