Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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Here is a travel hack I learned long ago.
Say you are on the 6:37pm flight from SEA to SFO. You get to the gate at 6:20pm and they announce a 20 min delay. No big deal right? Well in my experience it means of one two things:
I was just informed that the air conditioning wasn't working, and that boarding was delayed another 10 min. Then I was informed that they could not pressurize the plane and that they would have an "update" for us at 7:35.
When you hear those words, RUN! Run from the gate and get yourself on the next flight. Those are words of doom. It means that they don't know how to fix the problem, don't know how long it will take to fix the problem, and that the next update they plan to give you is in an hour. It's a recipe for more delays.
In my experience there is a greater than 50% chance that the next update will be bad news.
So, what I do is immediately ask to be placed on standby on the next flight. I am hedging my bets. The next flight is at 8pm, so really, either way I'm in a better position then betting on my original flight (which all the other passengers are doing).
I have been a member of the Alaska Airlines Boardroom (their club) for the past two years. Today I was wondering if I should renew my membership since I fly far less than before. But the thing is, the Boardroom rocks for this kind of situation. Why? Cause I am paying for service. I walk in, ask them to be placed on standby, and never wait in line. They just take care of it. Contrast to all the poor folks who are scurrying around the gate waiting to see what their fate is. In fact a few years ago I was denied the option to get on the standby list (at the gate) for the next flight because so many passengers were trying the same thing.
Anyway, the next time you find yourself in a similar situation, you can do the same at the customer service desk which is usually less crowded than the gate with over 120 people trying to find out what's going on.
I think I am going to renew my boardroom membership for this very reason. I am currently typing this in their lounge, drinking an aslaka amber, using free wifi and I plan to catch up on work.
Update: my hedge worked, I won, Alaska lost. I took the 8pm flight, which left on time and lander early. My original flight, scheduled for 6:35pm departed at 8:53pm.