On Sunday I went to Nantucket on a business-related matter. Really a law-related matter, I suppose, but since my business is law, the phrase fits. Everyone I told this to was extremely incredulous. Twice I heard "There's business in Nantucket?" There may not be business in Nantucket apart from bicycle rental shops, tasty juices, and exclusive blue-blooded sporting clubs, but there are dudes in Nantucket. And we had to interview one of them. In Nantucket.
This led to a somewhat amusing colloquy between myself, the partner I was with, and the cabdriver who drove us from our hotel to the Nantucket airport (which, by the way, isn't nearly as much fun as I expected after all those years of watching Wings). We told him we were in Nantucket on business, and he asked what kind of business. I told him we were here to interview a witness. He said, "What are you, the FBI?" I said, "No, we're lawyers." He said, "Oh! Looooo-yaz. You come all the way to Nantucket to interview somebody? You never heard of a telephone?" Then I punched him, kicked in his windshield, and said, "What you don't know about lawyers could fill a phonebook, buddy."
But the overall Nantucket experience was positive, despite the general uninhabitability of the Atlantic coast. Haven't these people heard of California? Don't they know you can go to the beach without feeling like your skin is being boiled off your bones by the humidity, and without being bothered by man-sized insects? What wasn't positive was my trip from Palo Alto to Nantucket. Here's a quick run-down of what went wrong.
First, for the first time, I was actually close to missing a flight. I thought that 100 minutes at the airport would be plenty of time to check in and board the plane. This was not true, because I was flying out of SFO, where everything is terrible and nothing goes right. Also, everyone in front of me in the check-in line, which was overflowing almost to the point of fire marshall involvement, had a one-bedroom apartment worth of luggage and a story to tell. This was a very long and very slow-moving line.
In addition, I planned to do some work during the flight, you know, in order to pass the time. I fired up my laptop and the little battery gauge said I had three hours. I had been fooled by such representations before, so I compulsively checked the battery gauge every five minutes to make sure it wasn't counting down at an accelerated pace. It wasn't. And yet, when the gauge said two hours, the laptop abruptly went into stand-by mode. When I woke it up the battery gauge told me I had four minutes left. My battery gauge is a lying harlot.
So, I packed up the laptop and busted out my much-maligned iPod. My iPod has recently decided that there are certain tracks in its memory that it simply will not play. On Sunday, this list included every track in the hard drive. I could feel something churning and moving inside the tiny metal case as the little device tried to get each track playing before it automatically skipped to the next track, which it also could not play. I also got to actually watch the battery gauge decrease before my very eyes, as it wasted precious power on moving around whatever it was moving around. God, I hate my iPod. Hate it hate it hate it. I'll never buy another one. When this one finally craps out for good (and it will), I'll either buy whatever Microsoft is pimping or buy another little Flash mp3 player. Fucking iPods. Anyway, I managed to fix the no-track-playing problem on the flight home today by whacking the iPod several times with the meat of my palm. Just call me Fonzie.
I think those were the major irritants. The flight from Boston to Nantucket was pleasant enough, despite the fact that it was conducted in a minivan with wings. The trip back was also pleasant, since Logan airport is run with a modicum of sensibility. I really wanted to stop at the Dunkin Do-netz in the airport but was sensitive to time, and I already hadn't been to the gym in three days. And the best part was, since my flight got in at 2:00 p.m., I was able to head straight to the office and put in a few more hours of work.
I need to work on my endings.
You know, I hate iPods and their dominance and Apple's use of them as a way to get people to buy their crappy DRM'd music, and my last iPod died four times under 2 years of warranty (as in went completely DEAD), but I ended up reluctantly buying another one just because honestly, nothing beats the iTunes interface, and all the other MP3 players on the market just aren't "there" yet. If you do end up getting something else, I hope you post about your evaluation process and what you ended up choosing because I keep hoping something better will come along!!
Also, if your laptop has a removable CD/floppy drive, you can take it out and get an extra battery that fits in there, so you are using two batteries at once -- with it, I have a total of 6 hours of battery life now. SO nice for traveling.
Finally, kudos on your crab/lobster debate win. I hate hate HATE it when people know nothing about a topic and are obviously wrong, yet keep insisting that they are right. A tailless lobster is idiotic. And don't even get me started with Fox's claim that the dog on the Simpsons is a greyhound.
It's actually called Dunkin Deez-nutz by those of us in the know