You shouldn't blog when you're FURIOUS

but I am anyway, and maybe it's a bad idea, but maybe later I will be less outraged and I would kind of like to get this thought out there while I am still outraged.

(another precaution: I'm probably not justly mad, I think I'm just trying to get something for nothing, knowing ahead of time that I shouldn't be allowed to do this, and I'm mad when I can't, so I guess this just makes me a spoiled kid)

Here's my situation: I'm flying Pittsburgh to San Francisco with a stopover in Cleveland. I want to just fly from Cleveland to San Francisco. I can't change this without paying a $150 fee plus blah blah blah. I don't want to change my route, I just want not to be present on that first leg. I mean, they could fill my seat with a mannequin. Whatever. Not allowed, without recalculating the whole thing as if I had said "wait, I don't want to go to San Francisco, I want to go to Dubai," applying fees, etc.

I'm mad at Continental Airlines, I guess, although I know every other airline has the same policy. I'm mad at the entire airline industry for not having systems in place to let me do this. It's just an information systems problem; it's not like the Cleveland-San Francisco flight could possibly be overbooked now or anything, because I was FLYING ON IT IN THE FIRST PLACE. Move a few bits and bytes, or convince the flight attendants in Pittsburgh to pretend that I checked in, and all would be well. But I can't, which means a 5 hour greyhound trip from Cleveland to Pittsburgh the day before, and waking up two hours earlier, which means like 4:30am now, and showing up in PIT instead of CLE.

Aargh. If any human had any power, he/she could fix this for me. But the whole goddamn airline industry is so dehumanizing, so mass-produced, factory cattle number-not-a-name squeeze-out-every-last-penny nonsense, that there's nothing that anyone can do. AND it's inefficient and poorly run. But we all keep doing it, because it's the only choice we have if we want to travel long distances.

(postcaution: And in the end, all my outrage is because I can't have everything I want with regards to an AIRLINE FLIGHT. I mean, is cross-country vacation travel a god-given right? No! If I don't like the flight system, maybe I shouldn't fly.)
Signed,
Dan, who is a spoiled kid.