It’s Time for Southwest Airlines to Change

I don’t know anything about the airline industry from a business standpoint, just as a customer that has done heavy travel for most of my career, with over 2 million miles of travel.

There has been a lot of discussion and rumors about Southwest changing its open seating policy, and I think it is time for it to change to match changes in business, and more importantly changes in society.

Back in the mid 1990s I had a year when I flew Southwest every single week for a year.  I was working in Houston for a company that had a big project in Dallas, so every Monday morning I got on the 7am Southwest HOU-DAL shuttle, and usually came back on the reverse shuttle the same afternoon.  That shuttle still runs both directions every hour, and if you get to the airport early you just hop on the earlier flight, get there late just hop on the next one, easy as pie.

Since it is a short flight – 45 minutes wheels up to down – back in the 1990s the afternoon flight had a big ice chest outside the gateway with ICE COLD BEER.  Instead of a stewardess coming down the isle, taking an order, returning with your suds, and you trying to down the beer in the 10 minutes remaining, you just picked up your beer as you got on the plane!  It was awesome!  Of course back then the stewardesses were all young and pretty, wore short-shorts during the hot Texas summers, and everyone on the plane from crew to passengers were basically having a good time.  Those shuttles were 99% businessmen back then (maybe a few women) and very few vacation travelers, kids, or people who normally frequent Greyhound bus terminals.

Alas those fun days are gone.  Today’s Southwest experience always has screaming kids, derelicts and weirdos on every flight.   For some reason, while assigned seating doesn’t mean those people WON’T be seated by you, it seems with the open seating the percentage chance of the person next you being the screaming kid or 300 pound behemoth seems higher.  Maybe since there are no higher price assigned seats like other airlines, there is no subtle caste system that puts better quality people in the economy plus and business sections (and people who seat their undisciplined screaming kids in business class should be shoved out the door without a parachute at 30,000 feet)

What I am saying is the class of people flying has dropped dramatically, but so has the class of the average American.  Besides most Americans becoming fat lazy slobs with tatoos, everyone is self-absorbed and think nothing of playing phone videos without headphones, screaming over the phone, letting their hellion kids disturb everyone around them, blocking aisles in airport throughways, and so on.  With most people in society not fit to be around in close quarters, Southwest should go back to assigned seating and put the bus people at the back of the plane together, like the rest of the airlines.

Southwest also used to be the low-price airline, but I have not seen them beat anyone on price anywhere there is direct competition.  This means I only fly Southwest when there is no alternative, and grit my teeth during boarding as I wonder how overweight and how much of my seat companion I will be in constant contact with over the next 2-3 hours.

 

The Forgotten Employee

For the second time in my career my company has been acquired and being integrated into a much larger organization.  And while the gears of the large company grind to integrate the engineers, technology and roadmap, I have been forgotten until all the tech stuff is done, which will end up being about half a year.  This exact same thing happened to me about eight years ago.

I have a job, and am getting paid full salary and benefits, but I am not given much to do while this is all happening.  I literally have 3-4 emails a day to address, an occasional conference call, then I am done.  Since I work from home I am free to pursue what other interests I might have after about an hour of work.

This might sound great since it sounds like retirement on full salary pension and benefits, but actually it is a bit boring because I am not really retired.   While I have nothing to do it is not like I can take off to Hawaii or go on a two-week cruise and leave my laptop behind; I am tethered to email and a phone to answer the few items that are lobbed my way from time to time, so I can’t fully check out.  The down time does give me a chance to address a few health issues that I have been putting off, pursue a couple of hobbies more seriously, and start seriously planning for “real” retirement.

I do have to go through a variety of “on-line-training” for new BigCo employees.  I also had to attend in person “new employee orientation” at the US headquarters, and it was a bit humorous with me as a middle-aged guy near the end of his career in a company orientation with about a dozen new Gen-Z hires just out of college.  Talk about culture clash, and maybe I will write about that experience.

Supposedly after this interregnum I will become super busy once again with new products to sell from my previous company (now subdivision), a customer book assigned to me, and will back in Sales Mode with both virtual and in-person selling (so back on the road).  The issue then will be if I really want to go back into full work mode and the grind of present-day business travel.

The last time this happened I left the company and went to another start-up (my present company that is being absorbed) after the integration was complete and my down-time was over, but at my age and stage of life I may just go ahead and pull the chute for early “real” retirement this time around.

How Long Does One Keep Furniture?

My parents went out as newlyweds in 1958 and bought solid oak furniture, then used it through the time my mother passed away in 2022.  It's all still sitting in the Old Man’s house in 2024 as he “maybe” gets ready for an estate sale and downsizing: coffee table, end tables, bedroom suite…

That’s 66 years of using the same furniture, two thirds of a century.  Now these aren’t and will never will be antiques.  They were sold to yuppy-equivalents in the late 1950s at department stores like Macy’s.

One way to think about this furniture is sentimental, as there are decades of family pictures with them in the background, mostly Christmases and Thanksgivings, sitting there as silent witnesses to the growing up and leaving of the kids, the aging of the couple who bought them, the death of one of the buyers after six decades, and soon the second.

But instead of being sentimental about it, seeing these pieces actually makes me a bit angry.  “Why didn’t my parents ever update their furniture? Were they cheap or is it a depression-era generational thing?”.  “Did they not pay attention to evolving tastes and styles?”.  “Modern furniture is not that expensive, why did they hang on to it?”, and so on.

So to be fair to them I wandered around my house and figured out the ages of all my furniture, wondering what was the oldest piece I own.   But I am not a good comparison since I got divorced not once, but twice, so started over with nothing at 30 then almost nothing again at 40.   The second time I did end up with my nice home-office desk I had bought a few years before, which as the only worldly possession I owned after the second divorce, I could say it’s a $250,000 desk.   It is now the the oldest piece of furniture I own: 20 years old.

But I won’t have it much longer.  When I retire in a few years I plan to walk out of my current house with some clothes and start over again at 60 (but keep the wife and bank accounts this time).  I will be downsizing and moving to another state, and there is no reason to haul any of my current furniture with me.  If I am lucky that will be the last time I start over, but if not, then I will walk away with nothing yet again for the last time in a few more decades, checking into some furnished care facility at the very end.

I just have a different mindset about furniture so shouldn’t be too hard on my parents about keeping the same pieces all their lives, but it still bothers me a bit every time I walk into that house and see furniture that was already old and out of date and I hated when I was kid.