Random Thoughts From the Clouds

There’s not a lot of personal finance content in this post… which makes it somewhat suitable for a Friday afternoon (or evening if you are on the East coast). It’s simply some thoughts I had while flying back from vacation that I felt like sharing. I’ll return with more personal finance articles next week with such mind-numbing topics like “budgeting”. Don’t think I’m joking. I have half a mind to do a whole week on it.

I was fairly sleep deprived so excuse the extreme negative tone of some thoughts.

Advice for various companies:

• Palm – Your memo application for the Palm Pre should work the same as composing an email. I don’t know how to move my cursor to edit any of these notes that I’m sending myself for this article. I know it’s possible, as a number of screen touches moved it to a random location, I just can’t replicate the moves nor put it where I want to. However your “email memo..” feature was incredibly useful for this when I came out of “airplane mode.”
• American Airlines 1 – On a 6 hour flight that takes off at 8:47AM, look into selling lunch not just breakfast. We didn’t land until 3PM in the time zone we left. It was closer to 4PM be the time we claimed luggage and left the airport.
• American Airlines 2 – Since you aren’t selling a proper lunch how about accurately naming your snacks? Your “cheese and crackers snack”, has only .75 oz of cheese and .56 oz. of crackers – but the same snack box has 1 oz. of nuts and 1 oz. of raisins each. Perhaps look into renaming it the “nuts and raisins snack box?”
• To the lady behind me – Okay, I know she’s not a company, but I might as well get this out of my system, too. Thanks for telling your boy the tray table is not a toy. I wish you did it 3 hours ago. This way I wouldn’t have spent time thinking up 2 things to tell him: 1) I’m Santa’s secret eyes and ears and he’s dangerously close to making naughty list this year or 2) I ate Santa Claus and there will be no Christmas this year or in the future. Did I mention I was sleep deprived?
• Best Western and Super 8 – Free wifi included with rooms that are priced at $79 and $59 respectively. Somewhere Peter King is spitting up his quad cappa-speso-latte. (See his Enjoyable/Aggravating Chicago Travel Note of the Week II.) Oh yeah, free fridge and microwave as well.
• Toscano – I really want the Zombie of Montclaire Moors Statue from Toscano that I pictured here at the top of the article. Thank you Toscano and Sky Mall for making me laugh when I was stuck in a bad mood.

By the way, sorry for the weird title. I was going to title this post “Random Thoughts from 3,000 feet”, and then I realized that I didn’t know if a plane typically flies at 3,000 feet or if it’s just something that I’ve heard in the past. So I’ll just go with “from the clouds” to be safe and someone with aviation knowledge can help me out in the comments.