The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer

Say say my playmate,
Come out and play with me,
And bring your dollies three,
Climb up my apple tree,
Slide down my rainbow,
Into my cellar door,
And we'll be jolly friends,
Forever more
(children's nursery rhyme)

I once read a blog entry whose author waxed poetic on the fact that certain people (blogging or interacting on Internet forums) “just don’t get it,” it presumably being some unwritten rules for coolness on the Internet, understood by “those in the know"/the author’s particular clique of Internet acquaintances.

I had assumed that most of us were automatically uncool, by virtue of spending any significant amount of time on the Internet, in the first place. Weren’t all the cool people too busy caught up living the breathless whirl of their exciting lives to read or write? Then it dawned on me. Was it possible to be such a loser that even the other losers looked down on you? This possibility first occurred to me in Mr. M’s grammar class in Junior High.

I attended an old fashioned American prep school, also attended by my father, my aunts, my uncle, my sister and one of my cousins. It had a motto that went something along the lines of “And Jesus grew in understanding with the Lord” and an honor code. I learned to diagram sentences, scan poetry meter and exegete Bible verses, a tedious exercise that did wonders for my textual analysis skills but little for the faith it was aimed to reinforce. If God communicated by the written word and the written word was subject to multiple interpretations, how could we then be sure what God was saying? Maybe he speaks in Math. But I never was much good at Math. Most of all, I remember my chief preoccupation in those years was attempting to decipher the unwritten grammar of the arbitrary and constantly changing social behavioral code meted out by certain (seeming at the time) godlike peers.

In such a place, it was possible to achieve a solid academic education, along with an adequate introduction to, and, for the lucky, a lifetime immunization to institutionalized hypocrisy. Like so much in life, the lessons from what I'll call for lack of better name "The John Knox Institute" that really stayed with me were not the ones they consciously taught. Dispensing and deflecting sarcasm was one survival skill you might pick up there. The biggest triumph was to matriculate with some significant part of your dignity and individuality intact. I don’t know if I hated that place so much as I hated the person I was in that place. Funny how so many behavioral instincts go back to the schoolyard. It is one of our first frames of reference.

Back to Mr. M’s eighth grade grammar class. Some of my teachers at The John Knox Institute were truly inspiring individuals and some could have inspired Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” (We don’t need no education), M. was of the latter persuasion. As he handed back our tests, M. would cheerfully dispense his prognosis of the student’s collegiate aspirations accordingly—Duke, Vanderbilt, University of Georgia (considered a safety school for Atlanta prep schools in the eighties), Ole Miss (you really fucked up and couldn’t get into the University of Georgia), Bumfuck University in the middle of the sticks, trade school, enlisted in the military and very rarely, an Ivy League school.

It was another boring day learning about prepositional phrases in “Warriner’s Grammar and Composition” so I didn’t hear what Joe Dweeb said. Joe Dweeb had coke bottle glasses, wore Seventies style clothing (before Seventies clothing came back in style), supposedly had gotten a sixteen hundred on his SATs, had parents who were university professors and lived outside the Perimeter. None of these attributes, in and of itself, would have counted against him, if he wasn’t simply the type of kid who was doomed to be spurned by his more conventional peers anyway. He was unapologetically different. He also, apparently, had a sardonic sense of humor because that day he made a joke. I didn’t hear Joe Dweeb’s joke. If I had heard it, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten it.

I did hear M’s response: “Joe, only you and I got that joke, and I didn’t think it was funny.” To this day, I think this is the cruelest put-down. I remember thinking how sad and isolating it would be if somewhere some person told a joke, a clever, complicated joke, with multiple levels of humor and frames of reference. And the impossibly improbable occurs: somewhere across the space-time continuum, some other sentient being claims to comprehend the joke, only the cruelest part of the joke is the one other person capable of comprehending it, doesn't think it's funny. This kind of makes me think about process of writing on the Internet and a C.S. Lewis quote where he says “we read to know that we are not alone.” Presumably we write for the same reason, but sometimes the very act or space in which it takes place leaves us feeling even more so.

