The Secret Life of Frequent Flyers

I'm squished into the back of an Aer Lingus airbus last night, after a frustratingly long day of project planning*. I just wanted to quietly withdraw for an hour or so and read about Lily and the calendar sisters.

Two Spanish girls, early-20s if they were out of high school, plop down next to me. With total disregard to my personal space or their own privacy, buzzed on about not being able to give up their hearts ("I want to, but something just happens after a few weeks and I can't") and how long it took before they slept with the guys they're now seeing (or used to be seeing, in the case of the lovelorn girl next to me). Turns out it depends on they guy, 1st date's not out of the question, but usually within the second week.

As hard as I tried to ignore them, they just talked louder and faster. My bad for packing light and being a Boseless Bozo.

Without taking a breath (she must have had gills somewhere, because the air was not going in through her mouth, the aisle chick moved from relationships to careers.

Evidently one was a more seasoned traveller than the other, telling her friend how she used to "just live" on airplanes.

"You were a flight attendant?"

"No, I worked in a reservation center." Seems she flew all over for free on her days off. "I'd go to South America, Malaysia, and China, well not China but Hong Kong."

Newly single chick asked what Hong Kong was like.

"Hong Kong is just like a New York. I've never been to New York, but I've seen it in the movies, and, yeah, I'd say Hong Kong is a little Manhattan except for all the people are Asian."

I'm hoping she starts writing a column soon -- Inez's travel advice for the lovelorn.

* Evidently "project planning" can now be summarized as:

A) Confirming that a new process has been developed to get anything into the pipeline

B) Reiterating that we don't have the resources to execute the steps outlined in the new process.

So, after 5 hours in this meeting, and looking at the 14 events that we need to get from paper to implementation, we now know that nothing can happen because everybody's too busy with BAU. As they say in Ireland, that's just feckin' grand.