Body still on west-coast time, but with an east-coast schedule. There is much caffeine in my future.

Thoughts from this past week:

Airline travel really sucks. There is no space in coach, and the seats are really uncomfortable — my back still hurts. Next thing you know they will charge for air.

Note to TSA guy: if you are going to admonish me for not following the procedure going through the checkpoint (my shoes were on top of my laptop), it would help if someone would tell us what the procedures actually are. They aren’t posted anywhere. So I’ll say now what I couldn’t say then: bite me.

To the lady that tilted her seat back, almost pinning me in. And then giving me and my row-mates a movie-theater international-symbol-for-annoyed scowling-over-the-shoulder glance every time someone got up (it’s a six-hour flight) and having to grab your headrest. Caveat emptor. Thanks for finally cluing in somewhere over Nevada and straightening your seat.

It is not really comforting to know that the cabbies in Monterey are just as crazy as the ones in DC. We ran a red light. Not a yellow-oh-it-just-turned red light. A red, one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two, one-thousand three red light. We weren’t in that much of a hurry. The tip was a thank-you for not killing us.

The government travel system shouldn’t book me on a flight as standby. It’s not fun to get to the counter and be told, “Oh, we’re oversold on this flight. We’ll try to get you on.” I made it, but … United — you overbooked a 28-passenger flight by at least 4 seats. What’s up with that? Even if you really routinely get >15% cancellations, do you not understand small-number statistics? It was a hop from Monterey to San Francisco, and you paid cab fare to SF and a round-trip ticket for each one. Wow.

Murphy’s law does not disappoint. Backup scripts failed a week ago, knowing I wasn’t around to check. Of course, most of us were gone, so there wasn’t much to back up. Barely made a dent in the stuff that piled up while I was away.