I’m up in Anchorage, Alaska for an MSDN Event I’m going to be doing tomorrow. The day began strangely, and ended… well, it hasn’t really ended yet. It’s nearly midnight, and the sun’s still up. It’s insane.
As I was saying, though, the day began strangely.
I had a center seat on the flight today. It’s an interesting thing since I specifically requested a window seat in Peasant First Class (exit row), but I suppose there could very well be a seat-assignment glitch in the computer system that runs the whole show. Given the amount of typing airline customer service representatives have to do each time someone, for example, decides they’d like to opt for a vegetarian snack during the flight, it isn’t much of a surprise that things go wrong all the time. After about the fifth minute of KLICKETY-KLACK, KLICKETY-KLACK on the circa 1976 terminal keyboard that’s attached to the Alaska Airlines Super Mainframe, I try to make myself invisible as I feel more and more like there’s a three-story high neon sign over my head that reads “THE REASON YOU’VE BEEN TYPING FOR SO GOD DAMNED LONG ON THAT PIECE OF CRAP KEYBOARD IS THAT THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPER WHO PUT YOUR APPLICATION TOGETHER REALLY SUCKED RAT KIDNEYS, AND OH, BY THE WAY, THERE’S A SOFTWARE DEVELOPER RIGHT HERE BELOW THIS SIGN. WHY DON’T YOU ASK HIM ABOUT WHY IT IS THAT NOBODY IN HIS PROFESSION SEEMS TO BE ABLE TO PUT TOGETHER AN APPLICATION THAT ALLOWS SOMEONE TO GET SOMETHING DONE WITHOUT HAVING TO FILL OUT AN ELECTRONIC FORM THAT REQUIRES DATA ENTRY WITH A WORD COUNT RIVALING THAT OF THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV.”
Truly, we have a thing or two to be ashamed of, we do, us software maker people. We do some nifty things, but we’re also probably responsible for most of the repetitive stress injuries in the modern world.
Anyway, there I was, sitting in my center seat, cheeks still a little rosy from the shame of the thought of how my seat reservation must have gotten mucked up. The redness dissipated quickly, though, as I met the gentlemen sitting on either side of me.
To my right was a particularly diminutive and charming Chinese man who seemed to be composed of 98% Joy Molecules. He beamed at a time when, due to things like crying babies and recycled, stale, toxic airplane air, the act of beaming should seem like a silly thing to be doing, but I guess nobody told him that, so away he went with his beaming self.
To my left was a particularly gangly and hygienically questionable caucasian male who seemed to have gotten quite a bit more of the Stature Gene when it was being handed out than either the Chinese guy or myself.
The Chinese man, I quickly learned, was just one of those nice people you meet on planes. His only offense in life is his suspicious happiness.
The other guy, though…
I’ll tell you – as a non-smoker, there are few things in life that bother me more than being smoked at.
The one thing that might surpass smoking, though, is chewing.
I watched as the gangly fellow spat a bit of brownish, viscous spitty fluid into a clear plastic cup that he had brought on board for the purpose. He had to do it every few seconds.
He looked nervous…
And then he spat.
Looked nervous…
And spat.
Looked nervous…
And spat.
Etc.
He had about an inch of his own salivary ejecta swishing around in the bottom of the cup - exactly the sort of thing you wouldn’t want to accidentally drink at a party (unless you were doing it to impress a girl, in which case drink away).
When we were taking off, I was worried that he might drop the cup. Take-offs and landings in Portland can often be bumpy because of choppy winds, and it wouldn’t have taken an especially strong Portland wind to jerk the plane to one side, causing Mr. ChewGuy to spill his saliva all over my beautiful pantalones.
The only nice thing I could imagine involving some guy spilling his mouth-waste all over me is that I would probably never have a better reason to vomit on someone. It makes sense – someone spills his chew-juice on you, it makes you sick, you have to puke but have no place to do it, and so lean over to violently deposit the gummy contents of your internalest digestive gollywots in an interesting pattern on the sporting jersey of your new friend.
But it didn’t happen. We arrived in Alaska without a hitch. The flight was hitchless. Sans hitch. Ixnay to the hitchskay.
The deal now is that there’s no end to the sunlight here. My cabbie explained that there would be a little over an hour of darkness, and that it should come at 1:30 AM. I’ve never seen anything like it. There were people jogging in the streets at 11:00 PM without fear of mugging. This is no way to live.
Late sunlight or not, I have to get to bed, but I’ll leave you with a couple photos of this Alaska place…
These mountains belong to the United States of ‘Merica
An Alaskan night