A Plat in the Back

Greetings from seat 5C on Northwest Airlines Flight 368, nonstop Airbus A320 service from San Francisco to Minneapolis/St. Paul. As I mentioned earlier, I travel a lot. Airlines are exceptionally nice to frequent travelers like me. They work very hard to keep my loyalty to them by handing out generous amounts of frequent flyer miles, (like start ups hand out stock options?) and cheap and easy first class upgrades.

Since very few people actually purchase domestic first class tickets these days, the airlines upgrade their frequent flyers to the nice, wide, legroom-laden, and otherwise unsold chairs in the front of the plane. Reward the frequent customer with a perk and free up a seat in the back for another paying coach passenger. A win-win for the airline and frequent flyer.

I’ve been traveling for business for four years now. I am a Northwest platinum elite frequent flyer. I chose Northwest for its liberal upgrade policy (free and automatic) and generous amount of first class seats on its aircraft (16 seats on NW's A319/320 versus United’s 12 seats on the A320 and 8 seats on the A319).

Upgrades are important to me. I’m 6’ 6” tall and weigh 320 lbs (Note to self: time to do something about the 320 lbs thing). Airline seats are designed for people a foot shorter and half my weight. Coach airline seats and I are not good friends.

When I started my new career as a road warrior, I read Flyertalk.com, a chat board devoted to the frequent flyer, for awhile to learn how to play the frequent flyer upgrade game. As I rose through the ranks of elitedom (silver to gold to platinum), I have gotten pretty good at predicting what flights I would be upgraded on and what flights I would be taking my “previously assigned coach seat”. Since becoming platinum elite, I’ve grown accustomed to the cheap, easy, and automatic first class upgrade. I’ve grown spoiled. I no longer have to take the 6:00 am flight out of Hartford to have a reasonable shot at an upgrade. I automatically get upgraded five days before the flight on every NW flight I take.

Then I came to San Francisco. I’d read on Flyertalk that SFO is a rough place to get an elite upgrade. I wasn’t all that worried. I’m a plat. I haven’t ridden in coach in years. I buy my own travel over NWA’s website. When I book my ticket, I choose an emergency exit or bulkhead seat. I don’t actually expect to sit in the seat I pick, but I grab a good coach seat “just in case”. On my flight out of SFO, I picked 5C, the first row of coach, right behind the first class cabin. Five C is a rather narrow seat with lots of legroom. Five days before the flight, I checked my reservation on the computer, expecting to see that I was upgraded to the first class cabin. Shock! Horror! No upgrade! I’m still sitting in 5C!

Time to implement Plan B. Since I have not been automatically upgraded, I check in for my flight via the computer exactly 24 hours before my flight. NWA holds back some first class seats in the unlikely event that some fool may waste their money and actually buy one in the four days leading up to the flight. Usually by the day before the flight, all the seats that NWA is going to sell have been sold, and I can often times snag a first class seat by checking in online very early.

On this trip, check in time is 6:30 am PDT (or 9:30 am EDT or body clock time). After checking in online, I learn that I have been put on the “First Class Upgrade List” at the airport. Bad Words! Really Really Bad Words! No upgrade!

Desperate times call for desperate measures. If I’m going to be upgraded, it will be at the airport shortly before the flight. I arrive at the airport early. With my coach boarding pass and platinum elite card in hand, I approach the gate agent and ask, “Where am I on the upgrade list?”

The gate agent pecks at the computer and says “Mr. Green, you are number four on the list.’

“How many seats are available?” I inquire.

There is one seat available. Hmm… there seem to be a lot of elites on this flight.”

“Yeah… Thanks” I reply and wander away bewildered. A Keoghansque voice in my head says, “Mr. Green, you are the last to arrive. You have just been eliminated from the race.”

So here I sit. I am one with seat 5C. It did not shrink. I am wider now than the last time I rode in NW’s coach cabin. The flight attendant just offered to sell me a "snack box" that resembles an MRE. I’m a stranger in a strange land. I’ve got an excellent view of the first class cabin, and “This Nearly Was Mine” playing on my iPod. SFO to MSP: Three hours and six minutes of being on the outside looking in. At least I’m not alone back here. There are at least two other plats, and untold numbers of gold and silver elite passengers here in steerage with me.

