The Overheard Bin

Posted on

If the TSA could only perform, like they do in Tahiti

Welcome at Tahiti airport

After arriving in Tahiti recently for my fifteenth or so visit, (he said, trying to keep as modest a tone as possible) I was reminded once again that traveling doesn’t necessarily have to be the cruel and not so unusual punishment we have come to expect.

I was flying Air Tahiti Nui, and even in economy, with enough leg-room and enough in-seat movies so that I didn’t have to resort to watching the Gangster Squad in French, it was – in relative terms – a pleasant enough flight.

What was most pleasing about getting there, though, was that meeting us as we entered Tahiti’s terminal, just as there had been for every one of my other flights, was a woman presenting each arrival with a flower, and a couple of local guys, dressed in brightly colored traditional outfits, serenading us with guitar and ukulele.

How much nicer travel would be, I thought, if someone, perhaps TSA agents needing a little overtime, would meet us in a similar manner when we arrived at LAX, or JFK, or Miami.

How hard would it be to arrange? After all, if they used TSA agents, security clearance for the performers wouldn’t be an issue. And with the lack of common sense so many of the agents exhibit, you just have to believe that many of them are already musicians.

And this would be America going to work. So you’d think they’d be able to put together an even more extravagant, and memorable, performance than some little place like Tahiti, who has nothing more to draw from financially than the ever-dwindling resources of France.

Can’t you see it? A Latin beat as you enter Miami. Jazz welcoming you to New Orleans. A cacophony of car horns for New York.

My only fear? That the TSA-staffed program would have women handing out flowers, too – as they barked: “Married. Behind your left ear. Single. Behind your right ear. Looking forward to a cavity search. Behind both.” — Bob Payne

Long-time editor-in-chief of the travel humor site BobCarriesOn.com, Bob Payne was recently appointed as a consultant to the TSA’s performing arts program.

hugontour.wordpress.com photo

Posted on

Frontier Airline’s real intention? Getting passengers to fly the plane themselves

Boys in cockpit of airliner

This announcement that Frontier Airlines will begin charging for soft drinks?

It’s just a ruse, to get people talking — mostly about why Frontier is charging $1.99 for the can and not $2.00 — in order to disguise the airline’s real goal, which is to get passengers to fly the planes themselves.

Operating on the understandable premise that they’d like to make all the money without having to do any of the work, the Denver-based airline has announced, along with the news about soft drinks, that beginning July 1st it will charge a carry-on fee of up to $100 to anyone who does not purchase their ticket through the Frontier website, thus putting pressure on them to abandon third-party sites such as expedia.com.

“With this change, we are ensuring that our most valuable customers, those who know that when it comes to air travel we’ve pretty much got them over a barrel, will once again fork out for a fee not even we first thought they’d go along with,” said Frontier spokesperson Bob Payne.

But the concern among industry watchers is that the fee, designed to see just how much of the work of running an airline the passengers are willing to do themselves, is the first of a series of steps that will lead directly to the cockpit.

“After all, flying is not like driving, where somebody actually has to be behind the wheel,” said airline-passenger advocate Bob Payne (no relation).

Commercial aircraft have been flying themselves for a long time, Payne said, with the cabin crew now there just in case the flight attendants have to reference an authority figure.

“If the airlines can buy enough lobbyists, you’ll see pilots being eliminated altogether,” said Payne. “And it’s only a step from there to charging passengers to sit in the cockpit, and only another step beyond that to charging them if they chose not to wear a captain’s hat.”

Informally polled about the announced actions, the biggest concern most Frontier passengers seemed to have was about that extra penny. “How often do you think they are going to tell us they don’t have change for the $2.00?” questioned one passenger, Bob Payne (no relation).

 When not serving as the airline correspondent for BobCarriesOn.com, Bob Payne is a non-attorney spokesperson for the soft-drink industry.

 

 

Posted on

Court rules no deception in hotel case where “Room with a view” is of freeway

The California courts handed down a landmark ruling today that will have far-reaching effects for travelers who purchase accommodation based entirely on information provided by hotel websites.