The Space In Between

The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others.
Friedrich Nietzsche

In that awkward space, somewhere in between
What you’ve done, what you failed to do;
Who you were, the person you failed to become;
The vision you attempted to create,
The reality that took its place,
In a broken culture you couldn't change.

People get lost
Somewhere in between
Where you let them down, and they let you down.

You wonder what you could have done differently?

Who knew? Did They?
They were laughing all along.

You see a good movie the other night.
You know what it means to communicate in codes.

What does that accomplish,
When it’s not that people don’t know the truth;
It's that they don’t care.

Are there others who understand?
Does it matter?

It was a wave. You hopped on. You had your ride.
Did you get there too early?
Or was it always already too late?
Or just too late for you?

You were the pilgrim,
At Vanity Fair waylaid.

The Yell School of Drama

"In my sex fantasy, nobody loves me for my brain"
--Nora Ephron.

My writing collaborator and I have discovered that the most common path to production for first-time playwrights is to enter sponsored drama competitions. Unfortunately, many of them like The Alliance Theater in Atlanta's Kendeda Competition require that entrants be enrolled in a graduate playwriting program.

This is not an option for us. We have seven children between us, not to mention a stack of superfluous diplomas. My colleague has an MBA, CPA, cooking school diploma and divemaster certification. Ironically, the latter two degrees have proven the most useful in our writing adventures. As for me, no more diplomas, thank-you-very-much. Graduating from Wellesley College Phi Beta Kappa, with an Honors degree in English literature couldn't even get me an $18,000 a year publishing job in New York back in 1994. My Universite de Paris DEA (Masters) in Comparative Literature was worse than having no graduate degree at all. This testimony of impracticality was guaranteed to send would-be employers packing.

I suppose none of this would matter if I were a clever, resourceful sort of girl.... In my most recent employment experience as the Director of Communications for JBoss, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to convince journalists to write about us and paying talented full time PR to do just this. It never occurred to me that I could skip that superfluous step by simply pretending to be a journalist. Not only would I have saved money, I would have done away with the inconvenience of relying on two credible sources for my stories. In a crazy mixed up world where legitimate journalists pretend to be anonymous bloggers, I missed the boat on corporate PR pretending to be disinterested journalists.

Ironically, it was my old Wellesley tee-shirt that initiated a conversation about journalism with another mother, while we were waiting to pick up our kids at school. She, herself, had attended Barnard, and then Columbia School of Journalism. She mentioned that the loans for two years at the latter totalled more than her four years at Barnard. My wiser pseudo-journalist self certainly would have skipped that step. I could get more mileage out of a fake pair of tits. I came to this conclusion observing first-hand the successful interview tactics of a journalist from a respected business publication. Her plunging decollete exerted a Kaa-like effect on her interviewees--"Don't think about the questions, boys; just focus on these." No doubt she had figured out the corresponding plunge in the heterosexual male IQ, transforming the heppest and smartest Web 2.0-types into this.

Thankfully, my certificate of enrollment in a Masters program in the Fine Arts is being mailed to me, forewith. Not the Yale School of Drama, but the Yell! (in the South, this is pronounced 'yay-ul') School of Drama, my distinguished soon-to-be alma-mater, a place that understands that the implication that I am anything less than talented flies squarely in face of the incipient dramatist I was born to be. And that for the $200 I am paying for my diploma, I am far too busy and important a person to be bothered with studying the techniques of playwriting or reading anybody that has mastered them.

Lambchop in La La Land

Investigating what it might take to succeed as a scenariste, I came across the following analysis of the role of the artist and the producer in David Mamet's Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie business

"The artist is, in effect, a sort of gangster. He hitches up his trousers and goes into the guarded bank of the unconscious in an attempt to steal the gold of inspiration. The producer is like the getaway driver who sells the getaway car and waits outside the bank grinning about the deal he's made."

Artists, craftspeople and directors

CV: Experience as a ne'er do well

Medical history: Preferably Asperger's Syndrome. Surprisingly, Mamet fails to mention the inherent potential of manic depressive, obsessive compulsive and insomniac diagnoses

Motivation: Pleasure in creating something, doing the job well. Like a terrier gnawing on a bone, it's fundamentally what you do, an expression of who you are; you wouldn't be happy doing anything else.

