Plane Jane

I am a person who likes to stop using businesses as a statement.  For instance, I will not eat Oberweis ice cream (this may be very local)--even though there is a store less than a mile from my house, and ice cream is one of my four major food groups-- because the owner of the stores, Jim Oberweis, has a political career run on hatred of women, gays, and immigrants, just to name a few.  Remember the Toys R Us Christmas Catalog debacle this past year?  [I can't find it in the search function of my blog, for some reason.]  I stuck with that, too.  In college, it was very easy to be all feminist, women's studies major righteous, but it's so much more complicated to translate into an activist as an adult.  This is my way.

But how far do I go?  I'm never sure.  Because right now I am trying to book our plane tickets to New Orleans for the ALA conference this summer, and the airline with the best times (although not the best price) is United.  There is nothing (as far as I know, or at least nothing worse than other airlines) that I'm boycotting politically, but I have had several annoying experiences with them.  For instance, they cancelled a flight on me, and I found out about an hour earlier than they actually alerted me (because I'm top of stuff like that).  They continually switch around my flights, which means they switch around my seats.  If I wanted to not know where my seats were going to be, I'd fly Southwest.  And last time I flew with them, I had a little chat with someone about how they screwed my family one too many times, and they were idiots.  Shouldn't they have given me a free flight or something for my troubles?  I told them I would never fly United again.  How can I go back on my word?  What if they have it in their files that I said that, and they see me book and they never take any of my requests seriously again?  What if they deliberately change my seats because they hate me?  What if I take so much time worrying about all of this that I miss out on all of the flights going to NOLA?  Could that happen?

What to do, what to do.  All of this is a trillion times more complicated because we're traveling with Romy.  Not that traveling with her is complicated, but we've done it enough that we know what times are best and how to make the trip easiest.  And she's totally excited about the trip.  Not quite as excited as going to the mall today so she can ride on the seventy-five cent per ride cars.  Maybe we should just take one of those to NOLA.