December 4, 2006
How Not to Survive a Redeye
Want to really suffer on a domestic redeye? Pick the aisle seat. Don’t bring a blindfold. Get too little sleep the night before. Take Dramamine only to realize that sleep isn’t in the cards anyway.
Seriously, though. I’m on a flight from San Francisco to the Gartner show in Orlando and, out of habit, I chose the aisle seat on a plane that doesn’t have an adjustable headrest. In a window seat I would have been able to lean against the wall. If I’d managed to fall asleep there wouldn’t have been any need to get up during the flight. To make matters worse, this old plane has huge CRT screens in the aisle, and one of them is three feet in front of my face. I’d forgotten how bright those old sets could be with the cabin lights off. With a blindfold I might have been able to ignore it.
The backpacking pillow Jen suggesting bringing with me was a great idea. If only I had something to lean it against.
Since sleep isn’t an option, I’m glad to have the extra power supplied by the auxiliary battery I replaced the DVD/CD-ROM drive in my ThinkPad with.
