Bound for Dallas

February 6, 1994

Aboard American Airlines flight 523, somewhere over Arkansas, bound for Dallas ...

The flight has been so bumpy that my food has been bouncing around on the dinner plate faster than I can stab it with my fork ... whoops, there goes a shrimp! Argh, I give up -- a seasick (airsick?) flight attendant has just whisked away my dinner tray, with blobs of food scattered about ...

I spent last week in Phoenix, working on a project with a computer consultant my family has labelled the "one-suit techie." This fellow is, as he calls it, "compulsive/obsessive," and on a tight budget. As a result, he picked the restaurant where we would have dinner each night (having spent several hours researching it via CompuServe's on-line travel guide, getting a list of restaurants within a ten-mile radius of the hotel that serve all-you-can-eat dinners for under $10). Sigh ... the first night was a Mongolian buffet restaurant; the second night was a Chinese restaurant whose best item on the buffet was fried chicken (yep, just like they have in the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant). It went downhill from there -- I'll spare the details.

My wife made an interesting comment a few days ago that is still sinking in: now that I've shifted most of my communications over to the "information highway," the number of fax messages coming into our office has dropped drastically. According to my computer system, I've sent out 252 e-mail messages from Jan 19th to Feb 5th, and I've received approximately the same number. And what a variety! A frustrated programmer in New Zealand who wondered why one of my textbooks hadn't improved his job situation; a client in Chile sending me details of a multi-country lecture tour in South America later this year; a consulting prospect in Australia bemoaning his budget problems; a computer colleague in Japan telling me about the details of a major computer conference in mainland China later this year; a colleage in Germany harrassing me to write an article for a newspaper in Franfurt; a gadfly in a computer research firm in Paris taking potshots at some snide remarks I made about European computer people in my Guerrila Programmer newsletter ... and on and on and on. Carrying on such conversations by phone would be utterly impossible; doing so by fax would be possible (except for the fact that no one but my wife ever knows where to find me), but it would cost five times as much...

Whoops! The pilot has just come on the radio to say that we'll be landing in 10 minutes, and would that obnoxious passenger in seat 3A please turn off his damn computer.