Final Travel Jotts

- The seats on my plane coming back had ash trays in them. Yeah, ash trays. We've haven't been allowed to smoke on a plane since the 70's, right? Surely, my plane was not that old. I was hoping maybe the seats had just been recycled, but the couple primer grey panels on the wing leads to be believe I just flew home in a relic.

- I thought security was supposed to be heightened. And tougher to get through. And we all have to show a barcoded ticket that someone scans prior to boarding the plane. Apparantly, that bar code isn't what we thought it was. On the first leg of the trip, someone had the same seat as a lady near me and I kindly pointed out to him (with my powers of observation above those of normal humans) that his ticket was not for this flight. Wouldn't the bar code not have scanned if it was for the wrong flight? However, I realized why before boarding my next plane. The guy in front of me had a ticket that the attendant couldn't get the barcode machine to scan. So she tried keying the ticket in manually and it kept erroring. 3 times she did this. Then, she told him to go on and she'd worry about it later. Later?!$@# When we find out he's a terrorist and used a fake ticket to board and he's taking down the plane? Heck, it can't be that hard to forge a ticket that doesn't have to scan in the barcode machine or be entered manually. That makes forgery easy. What is the point of even having the bar code? Or the ticket for that matter?

- Finally, looks like the marketing gurus have finally taken over the friendly skies. Yep, they've found more places to advertise. All the tray tables on all my flights were covered in advertisements and even the bottoms of the bins to place all your crap in to go through the x-ray machine were advertised on. Remember everyone, nothing says "Buy my product" quite like being treated like a suspect. Do all these companies really want to be associated with one of the most annoying parts of travelling? In Greenville, all the ads were for Charter. So, in that case, the association is a more positive one than the actual Charter experience. Normally, when I think of the perfect places for Charter to advertise, I think about maybe them putting an ad on a dentists drill or pick. Possibly, an ad on the side of a rectal thermometer. Or on a cover sheet for a subpoena? These are all things I would associate to the Charter experience and then I saw it, I'd be reminded of Charter and all my wonderful customer disservice experiences with them. In your mind, it would make sense and it would just click. And that would be a memorable advertisement.