My 24 hours in the airport

January 6, 2010 by Bill Palmer

This isn’t some sob story about how I had to spend the night sleeping on a bench in the airport atrium (I’m actually sitting in a hotel room inside the airport with a balcony that overlooks the benches where other stranded passengers are currently sleeping), nor is this a vent session about how I my trip was ruined (I’m still get to CES well before it starts). But as things I’d never previously experienced go, this certainly fits the bill.

The irony is that I had wanted to wait and travel to Vegas on Wednesday anyway; I only opted for flying on Tuesday because it was ridiculously cheaper, even factoring in the extra night in a hotel. So my plan was to spend Wednesday at the hotel, as a normal workday on my laptop, and then do CES once it opened on Thursday. As it is, bumped from my Tuesday morning flight in favor of a Wednesday morning takeoff instead, the airline is actually paying me about five hundred dollars to fly out on the day I had wanted to in the first place – and today became my “work out of a hotel day” thanks to the free room they set me up in here at the Hyatt-inside-the-airport. Make up your own joke about how it’s no wonder the airline industry is in financial peril – I’m too busy using up the wad of free meal vouchers the airline gave me.

I’m not going to pretend it’s been a particularly interesting day; in fact it’s more of a day of disconnected limbo than anything. As it turns out, checking into a hotel at 9:00am is about as surreal as one might expect. That there was an employee in the hotel room they’d initially put me in, doing electrical work, didn’t particularly surprise me. But no complaints, and particularly not after glancing down at all the other travelers trying to figure out how to use their balled-up sweatshirts as a pillow.

Oddly enough, Google is offering free wifi airport-wide over the holidays, and it’s pretty fast, but it only works for web browsing and not for email clients or instant messaging platforms. My sinister side tells me that it’s a cheap attempt to steer people away from using real email and back to webmail, since Gmail is one of Google’s bread and butter offerings; my cynical side tells me that it’s just a screw-up. Does Google screw those kinds of things up though? Either way, changing the port number to 80 on all of my apps allowed all of them to function. Google’s execs appear to be stuck in some kind of alternate reality in which everyone on planet earth is an uber-geek anyway, so perhaps they’re under the impression that the average airport traveler would know enough to do that.

Yes, I’m aware that on the other seaboard today, Google rolled out yet another Linux-phone. No, I’m sorry, what is Google calling its proprietary “open source” platform? Android? Right, sounds appropriate. Funny how every time yet another Android-based phone hits the market, Google worshippers proclaim that “this is the one,” only to say the same thing about the next one a few months later. In contrast, the very first iPhone changed everything about the cellphone industry on its very first day.

In any case, I suspect Google knows that Verizon’s Droid is anything but “the one” as the only reason Verizon even brought it to market was as an attempted bargaining chip in its obviously-not-going-well-if-at-all talks with Apple about expanding the iPhone to both of the nation’s major carriers. If Verizon thinks Steve Jobs can be bullied into such things, they’ve misjudged their man; all one has to do is look at the way Steve is punishing AT&T for its lame network and lamer attempts to get iPhone users to stop using said network – or did you think that the timing of Apple’s decision to go ahead and officially allow data-hogging live video streaming on the iPhone was coincidental?

But in any case, Google is apparently smart enough to know that the minute Verizon and Apple finally do come to terms on the iPhone, the Droid will either disappear entirely or remain as a mere insurance policy. Google knows that if it wants the Android platform to have any chance of prospering, the company itself is going to have to get out and push – hence today’s rollout of the “Google Android Nexus One” whatever-it’s-called. Not that any of it matters. Google’s latest moves appear to be nothing more than an attempt to force the non-geek 99% of us to use products that were specifically designed by the geekiest one percent, for the geekiest one percent. But we already lived through that period – it was called the eighties and nineties – and it’s long over. The days of geeks developing products for themselves and forcing the rest of us to live with them ended sometime between the rise of the iPod and the launch of the iPhone. Whether Google just doesn’t get that fact, or is defiantly attempting to reverse the course of history, remains to be seen.

Anyway, enough about cellphone platforms that don’t matter; I feel silly having even wasted four paragraphs discussing one of them. But I’ll say this: if you need more evidence that all of these other smartphones hitting the market really are geeks-only products, just look at their names – Droid, Pre(quel), Storm(trooper) – they’ve literally all been taken from Star Wars. Enough said.

It’s officially hour twenty-one of my airport residency. Because I’d been up late working the night before and expecting to sleep it off on the flight, I ended up crashing as soon as I hit the hotel room, which helps explain why I can’t get back to sleep now. I warned you in advance that this wasn’t a particularly exciting passage. For me it was just another day of working out of a hotel – albeit one that was located on the tenth floor of an airport – on a day that I thought would end in Las Vegas. But there’s always time for that tomorrow. Or later today, more accurately. My flight boards in five hours. Perhaps I’ll go ahead and take that nap in the mean time.