I seem to always have trouble on my return flights from Austin. I've been stuck in Denver and Phoenix, and I was reasonably sure that I was going to end up stuck in San Francisco as well.
I arrived at AUS with plenty of time to spare, and went through the "Premiere Line" for security, which means I get to skip over all the waiting and go directly to the driver's license check. Yay, frequent flier benefits! However, once I was through the first check, I had to put up with the perpetual mockery of security that is the checkpoint. A lot of families were flying, and they were all shuttled through the magnetometer with no subsequent checks. However, I had to opt-out of the radiation machine, which caused a slight panic. It turns out that they had six people working the entire checkpoint. Two people watching the baggage x-ray, one before the check, one after the check, one doing bag checks, and one sitting on his ass being "in charge." This meant that there was no one available to do the patdown that the opt-out brings. They had to wait until the lady doing bag checks finished, then she took the place of the post-check guy, who was then available to do the check.
Until, of course, Assy McGee decided that the guy running x-ray #2 should do it, and abandon his post. I have no idea what the logic behind this was, but he seemed to be insistent on it until someone else pointed out that then the bags would have no one looking at them. Finally, some random TSA guy was found, and he did the stupid check. I really can't wait for the TSA "Not A Terrorist" list to be made, so I can get through this dumb show without having to deal with incompetence and nuisance shoe taking-off.
I then got pizza:
which put me behind the worst fast food orderer I've seen in a long time. First he didn't know what pizza he wanted. Then, after choosing and moving on to pay, he decided he wanted a second slice, and asked if it could just be put into the same box. Since a box holds one slice, that couldn't happen, so he accepted the second box. Finally, he needed two beers. Again, a problem, because the airport people are only allowed to sell one beer at a time. He took the one beer, went over to stand at a counter, chugged it, and then got back in line to get #2.
Anyway, by the time I got to the gate, I noticed an important fact: there was no plane connected to the jetbridge. This continued for almost an hour, until the flight came in late, leading to the second problem: there was no crew to fly the now-available plane to SFO. I've never been able to understand how airlines can manage their logistics so poorly. You know you have a flight at airport X at time T. That flight requires a set of N crew members, who need to be replaced after some number of hours. Therefore, you need some number of crew sets k = ceil(dT / H). Not having a crew I think has been the problem in both my Denver and Phoenix flight issues.
Upon arriving at SFO, I discovered the actual reason for the delay for the flight: the
airport only had one open runway, and all traffic had to use that. I didn't know anything about this, suggesting that United didn't do a very good job of notifying travelers. The one benefit of this was that all flights were delayed, so leaving Austin an hour late didn't decrease my layover very much. I went to the gate, and saw what I thought was my name noting that I'd been given an upgrade to first class, as seat 3-A was listed for someone with my same first initial and first three characters of my last name.
So, using this set of data for
last name frequencies, and this data for
first names (assuming first initial fractions are reasonably constant over time, so I don't need to convolve an age cohort function against time variable first names), suggests that my first name is more likely than random (0.068126 compared to 1/26 = 0.038462), but that my truncated last name isn't that common (0.0024997 compared to SMI = 0.010087). Therefore, randomly selecting from the US population gives me a upgrade name that has a probability of 1.7030e-04. Now, confining this to a plane makes it a
birthday problem, and
this seat map suggests a United 757-200 has 188 seats. This leads to a probability that someone else on the plane has the same upgrade name as me of 0.031512 (Edit: For comparison,
Roger Smith has a probability of 0.10684, significantly worse than me.) This is higher than I would have thought, but since it's a birthday problem, that's pretty much always the case. Still, this would give me a ~97% confidence that I had the upgrade to first class, meaning I would be able to count on a meal on the flight.
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| I had some emergency chocolate that I'd packed before leaving home, and I discovered it while sitting there. It had a raspberry filling. |
Tl;dr: I didn't get the upgrade, this flight fell into the 3.15%.
In any case, I made it home without much trouble (despite all that), and was able to get to see a really nice sunset over the Pacific Ocean:
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| I'm sure the clouds have a specific name too. Altocumulus? Is that right? |
