The closest I’ve been to a George Clooney character is unfortunately his one in Up in the Air (I wish I could tell people I was like Danny Ocean).
My job requires me to fly on average of twice a month.
This is by no means any kind of record in the pantheon of work related travel, but some months all the travel happens at once.
By the Thanksgiving I’ll have gone to Minneapolis twice, Philadelphia, Santa Barbara and Los Angles – all during November. Because I’m sometimes forced to connect, this amounts to 12 individual flights and approximately 25 hours of flying time.
One of the themes of Up in the Air is that Clooney has no personal life because of all of the travel. His apartment looks as impersonal and bland as a hotel room. Everything about his life is transient. But he does find some solace in being in the air, and that’s where I feel the film goes wrong.
I view my time in the air as time that needs to be killed.
Even in first class, planes are uncomfortable. Between the rumble of the engines, people coughing, babies crying, turbulence and the cramped seating, I cannot wait to get off the plane. Further compounding this problem is that I cannot sleep on planes. I don’t know why this is, especially considering that I can fall asleep in a car or train within five minutes. To try and pass the time, every flight I load up on electronic devices and books.
When the Netflix app for the iPhone was announced, I was convinced that it would change my travel life forever. While I always travel with my laptop and iPod – both can play movies – the iPod cannot stream them, which limits how much media I can access on it (remember, most planes have WiFi). And with the laptop, I have my work laptop with me which is heavy and bulky; I rather just leave it in the bag. But my iPhone – that’s always in my pocket.
When I demonstrated the app a few weeks ago to a friend who had just bought an iPhone, I realized that this was the first time I had used it since it was released back in April. While my laptop, iPod and iPhone allow me to bring a massive media library with me on planes, I never actually end up using any of them.
Watching a movie or TV show on a very small screen sucks a lot of the enjoyment out the experience. The bigger the screen and the bigger the sound, the more enveloping the experience is. That’s why we keep buying bigger and bigger TVs. I grew up with the family TV in my home being 13 inches. It certainly served its purpose, but it’s a lot more fun to watch movies and shows on a large screen HD TV. So for me, I have a hard time focusing on video being played on a 2 inch screen.
Maybe more of an issue than the screen size is a comfort factor – being able to relax in a chair without a lot of ambient sounds. Every time I fly to Europe I bring the Indiana Jones trilogy with me to watch back to back on my laptop. What better way to kill over seven hours? But it never happens. I just end up listening to the first half of Raiders and then shut it off. I just cannot get into the movies. I’d be a much more satisfied flyer if Apple could figure out a way to put me to sleep for the duration of a flight rather than stick video playback into every device I own.
I have the same problem with music and audio books. The various noises of the plane makes it difficult to fully concentrate on what I’m hearing. With audio books especially, I quickly get nervous that I’m missing something and need to replay sections of the book.
The only thing that works for me is old fashion print. For each flight I bring a book and a stack of magazines. Having to focus on the text helps me zone everything else out.
Like Clooney’s character, sometimes I left just sitting on the plane thinking about my frequent flyer points. In return for my pain and suffering I’m at least going to be rewarded – there is some goal that I’m working towards. But unlike him, at least I do have something in mind that I want to do with the miles: Russia Summer Vacation 2011!