Mythological archetype: The Trickster -- "characters who express or intuit the propensity to upset and so reorder the world on a different level of abstraction"

Paid your dues: "i.e.been seduced and abandoned sufficiently to tire of it"

Producers

Education: "The American educational system prepares those with second-rate intellects to thrive in a bureaucratic environment...the bureaucratic rigors of the studio system probe the neophyte's threshold for boredom, repetition, sychophancy and nonsense."

Origin/Family Values: "So let us assume someone's brother-in-law showed up in the palmy presound days of Hollywood, and his brother-in-law, a power on the lot or on the set, hoping to avoid a "touch," said "People, this is Bob and he is a producer." Bob was then, entitled, under the family flag, to all the sex, drugs and fun he could wrangle and to whatever he could hypothecate. Time went by and Bob stayed on. He, or another of his ilk, caught, stole, or otherwise achieved power in some niche of the industry and, having learned a good trick, one day appointed footmen of his own."

Modus Operandi: "This power exists, and can exist, only in potential--for should the committee ever come to conclusions, its task and so its operation as a bureaucratic fiefdom, would cease."

Growing Savvy: learning that success comes not from pleasing the audience, but from placating one's superiors, until such time as it is expedient to betray them.

Pinnacle of Success: getting rid of the artists and craftspeople; achieving the "art of producing nothing at all."

Nostalgia..."It is not that the fox has taken over the henhouse but, if I may, that the doorman has taken over the bordello. In the golden days of the madam (Harry Cohn et al.), the lives of the girls may not have been better, but the lives of the customers were. Why? Because the owner-proprietor knew that her job was simply and finally to please the customer. "

Behold! The Crepe Maker Cometh.

As part of the health section of my third grade daughter's IB unit of inquiry, her teacher sent out a request to parents to help with a French-themed breakfast. It seemed a simple enough request. Bring in crepe batter. Come into class and make them.

How could I go wrong? I had fond memories of gorging myself on sugar-filled crepes that my French-raised grandmother would make for Mardi Gras. My mother was a chef. I remember her riding the subway to work, her army-issue carrying case filled with cooking knives jauntily swinging from her shoulder. Surely such can-do spirit might have rubbed off on me.

One reason for doing this was the extra brownie points needed to redeem myself from the "What do people do for a living?" unit. I had signed up for the "Creative" section, on the heels of so-and-so's gastroenterologist mother who came into class to talk about how the digestive systems works. In contrast, my presentation would be something along the lines of

"Hello, boys and girls. My name is Nathalie Mason-Fleury and I make things up for a living. That's actually a figure of speech because, so far, nobody pays me to do this. Today my colleague and I researched how to fake your own death. I don't have any medical, forensic or criminology degrees, but it only took me a few minutes to look this up on the Internet. Why would I bother with professional references when I read the National Inquirer? Look at how long it took Lacy Peterson's body to come floating back up. And they knew exactly where to look.

Things started to go wrong from the very beginning:

1) I doubled the batter proportions. However this caused the batter to overflow in the Cuisinart as the liquid level went higher than the middle blade attachment.

2) I then decided to guesstimate how much of the milk and water to replace, but probably didn't add enough flour, which made the batter a little runny.

3) Worse, we had to cook on these horrible plug in electric eye units that were underpowered and didn't heat enough. A Bunsen burner would have been better, as at least I'd have gotten some heat. It took an average of five minutes per side for each crepe to cook and I know that's not normal.

This confirmed what I had always suspected, that I would rather stand for eight hours at a software trade show with cheap carpeting in three inch heels, than deal with a class of cynical nine year olds.

"You're not very good at this are you?" "I'm a picky eater, I don't want the broken ones" "My dad is a great crepe maker," "how come they keep falling apart" "When is this going to be ready?" and proceeded to literally go down the toilet, as two of them starting singing: "Bob Marley, Jim Dandy, R. Poopy..."

