[Butch Cassidy Slept Here]

I bet that you get terrible customer service everywhere you go…even your beloved amtrack.

Well, if I got bad service there, I don’t think Amtrak would be so “beloved!” Also, Pattis, you seem somewhat detached from rail travel. Drop-in on Pennsylvania Station, in Manhattan, around 3:00 AM. If “airport standards,” or airport civil rights, were applied half of everyone in the station would be arrested!

…lets just say you might put some serious thought into the fact that you are just a beligerant , cranky old guy with nothing better to do but bi**h and complain.

Well, Pattis, you got one out of three. I’m 59 (“old??”) However, even when I was a “…cranky YOUNG guy…” I had something to “…bi**h and complain…” about. Jetliner’s ancestors—the protester bashing “hard hats,” of the Vietnam War era, were a target of my wrath, and that of others. Yes, my civil/constitutional rights sensibilities go way back! Then along came Richard Nixon’s “enemies list,” and other police-state tactics of that time. Unlike today, I had some support—my fellow “flower children.” Anyone remember the daisy in the barrel of the M-16? Maybe that’s what is needed at the airport today. Whenever a flight attendant, or gate agent, kicks into a police state mode, someone should put a daisy in the offender’s shirt pocket! Only today, doing that would net you a charge of aggravated assault! Ironically, airlines, during this period, (late 1960s) were the opposite extreme of what they are today. Anything was TOLERATED! Drunks, you name it. Ordering the pilot to drop you off, at Marti Field, in Havana, was about the only way to get yourself arrested. Well, Richard Nixon is dead, and so are a lot of those “hard hats.” Somehow, in the intervening time, all the people who used to work at the Motor Vehicle Office have now become flight attendants or gate agents. Makes sense. Not a big transition. Instead of indulging one’s sadism by making someone beg for their driver’s license, we now have the airport police on speed dial. Next time, that family, with the noisy kid, will do the smart thing—flush the kid down the toilet in the lav!

I have often wondered if the reason you hate the airlines so much is because, at one time you were married to a woman that could'nt stand you anymore and ran off with a airline pilot?

Didn’t I see that in a Lifetime network movie?? If my friend ran-off with an airline person, it would be with a Lufthansa flight attendant (he’s a German major). In that event I would forgive him. He would have had the good taste to cheat with someone who works for a decent airline! Uh oh. I think Jetliner said he loves American Air. If that's the case, now that he knows my "story," I'm in BIG trouble!

After the aforementioned drunks, assaulters, smokers, etc. have been taken care of, how many more Islamic people, Sihks, families with small children, Australians who use the phrase “fair dinkum,” and others, need be raped of their civil rights before someone, like the not so former airline employee, Jetliner, is given the time to ponder, in the unemployment line, the virtues of a free society??

Peace!