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Thanksgiving triplog #1
SFO airport · Fri, 12 Nov 2025. 8:30pm.
Tonight we're headed east for Thanksgiving; to Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to visit friends and relatives over the coming week. We're at SFO already, awaiting our 9:25pm departure to BWI. Yes, it's a red-eye... and a red-eye was actually our first choice. Partly that's because when flying west to east it's a matter of losing most of a day traveling or having a rough night getting little sleep on a red-eye. We chose losing a night over losing a day. And partly it's because this flight is on Southwest, where I have the Companion Pass that makes flying together cheaper.
And yes, Southwest flies red-eyes now! They started that in the last year or two. It took decades because they literally had to upgrade all their IT to be able to handle the clocks flipping from 23:59 to 00:00 in the middle of a flight. It's like the Y2K problem but it's the D2 (Day 2) problem. 🤣 Oh, but despite upgrading their IT from the 1980s to maybe the 1990s they've still got...
...The problem of delays snowballing across the day because they continue to plan their schedules hopelessly optimistically like the past 20 years of commercial aviation in the US haven't actually happened.
Fortunately it's just a small delay (so far) and we really don't care this trip. We purposefully booked a nonstop, even as a red-eye, to avoid problems with missing a connection due to delays. And with this red-eye we're scheduled to land at 5:30am. If the flight were even 2 hours late we wouldn't care— except for how long we'd be sitting, bored, in the gate area struggling not to fall asleep before the boarding call!
Well, one thing that worked well this evening was a scheduled ride with Uber. I've been leery of using scheduled rides since a colleague of mine booked one for an early morning airport departure and the driver was late then canceled. He barely made it to the airport on time. But this time the driver was actually early and waited patiently outside.
SFO airport · Fri, 12 Nov 2025. 8:30pm.
Tonight we're headed east for Thanksgiving; to Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania to visit friends and relatives over the coming week. We're at SFO already, awaiting our 9:25pm departure to BWI. Yes, it's a red-eye... and a red-eye was actually our first choice. Partly that's because when flying west to east it's a matter of losing most of a day traveling or having a rough night getting little sleep on a red-eye. We chose losing a night over losing a day. And partly it's because this flight is on Southwest, where I have the Companion Pass that makes flying together cheaper.
And yes, Southwest flies red-eyes now! They started that in the last year or two. It took decades because they literally had to upgrade all their IT to be able to handle the clocks flipping from 23:59 to 00:00 in the middle of a flight. It's like the Y2K problem but it's the D2 (Day 2) problem. 🤣 Oh, but despite upgrading their IT from the 1980s to maybe the 1990s they've still got...
...The problem of delays snowballing across the day because they continue to plan their schedules hopelessly optimistically like the past 20 years of commercial aviation in the US haven't actually happened.
Fortunately it's just a small delay (so far) and we really don't care this trip. We purposefully booked a nonstop, even as a red-eye, to avoid problems with missing a connection due to delays. And with this red-eye we're scheduled to land at 5:30am. If the flight were even 2 hours late we wouldn't care— except for how long we'd be sitting, bored, in the gate area struggling not to fall asleep before the boarding call!
Well, one thing that worked well this evening was a scheduled ride with Uber. I've been leery of using scheduled rides since a colleague of mine booked one for an early morning airport departure and the driver was late then canceled. He barely made it to the airport on time. But this time the driver was actually early and waited patiently outside.
Hawk made a complaint about that bad doctor to the clinic's admin and also posted a negative review on Yelp. By the next morning the clinic's social media team had responded to her, apologizing for the problem. The admin took a week to respond... and even then only with a brief, form-letter acknowledgement of receiving a complaint. That's a sad illustration of the state of affairs in American medicine.
I opened this card last year under a fairly typical (for this card) offer of 75,000 bonus UA miles after $5,000 of spend in the first 3 months. I hit the spending target easily in the first two months then... didn't quite toss this card in the proverbial sock drawer for the remainder of the year. Instead I kept using it occasionally, taking advantage of various promotions it offered. At the end of 12 months I've charged a total of $6,700 on the card and earned 85,100 points.