The court ruled that any hotel room with a window has, by definition, a view, even if it is of a brick wall, and that unless the hotel falsely describes what the view is of it cannot be held accountable for whatever guests may choose to imagine.

“This is a great day for justice and a great day for the 87% of hotels with rooms that do in fact look out on brick walls,” said Bob Payne, a spokesman for the National Association of Maximum Yield for Less Desirable Hotel Accommodations.

The case was the result of a 2011 incident in which a honeymooning couple paid extra for what a California hotel described as a room with a view that turned out to be so close up to Interstate 5 that for the length of their stay the couple had to endure rude remarks about the bride from passing motorists.

“It was totally humiliating,” said the bride, who claimed the couple did not simply close the shades because of the principle involved, and because without turning the light on it would have been difficult to get in and out of the costumes they were wearing.

In a related matter, the court also ruled that photos circulate for so long on the Internet that a hotel can’t be held responsible if images that don’t accurately represent the current condition of the hotel can be found online.  That case involved a Miami hotel which visually represented itself as being on the water when in fact documented evidence showed the only time that could have been possible was during Hurricane Andrew, in 1992, when everything in South Florida was on the water.

“This is a great day for justice and a great day for the 87 percent of hotels who claim to be on the water but are not,” said Bob Payne, a spokesman for the National Association of Maximum Yield for Less Desirable Real Estate.

When not working for various hotel associations, Bob Payne is the editor in chief of  BobCarriesOn.com, an online site that has been sharing accurate, reliable travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.

 

 

 

Posted on

Was Easter Island mystery result of dispute over large, sugary drinks?

After centuries of debate, scientists think they may have solved the mystery of why the ancient people of Easter Island abandoned work on the statues they are famous for and suddenly disappeared, as if they all went to the store for milk and failed to return.

“We’ve found evidence that the Easter Islander population was decimated as the result of a dispute over the regulation of large sugary drinks,” said Bob Payne, lead archeologist for a university research team that based its findings on an extensive study of the island’s ancient sporting venues, movie theatres, and fast-food restaurant parking lots.

“It’s clear that the island’s statue carvers, who’d been unhappy with one particular local chief ever since he’d tried to institute noise restrictions limiting the amount of stone chipping they could do on nights and weekends, had finally had enough,” said Payne.

Scattered all over the island are piles of what were originally thought to be stone chips from the quarries. But Payne’s team discovered that the “chips” are actually the broken shards of returnable bottles, which he believes points to some kind of deadly deception on the part of the carvers.

“It’s likely the carvers lured the chief’s allies – consisting mostly of those who could afford to commission more than one or two statues a year — to one of the more popular fast-food restaurants and then quickly did them in with obesity-causing 16 oz. drinks,” said Payne.

After that, Payne surmises, the carvers, having dispatched the people whose investments generated most of the jobs on the island, had no more incentive to finish the statues, which, it turned out, worked only moderately well as a form of currency, especially if you needed change.

“With little reason to stay, the survivors all probably sailed, unknowingly, to Peru, aboard large Polynesian voyaging canoes whose navigators’ skills were not up to those of their contemporaries,” Payne said.

There does appear to be a happy ending to the story, though.

According to Payne, most of the stone carvers settled on the slopes of the Andes, where home prices were reasonable, taxes were a fraction of what they’d been on Easter Island, and the first primitive convenience stores offered sugary drinks in any size you wanted.

Equally fortunate, Payne said, the Easter Island survivors’ skill as carvers, coupled with their deep understanding of noise abatement ordinances, has allowed them to spread across the globe, to the street corners of virtually every major city, where they have flourished as the producers of the Andean flute music we all know so well today.

Posted on

Slingshot owners angered by reversal of TSA’s no knives on planes rule

Members of a group who call themselves law-abiding slingshot owners say the new TSA rules allowing knives on planes but continuing to ban slingshots is not only unfair but casts a shadow on one of the best-loved stories in the Bible.