As petty as this entry may sound, It could be worse. I’m in first on the next leg. NW 200, Minneapolis to Providence, RI is an easy upgrade.

Take Me to Your Animated Leader!

Friend and fellow Blogger Amy Marr pointed me to a "personal DNA" personality test.

It says I am an animated leader. Below please find my peronality profile along with my cynical comments:


Your solid grounding in the practicalities of life, along with your self-assuredness and your willingness to appreciate new things make you a LEADER.

Actually I thought I was a leader becasue nobody else volunteered for the job.

You're in touch with what is going on around you and adept at remaining down-to-earth and logical.

Paging Mr. Spock to the bridge.

Although you're detail-oriented, this doesn't mean that you lose the big picture.
You tend to find beauty in form and efficiency, as opposed to finding it in broad-based, abstract concepts.

So that explains why I like to shop at IKEA! I thought it was becasue I am cheap!

Never one to pass on an adventure, you're consistently seeking and finding new things, even in your immediate surroundings.

Especailly in the back of the refrigerator.

Because of this eagerness to pursue new experiences, you've learned a lot; your attention to detail means that you gain a great deal from your adventures.

I though all I gained from my adventures was frequent flyer miles.

The intellectual curiosity that drives you leads you to seek out causes of and reasons behind things.

And there are some things you just dont want to know the casues and resons behind. Like immigration policy.

Your confidence gives you the potential to take your general awareness and channel it into leadership.

and then onto making some really big mistakes.

You're not set on one way of doing things, and you often have the skills and persistence to find innovative ways of facing challenges.

Think outside the box? Is there a box?

You are well-attuned to your talents, and can deal with most problems that you face.

except the Bassett Hound.

You prefer to have time to plan for things, feeling better with a schedule than with keeping plans up in the air until the last minute.

and someday my wife will realize this. maybe.....

Never one to be found in chic boutiques or trendy clothing stores, you take an extremely practical approach to getting dressed.

like checking for food stains and odors (sometimes) before wearing.

If you'de like to read the unadultrated report with all kinds of nifty charts, maps, graphs, and data, click on the link below:

My Personal Dna Report

The Flying Bug

I’ve been on the road a fair amount this month. One of the nice (or not so nice) parts of being an immigration lawyer is the frequent opportunities to travel. I’m composing the text portion of this entry in seat 1B of a Northwest Airlines 757 bound for San Francisco.

Just like my bassett hound (whom I can’t take outside to relieve himself unleashed for fear he will wander off somewhere and not be able to find his way home), I love to travel. There are very few places in the world I do not want to go to. I love the smell of jet fuel, crossing time zones, meeting new people, and seeing new sites. I attribute this wanderlust to a ailment known as the flying bug.

Aren't we pathetic looking?

I can thank my uncle for the flying bug. When I was very young, my Uncle George flew out to California from Pennsylvania in his Mooney to visit. During his visit, Uncle George took me and my siblings for a ride. My brother and sister were scared out of their minds. I loved every minute of it. I was hooked.

As I grew up, flying fever did not dissipate. Other kids wanted to be doctors, firemen, or garbage collectors, I wanted to be an airline pilot. Growing up in Southern California, it is not unusual to look up in the sky and see a plane flying overhead. My head was cocked at a permanent 45 degree angle, looking, and if low enough identifying all the planes as they flew by. I was probably the only nine year old in the USA with a subscription to Flying magazine and Plane & Pilot.

After earning my private pilots license at Orange County Airport, I enrolled in Trinity Western University’s aviation program. TWU was something of a compromise school. It was sufficiently religious to satisfy my parents, and it had an aviation program. I was on track to graduate with a commercial pilots license and an instrument rating when six of my classmates (and two very close friends) were killed in a plane crash.

After being handed a sobering wakeup call that people get killed flying planes, I changed majors to history and graduated with a BA in History/Political Science, a private pilot license and about 200 hours of flight time. At graduation, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do with my life, but I was reasonable sure that flying an airplane was not one of them.

Last month, I went up to the U.S. Consulate in Montreal, Canada to assist a client obtain a U.S. visa. Since Montréal is relatively close, I decided to fly myself up there.

