Category: Travel

Alaska Airlines still uses the classic paper boarding pass paper stock at San Francisco airport and (looks to me) a main-frame program to print the details.   The ELECTRONIC only means the ticket is electronic.  (I’m old enough to remember the days when the gate attendant would rip off the top part of a paper ticket and hand the carbon copy below it back to the passenger).   I could certainly go with an electronic boarding pass as well : the square bar code from the Alaska Airlines app on my mobile phone.   But with the paper boarding pass I can ‘scoff’ at (scoff back at?) the tech geeks fresh from doing business in Silicon Valley, that fly back to Seattle with me. I read in my Bloomberg Businessweek that paper coupons for packaged goods at the grocery store and elsewhere are thriving – even in this age of smartphones and electronics.   People just love to clip them out and take them to the store.   Will paper ever go away completely? Not any time soon.

I left San Francisco a little earlier than my regular Thursday time .. or should I say I tried : our flight was delayed by about an hour.

Then we seemed to take the longest time I could remember ever, to get onto the plane.  A long line of us lounged in the jet way for an interminable time.   My fellow travelers actually remarked about it as well.  What is going on in there?   As Miranda Priestly (character from The Devil Wears Prada, played by Meryl Streep) would say : By all means move at a glacial pace, you know how that thrills me.

I am staying over in downtown San Francisco tonight.  I have to attend a mandatory ‘Talent Transformation’ session hosted by my Firm.  Here are some pictures I took early evening on Powell Street.

I made it out to San Francisco with my regular Monday morning fly-out.  My airplane still fills up completely, even though there seem to be a lot fewer people in the airport.  The airlines surely reduce the number of flights this time of year. (But I am sure they add flights back onto the schedule for the upcoming Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays).

It’s only Thursday, but it’s been a long week already!   But hey – we were allowed to go home and not required to stay overnight to work on our documents.  I thought it best to get out of there today as well .. I think the city will come to a standstill for some time tomorrow with the planned parade for the San Francisco Giants.

We were all glad to call this week’s trip out to the project office good, and get out of there. I drove my little rental car out to San Francisco International Airport across the San Mateo Bridge, dropped it off at Hertz, and stood in line at TSA’s security check point.  I hate those big millimeter wave scanners; they have those at SFO.  (The ones where you step into a giant cylinder, do a Hands up! and hold still while the machine does a whole-body image scan).

Hmm .. very interesting, I thought, the paint on the Alaska Airlines fuselage, as we stepped into the front door.   Could it be a mushroom? What could it be?!  I never saw the entire airplane since it was out of sight as I stepped out of it in San Francisco as well.

So I had to resort to an on-line search .. and here is the answer to the mystery. It’s Minnie Mouse’s red polka-dot hair bow.  It was a ‘Disneyland’ Alaska Airlines plane that I flew on.  Says the DisneyWiki :  Minnie Mouse is the girlfriend of Mickey Mouse created by The Walt Disney Company. Minnie is sweet in nature and fun-loving. She is widely recognized by her pink or red polka-dot hair bow.

I found myself spending the last hours of this week’s trip in the Embarcadero again, to attend a meeting.  Afterwards I had to run out and take BART to the airport, but managed to snap a few pictures (of course).

I had just settled into my seat at 20C on the Alaska Air flight out to San Francisco this morning, when a woman with a pink track suit came by, and lifted up a very large garment bag – also pink – into the overhead bins.  It filled two whole side-by-side bins, taking up six feet of space!  Ahh .. of course, can only be one thing : a wedding dress,  I thought.  Sure enough, that’s what it is, she confirmed soon after when someone inquired what it was inside.

[From Wikipedia] ‘Little Boxes’ is a protest song written and composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962, which became a hit for her friend Pete Seeger in 1963.   The song was reportedly inspired by the boxy houses of Daly City and expresses alarm at conformity and loss of individuality.   Well, the little boxes are still there today, but I see in writings of historians and sociologists that the people populating them are actually quite diverse with large Filipino and other Asian communities there.

Here are the words for the song.

Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside,
Little boxes all the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look the same.

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same
And there’s doctors and lawyers
And business executives
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

And they all play on the golf course
And drink their martinis dry
And they all have pretty children
And the children go to school,
And the children go to summer camp
And then to the university
Where they are put in boxes
And they come out all the same.

And the boys go into business
And marry and raise a family
In boxes made of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same,
There’s a green one and a pink one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same.

I finally got to ride on BART today : the veritable and well-ridden by now – Bay Area Rapid Transit – in service since the ’70s and showing it.  Taking it to Walnut Creek at rush hour was a crowded, sweaty affair!

Over lunch time I got to see some of the sights in the Embarcadero area in downtown San Francisco.  It was a warm cloudless day. I did not have a lot of time and just walked straight to the waterside to check out the Ferry Building to see the water in the Bay.

I am at the airport here in San Francisco, heading home.  It is Friday and even at the early hour of 2.30 pm there was a little more traffic on the freeways* on the way here than we have on Thursdays.

*I should not say freeway.  I see on Wikipedia that the word freeway was first used in February 1930 by Edward M. Bassett, but it is now an outdated word.  We should just go with highway.  Or parkway.

It was interesting for me to see on Monday morning that Alaska Airlines sometimes uses the aircraft’s rear door for boarding the back rows of the airplane.  It’s not something that is done often !

I think there are studies out there that show that boarding all window seats first, then all middle seats, then all aisle seats is the quickest – but to do that in practice is a major challenge.   The airline will likely upset the super platinum elite frequent fliers that like to all board first – to go sit in the front of the airplane, or to go sit in their chosen seat further back.

I have a very smart smart phone.  It knows what I wanted to type in my message to my colleagues in San Francisco before I even started typing it.  My flight is ..  and there it suggested ‘delayed’ (in the grey box below my name, so you just poke it to pop it into your message.  You saved a whole lot of typing.

I made it in an hour later to San Francisco, so not too bad a delay.

I made it in to Seattle. The four days out at our client project site went by quickly.  It always does when we are busy.   I made my way through security and onto the Alaska Airlines flight. While we were at the gate waiting to get pushed back, there was a young woman sitting next to me juggling two iPhones on her lap.  From what I could tell she was feverishly sending and receiving e-mails on her two iPhones.  So I was relieved when the airplane door was just and she had to turn the two phones off.  Man!  Give it up!

My flight out, and my drive out to Walnut Creek went fine.  Monday on the road is always long day for me, mostly the result of getting up really early.  It’s an even longer day for my colleagues from the East Coast!  If we’re still at the office at 7 pm, that’s 10 pm for them.  Yikes.  Better to be in my position and stay in the same time zone.

I’m making sure I’m not getting lost while driving out to the office on my own tomorrow morning, by printing a map.   I will turn on Google Maps with voice instructions on my phone as well, of course.   The phone is working very hard when it is used as a GPS, and it can draw down the phone battery completely in an hour or so, though.  And then I’m up the creek without a paddle!

I am at San Francisco International Airport.   The prisoners have been released out of their asylum for the week, and we are all heading back home, some of the team members all the way to the east coast!

Our San Francisco-bound plane from Alaska Airlines this morning was parked way out, and away from the North Terminal.

So once we walked though the gate at the North Terminal’s boarding door, we went down- stairs and onto the tarmac. From there a constructed tunnel and a temporary, scaffold-like gangway got us into the airplane.

Well!  It was supposed to be a short week with Monday being Labor Day and all, but my colleague and I ended up holding the fort at the project site until today.  We finally got out of there this afternoon, and made our way to San Francisco airport across the San Mateo bridge.   One of these days I will take the train (BART : Bay Area Rapid Transit).