Posted inThank You Sir May I Have Another

Loud Cell Phone Addict 0 Universe 1

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

On Saturday I finally got to fly back from New York. Nothing makes one miss home like being in New York. Yes, it was a trip from hell involving a bout with the flu, an accident in a cab, and a host of other bad things. All pretty typical.

The flight home allowed for a brief moment of joy though. I arrived at the airport 3 hours early and spent my time napping at the gate. Barely one hour before departure time a blonde girl showed up chatting loudly and incessantly on her iPhone. She must have made 9 or more phone calls filling in people on the details of her shopping trip.

If you’ve never flown out of JFK, boarding a plane is an odd experience. Delta has this weird multi-plane breezeway system at the gate. One gate can load up to four planes at a time. They also have a very unforgiving overhead display. If an agent scans a ticket for a flight which isn’t currently displayed, it will automatically update the display to show that flight boarding.

Another individual who was also flying back to Chicago but far less patient jumped into line when they started boarding the plane flying to some place in Maine. This caused the overhead display to say they were boarding the flight to Chicago. Unlike many others, I actually listened to the PA system when the person said they were boarding the plane for Maine only at this time. I stood back in the pool of other people who listened. The one person handling the boarding became swamped with people trying to get on the Chicago flight, then finally got most of the Maine flyers on the plane.

Incessant cell phone chatter had moved in beside me, she fished out her ticket, and walked right up to the boarding gate. I expected her to be turned away, but she was scanned and walked down the ramp. About 10 minutes later a man came back up complaining that flight was not going to Chicago. The attendant explained that he had to listen to the PA system.

20 minutes passed, and I didn’t see the blonde girl.

We started boarding the flight to Chicago and I didn’t see her on the plane.

I wonder how she liked Maine.

 

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.