Hodgepodge 163/365 - Go

Long day today: up at 4:50 a.m. in Venice, arrived at my house at 10:20 p.m. With a rather big time zone adjustment, that makes for . . . a lot of hours. Most of them awake.

Four flights, every one on time. A group of folks in Venice were hung out to dry by American Airlines and had to fight to get on our flight (which they did, by the skin of their teeth), but I have to say, I had no complaints at all about American today. Maybe I just have good air-travel karma, because in all my years of flying, I've only had delayed bags three times, missed connections twice, and been bumped from a flight once (because of overbooking).* My memory may be faulty, but I think that's about right. It's about a 2 percent mishap rate. If that. (Knock wood.)

Frankly, I'm astonished that air travel works at all. I mean, seriously: I can check in in Venice and get four boarding passes that work, and my bag can get checked through all the way to home (with a minor interruption in Austin for "customs"—which I consider a mere circus act, but never mind). And the computers are keeping track of tens of thousands of similarly complicated trips every day?

It's a miracle.

Except for those poor folks in Venice, who I surely do hope got to their destination. It's also a miracle that more people like them don't fall through the inevitable cracks of such a complicated system more often. Never mind the vagaries of weather and mechanical failures. And it's a miracle that in case of missed connections, people get squeezed on to later flights and, yes, eventually get where they're going.

Also a miracle is in-flight entertainment, which sure beats the old days of having to watch whatever movie they happened to show, with a screen either too close or too far away, with lousy audio to boot. Today I was able to select from a vast menu, and I could pause and rewind at will, the tiltable screen just a foot away. I watched Moonlight (wonderful), The Big Lebowski (very funny, but a bit of a train wreck by the end: thank goodness for Sam Elliott), and Amadeus (a few scenes are too long, but I enjoy the music and the cavalcade of the short ten years depicted in that film: Mozart was and will always be one for the ages, no matter how similar he actually was to the character in this film).

And now: I'm home! No more travelogues on this Hodgepodge. I'll have to think of something topical to write about. Wish me luck.

*Re overbooking: I don't really know how overbooking occurs (i.e., if it's a matter of policy or of piled-up circumstances), but yesterday it led to an incident of assault that was, justly, all over the Internet news. Apparently the airline, United, needed seats for standby employees, which makes it a matter of union rights, I suppose—and those are bound to be stronger than mere consumer rights (if such a thing even exists). Apparently, too, the staff dealt with the overbooking problem "at random" after trying to entice volunteers with vouchers. In my case, the reason for the "overbooking" was a change in rules at the destination airport, having to do with work being done to extend runways, and they had to restrict the weight of the loaded aircraft (if I remember correctly, though that doesn't really seem possible, given that three individuals don't weigh all that much). In any event, they chose the three of us to bump by the cost of our  tickets—which is less "fair" than by the date of booking, but who said life is fair? In my case, too, they simply didn't let us on the plane: there was no question of having to remove anyone. My two fellow bumpees were not at all happy, though we were immediately rebooked from a late-night flight to an early-morning one and provided with lodging. Me, I was on my way home with no real obligations the next day, so I took it in stride. As I try to do anyway. It just makes life easier . . .