A left seat self portrait, an air traffic control radar trace of my flight from Flightaware.com, and a shot out the windshield threading the needle between the Green Mountains of Vermont and a stratus cloud layer.

After a fifteen year of remission, the bug came back. I renewed my pilots license. I was invited to join the Raytheon Employees Flying Club by a friend from church. REFC is not very exclusive. Unlike the name implies, employment at Raytheon is not required. You don't even need to be a pilot, but is sure does help. The sole requirement to join the club is to know how to spell R-A-Y-T-H-E-O-N. I got a lot of practice at this as I get to write it on the many checks I send to them.

I now fly fairly regurarly now. I do not fly as much as I did in shcool, as airplane time is $80 an hour.

Flying fever is genetic, and I've passed the bug. At the tender age of three, and against my wife’s better judgment, I took my daughter flying in the club’s Beechcraft Sundowner.

The Sundowner

The virus has been passed. Although she was scared half out of her mind during the simple flight around the airport, upon landing, Joanna cried, “Lets do it again Daddy!” If you ask her what she wants to be when she grows up, she will tell you “airplane pilot”

.

Joanna the business traveler: Bose Headphones, iPod, NWA safety instruction card (Lets do that! as she points to the picture of the people going down the inflatable slide) and Bear.

Carrots, Sticks & the Amnesty of '86

In 1986, President Reagan shepherded the Immigration Control and Reform Act of 1986 (IRCA) through Congress. IRCA permitted the estimated one million illegal immigrants to regularize their status. This legislation adopted a carrot & stick approach. First the carrot: All an alien had to do was prove that they had been here illegally since January 1, 1982 and that they were otherwise a person of good moral character, and volia, the government gave them temporary status, then permanent status, and then (if they wanted it) citizenship.

And now the stick: In exchange for the amnesty, IRCA required employers to verify the lawful immigration status of all of its new hires. New employees would be required to bring a handful of documents to verify that they were in the country legally and were authorized to work. If employers did not comply or knowingly hired an illegal alien, the INS would use their stick and mete out stiff fines or jail time to the employers.

Twenty years later, one million illegal aliens turned into eleven million illegal aliens (how does the census bureau count something that by its nature does not want to be counted?) and we are talking about another amnesty program. Why? What can we learn from ’86?

The amnesty of ’86 did not address the market force that caused one million people to break the law in 1986: The American economy’s demand for cheap low skilled labor. The government attempted to regulate this economic force with the threat of the use of a stick. We made employers surrogate immigration officers, and told them not to hire anybody who did not have the right papers.

Most employers complied with the law and added the immigration verification form to the myriad of forms passed in front of new hire employees. However, knowing that the average American worker would not want to do their job at the wage they were offering (if at all) some employers gambled that the government would not use their stick. And for the most part, the gamble paid off. Illegal immigrants streamed into the USA relativly unfetteed by the Border Patrol and into the arms of employers that needed their skills.

Twenty years of winking at the employment verification system later and inaction on the part of law enforcement, one million illegal immigrants balloon out to eleven. If the Department of Justice had used its stick, funded INS and it enforcement unit, and the workplace raids that we are seeing now had been a normal fixture of American life in the late 80’s and early 90’s they would have changed the labor makrets forever. there would not be eleven million illegal immigrants.

I'd hope that as Congress considers legislation to change the status of the estimated eleven million illegal immigrants, they would consider passing legislation that would address the labor market's need for cheap labor. Threats of fines and jail only work if people are fined and go to jail.

Hey look, Prof. Hewitt, I've got a new blog!

My wife has been badgering me to make a blog entry on the family blog. Since that blog seems to be aimed at a very limited audience (folks who are interested in my family), and my posts would be on a decidedly different topic, I created my own blog.

I've been interested in blogging since reading Hugh Hewitt's book Blog. Prof. Hewitt is a radio talk show host, blogger, and a law professor at Chapman University School of Law. (Go Panthers!) I had the honor of sitting under Prof. Hewitt for twelve credit hours of torts and con law. Although I cannot receive Prof. Hewitt's radio program here in the hinterlands of New England, I still read his blog.

Rick