Why we need universal programming literacy

I was prepared to be impressed with Continental Airlines. On the way to Delhi they had surprised me in a good way – every seat, even in coach class, has an electric outlet. And you can choose any one of two hundred and thirty seven movies to watch. Unfortunately I’d already seen most of the good ones.

I did manage to see “Holiday”, starring Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn, which is delightful by definition, because it stars Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn. Although I felt very sad for another character – the young woman who is Cary Grant’s fiancée at the start of the film. She seems to be unaware that her own dear sister, whom Mr. Grant is about to meet, is Katherine Hepburn. Which means that she herself is basically roadkill. In their way, RomComs are a theatre of cruelty.

That was on the way out. The journey back was much worse, and therefore much better. Once we were all in our seats we were told that Continental’s vaunted entertainment system was broken, kaput, dead as a post. No two hundred and thirty seven movies, just a blank screen in front of every seat for fifteen hours.

The Continental folks were not quite apologetic. They kept announcing, repeatedly and somewhat proudly, that they could have repaired everything, but that would have delayed the flight by several hours. I can’t fault their logic – I would much rather be home on time than see a few movies – but it’s odd how smug they seemed about it.

And so I was reminded once again that a strange sort of attitude has taken hold among much of the U.S. airline industry. Namely, that customers have gradually become, in some odd and not quite definable sense, the Enemy. Rather than a profuse apology for inconvenience, the tone was a sort of smug message of “Yes, there was a problem, but we are professionals, dammit, and life is tough enough already, so don’t you mere passengers dare raise a fuss. Just be happy we’re still feeding you.”

Imagine an alternate Universe in which an airline actually asked the paying customers for their opinion on which option to take – perhaps taking a vote among the passengers. I suspect that if a U.S. airline were ever to do something so outrageous as to show that much respect for its clients, the Universe and everything within it would immediately collapse into a singularity.

Anyway.

Then they proceded to turn off the rest of the electrical system at the seats. No reading lights, no handy dandy little recharger plug. And no food service for most of the flight either. Just a planeful of forelorn passengers sitting in darkness for another fourteen hours.

I noticed a lot of people looking sadly at the books they had brought along on the flight – books that would remain unread for the duration. I’m not sure about the logic, but I think the airline wanted everyone to sleep so they’d be less trouble. Unfortunately, this resulted in a planeful of people who would be seriously jetlagged: If you go to sleep on a plane at 1am in Delhi, that’s 2:30pm in New York – exactly the wrong time to be falling asleep.

The airline folks then helpfully suggested that we not eat our little snack too quickly, because we wouldn’t be getting anything else for another thirteen hours. The young guy two seats away from me was sleeping when they handed out the snacks, so he was out of luck. I felt bad for him, so at some point I wandered to the back of the plane and nabbed one from a little stash I found there when none of the flight attendants seemed to be looking, and I brought it back to him.

Oh, and then the airline handed out vouchers to everyone (reminding us sternly that if we didn’t take our voucher right now, we couldn’t ask for one later). The voucher mostly gave you some little stuff that used to be free but that now you have to pay for. My favorite was the free headset. No entertainment system, but you can get a free headset. Honest. I couldn’t make up stuff like this.

To their credit, by the end of the long and grueling trip, the folks from Continental sounded truly contrite and apologetic in their parting announcements. It took seeing what fourteen hours of unrelenting boredom and darkness will do to a planeful of people to make them realize that there was something here to apologize for, but apologize they did in the end, and with conviction.

The strange thing was that for me this was all great. Nerd that I am, I had brought enough spare laptop batteries to last the whole trip, and then some. Without movies to distract me, I actually got a tremendous amount of programming done on the computer. I had a swell time, coding blissfully away.

Which just goes to show you: If only we had universal programming literacy, everyone on that plane would have had as much fun as I did.