The veteran teacher gave me some advice and consolation: "Next time, make them all ahead of time and bring some token batter. Send them off on some distracting activity. Then, 15 minutes later: Voila! 30 perfectly formed TurboCrepes. But don't worry, it's the weekend. That way if they get sick it will be at home with their parents and we won't have to deal with it."

I appreciated his wisdom and told him that if, one day, the teaching thing didn't pan out, he really should consider putting on software demos.

It’s Alive! Start-ups and Old Monster Movies

In the movie Frankenstein, based on Mary Shelley’s novel, Dr. Frankenstein attempts to create human life by sewing together disparate body parts. Only, none of it works until there is an electric storm, whose lightning bolt gives off the spark of life. Parallels can be found in the quest to build a successful startup, and in the relation between the surgical systems approach and what I’ll call, for a lack of better terminology, “the spark.”

A systems person wants neither drama, nor surprises. Skilled professionals in the start-up business optimize, customize (and improvise) a foundation of systems that worked well for them in the past--whether in sales structure, HR, finance, executive recruitment tactics, R&D, marketing etc. To make those systems work they look for teams with proven track records in the field. And, with a bit of luck, all this may be imbued with the spark—that rare zeitgeisty combination of the right idea, the right people, the right time.

A company could be a perfect system if it wasn’t for the messy, but necessary, “Human Element”—comprising the entrepreneurs, the artists, the “emmerdeurs,” the friends, the enemies, the relatives, the apparatchiks, the mercenaries, the visionaries, the small-minded, the amateurs, the pros, the traitors, the lovers, the people with the big goals, the people with the little goals, the advisers, the investors, and, oh yes, the customer. In short, what the French call “The Human Comedy” or “La Comedie Humaine.”

The spark without the system dissipates; meanwhile systems without the spark are empty vessels.

Whether the spark is a bolt of lightning striking some random unsuspecting dumbass, who wakes up to find himself plonked on a pot of gold, or the collective will of sentient beings, with objectives of their own, sparks do happen.

As for what happens from there, nothing is certain once the Creature shambles down the hill towards the unsuspecting and soon-to-be terrorized villagers.

PR and the Girl

One of the fringe benefits of co-founding a company is giving yourself any job title you want. By the time the company was big enough to hire other people to do things like setting up trainings, billing/accounts payable, legal review et al., I had settled on Director of Communications.

While the only thing I've ever been able to convince anybody to pay me for in my professional life has been writing, my interviewing experiences, when we first moved to the San Francisco Bay area in 1997, convinced me that PR was not for me.

The founder of one boutique tech agency asked me a series of validating questions along the lines of “Do you have many friends,” and, as I became progressively more self-conscious, she concluded “it’s obvious you are very ill-at-ease”--a doubtful prognosis, I imagine, of my ability to handle journalists.

My other interview was with a manager for a white shoe, pre-March 2000 “We-only-work-for-equity-thank-you-very-much,” plus enough retainer to keep its female staffers in Manolo Blahniks type firm. I read an interview with one of that agency’s founders, where she proudly mentioned how many software execs marry their PR girls, citing Steve Ballmer as an example. I considered the promise of “If you do well, you too can marry a future CEO.” I thought for a few seconds about Steve Ballmer. The monkey dance video (Developers, developers, developers!) hadn’t yet come out, but already the intimation of so much agitated, perspiration-drenched corpulence was there. I decided there were other professions where I could earn a living with writing.

I’d like to mention that I married the CEO BEFORE he was the CEO, six years before. When we did start JBoss, we were living at my parents’ house, and the only entity who even remotely reported to us was the family dog.

Ironically, I was once "Almost Featured in Rolling Stone." I had just graduated from Wellesley with a degree in English Literature. My success in getting interviews, coupled with equal success in remaining unemployed brought me to the attention of one of their writers doing a "getting the first job" profile for a series on Gen-X'ers. I am slightly embarrassed to say the prospect of anybody flying down from New York and paying attention to me quite went to my head. The article never got published, but we dined out on Rolling Stone's dollar (it was 1994, I was unemployed and Marc was a Ph.D. student), on stories of my unsuccessful interviews and bathos like "I used to write about Personality and Artistic Theory; now I write about evaporators and batch digesters." I even stooped so low as to play the Southern card, sharing some insight from my grandmother and her friends: "Honey we don't know what to tell you. After we graduated from college, we just joined the Junior League and started playing bridge."

