Theft at 30k.

I climbed aboard the nice shiny 777 that was to take me back to the States around 9:00, and within twenty minutes we were off down the runway. I had an aisle seat, but in the center section, so I really couldn't see much going on outside the plane.

I listened to my music until we backed out of the gate, at which point I killed it due to that "no electronic devices" embargo they place on us. I'm not sure what that's about. Somehow even when I've got my music player going, a friend's laptop running, and a buddy fiddling with his PDA all within three feet of me, their cell phones still manage to go off. If FCC regulations are designed properly so we aren't interfering with each other, why is it during takeoff and landing we're terrified that a device that doesn't even have broadcast capacity (like my Rio) is going to send the plane's electronic systems all wonky? Maybe I'm just a little overly-trained but it seems the giant electromagnetic fields created by the engines and alternators would probably drown out any field I could generate anyway.

I attempted to fiddle briefly with my entertainment unit (an embedded-in-the-seat-in-front-of-you model that I found very cool. I have taken my share of commercial flights over the last decade, but this was the first time I had my own in-seat entertainment unit, and I noticed happily that there were actually two different movies in the listing that I wanted to see. This trip was going to fly by! [Har har]. However, in my attempt to fiddle with my entertainment system I noticed that none of the buttons were having any effect. That's funny.

I looked around, and nobody else was really trying to play with their systems yet so I couldn't confirm that controls weren't all simply disabled during takeoff and landing (which reminds me: if we're trying to shut down all those pesky extra electronics, why were 300+ little LCD screens all still running?).

However, once we got in the air it became clear that the other passengers were using their systems just fine, while mine still did nothing. I overheard the people in the row behind me ask an attendant about it because theirs weren't working, and he said that a girl up front would try and 'reset the system' shortly.

After about an hour I managed to snag an attendant and asked about it, and he gave an exasperated smile. "Oh, I hate this system." He said, trying to be cheerful and express disgust at the same time (a tricky combination). He took my control stick from my hand (that's another complaint I have--the control design was incredibly stupid) and banged it against my seat handle. This didn't seem to help, but soon thereafter something fuzzed on the screen and he said "hmm. . .maybe that worked." He pressed a few buttons and some of the selections actually worked, so I thanked him. I don't know whether the system was reset somewhere else on the plane or whether him knocking the control unit around actually had an effect, but I wasn't going to argue one way or another.

However, constant bursts of high-frequency, eardrum damaging static fed into the audio often, and the video would frequently stutter and fuzz, making any video impossible to watch anyway. And it wasn't just mine; the two screens to my left exhibited the exact same problems. After half an hour the system dissolved back into complete snow and white noise anyway, and I gave up. I asked a few more attendants and about four-hours out, one of them looked at us incredibly apologetically and explained that they had reset the system many times and there was really nothing they could do.

Now, I should point out that the Delta people are always wonderfully helpful, and I love their cabin crew. They are nice, polite, and will go out of their way to make your day as best as they can with the resources they have on hand. They just couldn't do anything.

Normally I'd have had more patience than this, but my previous three Delta flights had all had a seat related problem, so I was beginning to lose what little I had left, and not with the cabin crew. Rather with Delta for not keeping a competent enough cabin maintenance watch. On the flight out to Seattle last summer one of my audio channels had been damaged. On the way back, the audio had been completely nonfunctional. On the flight to London, my seat didn't even recline (and no, I wasn't in or around an exit aisle--the seat next to mine reclined just fine). And now I was in a seat with litterally no entertainment capacity, and was forced to take a nine hour flight with no way to keep myself entertained. The attendants told us that as many as eight other seats in addition to mine had failed.

So I stole a bottle of vodka.

Just a mini. Pretty much the way Kevin Kline did it in French Kiss. I stretched my legs in the back-area until the crew members wandered from the area and picked one off. It's Finlandia, and I plan to hang onto it until the next time I'm forced to fly Delta and deal with whatever shit is broken on my seat that time. I figure it will help a little.

And another thing. If there is a person from Delta reading this: change your damn 'unsafe turbulence' criteria! Sometimes we'd cruise for half an hour through weather so smooth it felt like we weren't moving, with the seat belt sign illuminated. Very inconvenient.

After we hit the runway, I had gathered my things so I could be one of the first off the plane, because it sucked there, and found myself caught halfway up the first-class section trapped between businessmen pulling their briefcases out of overhead bins. The fellow to my left had already moved up the aisle, and had left his sealed first class amenities bag in the seat pocket in front, next to me. So I swung my small Eastsport backpack around (it's a one-shoulder model) and dropped the little bag quickly into the opening. I've always wanted to know what was in one of those things, and whoever had been sitting there obviously didn't want it. Once I got home I discovered the contents aren't that cool, but it was the spirit of the thing, really.

So that's how I came by a bag of goodies and a mini of vodka without paying for either. Blatant disregard for the property of a corporation which apparently has a blatant disregard for the comfort and convenience of its passengers.

So there.