"Goat Your Hand Baggage"

"Cabra su equipaje de mano" or "Goat your hand baggage".

At least that's what my handy-dandy language  translator app told me about American Airlines' luggage size checking thingy.

I find if you reverse translate it 3 or 4 times back and forth between Spanish and English  you get an interesting variety of translations.

Now, if I could just get my AA flight app to work, I would be in business.

"No, you're going to get off this plane...RIGHT NOW!!"

I had closed my eyes briefly as the remaining zones loaded onto American Airlines 1602 in Dallas.  Moments earlier, I watched as one passenger, two seats in front of me, attempted to stow his roller bag in the overhead compartment and in doing so, the backpack, still on his back, nudged a woman in the opposite side of the aisle.  It seemed like a very light brush but no one likes having a pack in their face.   The woman complained and the pack wielding man, turned and apologized profusely.  That pretty much ended the incident and I rested my eyes a bit, thinking about what time I had to get up earlier that morning to make the flight from Baton Rouge that would connect me to the flight to Sacramento.

Moments later, I was startled to hear, "No....you're going to get off this plane, RIGHT NOW!"  The flight attendant yelled again, "Yes you are!  Get up, you're not flying on this plane!"

I couldn't  tell exactly what had happened so I leaned over to the grinning guy next to me and asked, "What's up?"

"That woman two seats up took a swing at the flight attendant."  He added, "The flight attendant pulled a bag out of the bin to repack it and the strap dropped down on that woman so she took a swing and hit the bag the attendant was holding."

Further commotions erupted with some more words I couldn't make out, then the attendant headed up toward the front with haste.  The woman turned and pleaded her case that she was merely trying to knock the bag strap away from her to protect her $1,000 pair of glasses but a couple of other passengers, told her that wasn't what they saw.  Now, I have some pretty expensive glasses and I was a eyeglass wholesaler in a previous life and I can tell you they were not a thousand dollar pair of glasses, but that's another issue.

Five minutes later, another flight attendant approaches the lady in seat 21D and asked for her version of the story.  After a bit of discussion, flight attendant number 2 gets the lady to come up to the front to work things out with the captain.  Good cop, bad cop thing going on here, I think.

Now, we're 20 minutes late on the departure already.

A few minutes later, the woman comes back and starts retrieving her carry-on bag and while she's doing it begins to once again, tell her version of the incident.  Several other passengers, already looking at their watches tell her just to "suck it up and get off the plane, lady."  Thankfully, she relents and heads back up to exit.    A few minutes later, another female passenger, who was on standby, takes the seat.

Flight attendant #1 came back and joked and laughed with the passengers regarding the incident.  She collected a half dozen business cards, I'm guessing to have some witnesses that would take her side in case the disenfranchised passenger decided to lawyer up.  She admits that the captain wanted to let passenger #1 fly if she would apologize to the flight attendant but the ladies told him no.  "If she flies, we don't"   So, to avoid a mutiny, the captain ejected passenger #1.

By this time, we're already 45 minutes late closing the front door.  That, with the car rental agency being temporarily out of cars, caused me being an hour late getting to Modesto.

Grace, the Flight Attendant

"Good morning, my name is Grace and I will be your flight attendant today!", she said as the door slammed on the Delta flight to Memphis. The curious thing about this was Grace had to be 75 years of if she was a day and reminded me of the sweet little old lady that was the owner of the cartoon character, Tweety Bird that was in constant peril of Sylvester the Cat. In my eight years as a flying road warrior, I've seen some older ones but she was the oldest. In my opinion, it's quite fitting that we would have Grace as our attendant in as much as how the equipment seemed to show a lot of age and wear.

Watching and mulling over the significance of the elderly lady as a flight attendant, I noticed something lying in the seat next to me. It was a part of the overhead reading lamp fixture that had fallen off the console above my head. I decided to reinstall it myself rather than reporting it to Grace. Given their record of maintenance problems, I didn't want to risk delaying the flight.

In advance of serving refreshments, Grace announced with much detail that we would be limited on beverages because of some malfunction involving the ice machine and that somehow this had caused  an hour delay the evening before because the mechanics were trying to fix it but failed and they  were  having to order parts and on and on and on.....Whew!  She not only apologized for that but nearly fell on the sword explaining that there was a shortage of beverages as well. "I have a few Cokes, four Diet Cokes and three Sprites." What was next? Would she take the blame for the Haitian earthquake too?

Now, I'm beginning to think that if Delta is flying granny around the USA on planes that have parts falling off, refrigerators that don't work and potties that are not available, just how bad is the general condition of this plane? In the past five weeks, Delta has either delayed or completely canceled flights for me on at least five occasions for equipment maintenance problems. How old and how worn are thousands of planes flying the friendly skies? Honestly, this alarms me very much.