So, it’s funny when some journalists tell Marc that other people in the industry ask about getting the JBoss treatment, like it was some option you could sign up for like PPO vs. HMO on your insurance coverage. ‘Cause I would imagine that to get the JBoss treatment, you’d kind a sorta have to be JBoss, or the people affiliated with JBoss, and there definitely were two sides to the treatment we got. If there was any defining insight in our communications strategy, it was the oh-so novel idea of saying exactly what we thought. As for communicating our thoughts credibly, you’d actually have to have done the things we did and lived the quirky experiences we lived.

You Better Shape Up!

As my children returned to school last week, I felt the need to share some advice with my sister whose oldest child just started kindergarten: “Don’t be fooled about that homework your daughter comes home with. It’s not her homework, it’s your homework."

I don’t know if it was the eighties or just my parents, but they had a very laissez-faire approach to homework and grades. As long as my sister and I didn’t dip below B-/C+, the typical response to a lackluster grade on our report cards was “Did you try?” Or “Did you do your best?” to which we inevitably answered “Yes, I sure did,” translated to “I sure did try real hard to open that book,” and “I did the best I could considering I didn’t open it…”

Never having had real homework until third grade myself, and not having bothered to do any of it until fourth or fifth grade, having children in a school program where they feel the need to send you two or three email updates a day, where each of my children comes home with a notebook for communicating with their teachers daily, homework that needs to be personally supervised and checked daily and mothers who get into smack downs over who gets to be the “grade level rep” or what the annual fund-raiser tee-shirt will look like (“Really, Rose we all know you just want the bigger logo on the front to call more attention to your boobs”—and, no, I am not making this up), I felt like a total outsider, a feeling that was further compounded back when I was a working mother.

Just try doing homework with a tired child at the end of the day, when you are tired yourself. That was how I landed in so much trouble two years ago, along with a Georgia Tech Math professor and my husband, when we finally snapped and started an email thread expressing our feeling that with two Ph.D.’s, a Masters and a professional university teaching career among us, might it be a little excessive that none of us could figure out what our children’s First Grade homework assignments were.

Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis

When the ghosts come out to taunt you and dance a jig on your tombstone, hopefully you’re not there. There was a time, in the words of Hunter S. Thompson, when it felt wrong and on a good day you could get paid to be wrong. Manifest Destiny was on your side. These days, it’s like re-watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. Somewhere, along the way, after all the excitement and adventure, the Ark of the Covenant got lost. They tagged it for inventory and wheeled it off for storage in some anonymous government warehouse. And that’s when it hits you. The bureaucrats and accountants have won. You’ve grown up and they’ve won.

It’s like going back to one of your favorite haunts from the past and finding it under new management. They’ve redecorated, something to do with a cultural revolution or the curious ascendance of Shelob, but, damn it all, nobody knows where a bunch of high-altitude aerials of the San Francisco Bay and salt flats shot by a descendant of Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, one-time President of the Republic of Texas, can be found.

Even if you did read Alexis de Tocqueville’s “De la Democratie en Amerique,” predicting the rise to power of complacent mediocrity, you never were quite prepared for the inevitability of the sock puppet figure bearing the title of Commander in Chief of the Greatest Power in the Free World, the man who happened to sit on the winning lottery number, but gradually came to believe himself to be solely responsible for the country’s success. If a doubt ever plagued his mind regarding this success or his competence to be where he was, he consoled himself with the thought that "God was on his side."

"Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis,"translates, "A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy," M B Lamar, in a speech to Congress.

Grammar was her downfall

I was not so shocked, shocked to learn that Forbes editor, Dan Lyons, onetime voice in the outcry against anonymous blogging tactics, went from a defensive treatise against the Dark Arts to dabbling in them. Apparently, CEO blogs containing such compelling insights as "...coaslesce your unstructured data with our modular design for business processes based on a service-oriented parkitecture," inspired Mr. Lyons to take up the voice of Fake Steve Jobs.

