OK, I didn’t want to come back from vacation; however, since I like to eat…we did.

Today we will continue on with my Orbitz.com train of thought.

One of the more interesting things for me (now keep in mind I am new to flying in this century) was that Orbitz sent a voice message to my phone about three hours before each flight.  Along with other things, the messages let me know the flight number, the departure gate and most importantly if my upcoming flight was still on time.  A drawback about our one late flight… even though they did message me that it was late I received the message about 10 minutes after the flight had left the airport.  Of course seeing how poorly the preflight was managed I imagine Orbitz let me know as soon as they found out.

All-in-all, we feel that Orbitz.com was a beneficial way to go and will use it the next time the president provides us with a tax rebate.

Now I have a general technological comment or two about airports.

I found it nice that each airport provided Wi-Fi (although, I didn’t check that in SHD) which allowed me to use my computer to check mail, find out information that I could use on the trip, etc.  The bother was that of the three airports, two of them provided it free of charge.  But not Dulles!  They required me to pay AT&T to use their Wi-Fi system.  Needless to say, I didn’t pay for something that I didn’t really “need”.

Next, I noticed that most everyone had a cell phone at the airports even down to one little kid who looked to be about six or seven.  That pleases me corporately since I work for NTELOS but personally I wonder a kid that young needs one.  Many travelers also had iPods or other MP3 players with them.

Additionally I noticed that a large majority of people had notebook computers.  That was neat since it meant that I wasn’t the only geek out there…I was surrounded by them.  I believe we may have been in the majority.

There was a table in an airport eatery where it appeared a mom, dad, daughter and son sat dining.  The mom was messaging on her notebook, the dad appeared to be doing the same on his and the daughter, with the standard teenage, “bored-with-the-world” look on her face was listening to her iPod.  And then get this, the son, maybe eight, was writing in a paper notebook. WOW!  That was refreshing.  They were eating as they visited, oh wait, that’s what bothered me, there was no visiting at all.  They were each so intent on their own little worlds they didn’t communicate with each other - not one word for over 30 minutes.  The parents couldn’t even take time to look up when the boy showed them what he had been drawing.

Maybe we need to learn to communicate less to communicate more.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 5:08 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.