Baggage

The weekend before last I flew up to Bethesda, MD for a two day Navy Reserves symposium for medical/dental officers. The meeting was good because I got to see a few people I haven't seen in years and years (kind of like Facebook!). The flight left something to be desired though, not so much because of the 3 hour delay departing DC, but because of the new rules for baggage. If you haven't flown in a few months, you may not realize that most airlines charge you a fee to check a piece of baggage in - i.e. $15 per bag! What a rip off! Long gone are the days of checking multiple bags (not that I regularly did anyway), but what this is now doing is creating a new class of cheapskate passengers who, in order to forego paying this fee, don't check any bags in and instead lug all their shit onto the plane and cram it into the overhead bins occupying every square millimeter of space. Their baggage may pass the maximum size allowance, but it's still pretty damn big nonetheless. I've learned not to stow anything in the overhead bins, especially if its fragile, but God forbid if you have to put a laptop computer up there. You can pretty much kiss it goodbye! What it boils down to is that people bring way too much crap with them, even for domestic travel. My solution is that they shouldn't charge for checked baggage, which goes into a cargo hold, but instead they should charge according to how much volumetric space inside the cabin you and your bags occupy. Yes - that means obese people pay more! Extra-large bags and extra-large people are directly proportional to a less comfortable flight for me and plenty of other small/slim people who can pack a little more frugally and take up less space. How many times have you been on a flight and had a beefy arm or thigh of a neighboring chunkster taking up to a quarter of your space? Oh, and get this - when the beverage cart came out, they charged not only for beer and soda, but also for water! WTF!! And God love the flight attendants - I really empathize with them because they don't make these rules, yet they are often the targets of the wrath of ignorant, inconsiderate people.

Hey, enough of my ranting!! Here's a pic of me and my buddy Paul, and Paul and his wife Efrat, at the Dogfish Head ale house in Gaithersburg, MD. Paul's currently in his anesthesiology residency at NNMC. It was quite the weekend of ethnic foods. Friday night we had a menu of Israeli dishes prepared by Efrat and a neighbor (both are from Israel); Saturday we had Indian; Sunday we had Ethiopian. Gochisosama deshita!!