The group, Davids Against Goliath, says the evidence is clear that while knives have played well-documented roles in airborne tragedies, not a single airborne terrorist has been known to carry a slingshot.

“In fact in recent years there has been only one case of a slingshot bringing down a commercial aircraft belonging to a major carrier,” said the group’s spokesman,” Bob Payne.

And that case, Payne is quick to point out, was determined by a fact-finding board, in an 8-4 decision, to be an accident.

“As you may well remember, a man was having a cookout in his backyard, and he’d drunk a beer or two, and meant to use his slingshot to fire a flaming marshmallow over the fence onto his neighbor’s patio, as a harmless joke,” Payne said. ” But he mistakenly loaded the slingshot with a seagull instead, and the bird lofted higher than the man thought it would, and was sucked into the engine of a 747. And as tragic as the incident was, the majority of the board did find that most at fault was the seagull.”

Payne said the result of that incident, which is unlikely ever to be repeated, except on national holidays occuring in months when it is warm enough to cook outside, all responsible slingshot owners are being prohibited from using a handy tool that undeniably has practical uses aboard an aircraft.

“I cannot tell you how many times I have been on a plane, wanted to get a flight attendant’s attention, and the call button wasn’t working, and a slingshot loaded with a jellybean would have saved me considerable inconvenience,” Payne said.

Asked to comment on the news that baseball bats and golf clubs would also be allowed aboard under the TSA’s new ruling, Payne answered only: “Are you kidding me? Do you know how much damage David could have done to Goliath with a three iron?”

When not touring the country as a paid spokesperson for Davids Against Goliath, Bob Payne is the editor in chief and a religion columnist for the travel humor website BobCarriesOn.com.

 

 

 

Posted on

Hotel guest finds paper-thin walls ideal for making confession to priest in next room

“Where’s a priest when you need one?” is a question frequent traveler Bob Payne has never had to ask.

Payne is one of a growing number of travelers who choose their accommodation by scanning hotel review sites in search of  hotels with partitions thin enough to hear conversation and activity without having to resort to the traditional method of holding a glass to the wall.

“With the priests, it’s the convenience factor, mostly,” says Payne, who admits that having lived and traveled long, his tally of experiences is not without moral blemish.

“There was that time in Bangkok with the two elephants, and I can tell you that while finding a priest at a place of worship at 3 a.m., especially one that admits elephants, is just about impossible, there was a priest in both of the rooms on either side of me.”

The added benefit of making a confession through a hotel’s paper-thin walls, Payne said, is that once you give even the politest of knocks from your side you know you will have the priest’s complete attention. “It’s not like in a regular confessional, which is traditionally seen as an opportunity for priests to finish the crossword or work on a Sudoku puzzle,” Payne said.

“Of course it is not all about religion,” said Payne, who currently travels the world selling Old Testament apps for the iPhone. “There is also a good deal of natural selection taking place.”

In that regard, Payne said most of his experiences have been positive. “I seldom call down to the desk to complain until the selection process has been completed.”

Like many travelers who look for hotels with paper thin walls, Payne confesses that listening to procreative activities of guests in the adjoining room can be “interesting.”

“The only exception is if the room is occupied by your parents, especially if you know your father is down in the hotel snack bar,” Payne said.

Plenty of other factors make paper-thin walls desirable, Payne said. “Let’s say you want to charter a fishing boat for the day, but don’t have your credit card number handy, and a guy in the next room reads off his while ordering a pizza. Voila! The fish are as good as in the boat.”

Still, the most satisfying aspect of thin-walled hotel rooms, Payne said, is not the practical but the spiritual, as anyone knows who has listened to a night of: “Oh God, ohhh God!, ohhhhhh God!!”

When travel humor writer Bob Payne is not selling Biblical apps for the iPhone he is the  Religion Editor for BobCarriesOn.com, your online source for travel news and advice since before Columbus landed at Plymouth Rock.

BigStock photo.

Simple Share Buttons