July 2008 Archives

As the days get shorter and falling leaves leave trees naked to the elements, it can only mean one thing. Winter is looming. And before you people in California and Florida get all smirky on us, remember, if you are a business traveler, you are going to have to contend with inclimate weather, no matter where you live and no matter what your destination.

Yes, winter travel means delays, cancellations, and a snowball's chance in you know what to get to your destination on time. In part, you can blame the hub system. For even if you are flying non-stop from Miami to L.A., you may be delayed becuse the inbound flight to Florida is coming from, say, Chicago...and O'Hare can be a bit hairy from December through March...or April. Nonetheless, if you follow Jane Air's travel strategies, your wintertime odds of getting from here to there on time may be enhanced.

Jane stayed at an independent four-star resort this weekend and quickly became alarmed with her clock radio. Jane discovered the complex nature of her bedside device one evening upon coming back to her turndown-serviced room. Housekeepers in these types of hotels love to turn the radio on as they leave goodies on the pillow. As Jane prefers peace and quiet over music, she hastened to squelch the radio's emissions. But it took her five minutes to find the off button among the dozens of dials, knobs and related gizmos located all around the instrument of her madness.

No worries, dear reader. Although we are entering into an interminably long presidential season, this column is most decidedly not about political bents. Instead, Jane would like to comment on some recent articles she's read about the virtues of going right.

But before she gets to that, Jane, as a natural born southpaw, must express her dismay over the derogatory nature of the way the word "left" is bandied about. To wit, consider, mon amis, the words droit and gauche. Of course, those two words come from our French friends. A droit, in French, means to the right, while gauche means left. In old French, gauche also meant awkward, while in new French, adroit means dexterous and clever. What do said words mean in English? Adroit means skillful, ingenious and deft (which coincidentally happen to be among Jane's many wonderful attributes). Gauche means tacky and lacking in social polish. Nice. In idiomatic English, a left-handed compliment means a well-disguised insult. Meantime, the political meaning of the word, if said with the right intonation, has become debased to mean a free-spending, free-loving, UFO-sighting wack-job.

Jane is usually very choosy about the location of her hotel room. If, upon wandering up to her room after check-in, she finds it is too close to the elevator or the ice machine, she marches downstairs and demands a new room. But during a recent visit to Little Rock, Arkansas, Jane went against her gut. You see, her room was one of the few suites in the 95-year-old historic hotel. So, even though the second-floor suite was both by an elevator and at the top of the grand staircase leading down to the lobby, Jane stayed put. Jane suspected that since Little Rock is not a late-night town (even the security line at the airport closes at 8 PM), her beauty sleep would not be interrupted by noisy midnight revelers. However, she didn't consider that, when staying at an historic hotel, other spirited beings might cause a ruckus.