As others have pointed out, Mr. Lyons' official "Floating Point" and his FSJ jollies blog coverage of Open Source were quite consistent. He sought to disabuse his readers of any illusions they might harbor on the topic. The salient aspects of the movement--licenses, products, business models--did not interest him so much. Why would they? If Open Source is successful, it would all be controlled by IBM anyway. As FSJ, adding "freetards" to the "long-hairs" and "sandal brigade" repertory for describing the delusional pissants afflicted with the highly contagious social disease was perhaps his most lasting contribution to the debate on Open Source.

The ramifications of the Lyons' j'accuse are portentous and terrible indeed. The FSF and Groklaw PJ get money from IBM? It's not enough that the FSF goes out of its way to alienate every other corporate entity that could keep the lights on for them, they've got to let go of IBM too? As for PJ, isn't an ongoing obsession with chronicling every legal brief coming of the SCO case a hard enough cross to bear? Or, you're only a credible Open Source advocate if the compulsion leaves you penniless and starving? As for Richard Stallman, the guy may be a raving pinko Commie, but he works out of the William Gates, III building at MIT, after all. Isn't that poetic justice enough?

Then I got to thinking, plugged in as the talented Mr. Lyons may be, he still supposedly held down a full-time job while writing FSJ. The variety and quantity of the posts as well as the direct reference in FSJ's "El Jobso Rides Again" (...Instead of just having the Steve-inator write the whole blog, VC dude says let's have a team blog...) August 2006 post hint at a collective blog. Then there is the whole issue of matching anonymous authors with their public counterparts through unique writing pattern recognition. That jogged a memory. When had I last read about the success of that technique. Belle de Jour was hotter and supposedly got a six figure advance for her book.

As for the real Steve Jobs, I have to admit, I had quite a crush on him after watching the made-for-TV "documentary" "Pirates of Silicon Valley" back in 1999...until I realized that El Steve-O hadn't looked like Noah Wyle...for quite a while.

To British Air With Love

"The rule is jam tomorrow and jam yesterday, but never jam today," Lewis Carroll.

Along with certain beliefs in human dignity, the innate fairness and logic of authority, and the inalienable rights of the individual, my middle class American cultural baggage imbued childhood memories of air travel (to visit my grandparents in the seventies) with a spirit of excitement and anticipation. My mother would dress my sister and me in our better clothes (athletic shoes, sweatsuits and shorts were not expected to make an appearance outside sporting venues) and make it clear that unless we wished to forgo a thousand delights and indulgences of childhood, under no circumstances were we to humiliate her with a display of anything less than our best manners. Although we always flew coach, the airplane felt like a privileged and highly civil means of transportation.

That era fades into a distant memory against today's backdrop of the airport of the future, a venue that manages to combine the charms of a Greyhound bus terminal with triage at a low-security prison.

Have kids, will travel

Along my journey towards adulthood, I've managed to acquire four children of my own, something that has not eliminated empathy for anybody who has ever had to spend hours cooped up in a plane behind some squalling brat. I can truly say I make every effort to make sure that that child is not mine and I fully support whichever airline it was that chucked out the little horror that refused to buckle its seatbelt, along with its whiny, enabling parents. Ironically, the same litigious spirit which allows the child's parents to feel their rights had been infringed on by the seatbelt mandate, would have also been invoked against the airline had the little troglodyte been allowed to experience what it deserved--having its head bonked at the first sign of air turbulence. As for those younger children whose behavior simply cannot be helped, a mother of twins once shared with me a gracious panacea--offering the unfortunate cabin-mates importuned by one's offspring free drinks, preferably hard liquor.

Despite appearances to the contrary, parents of young children actually get few breaks in today's air travel environment. Just try getting through the carry-on luggage scanning line with an infant in a stroller. In that vein, the one travel experience, I always grit my teeth for is our annual trek, with the children, to visit my husband's family in Mallorca. Past bad experiences with Delta and Iberia and Madrid's Barajas airport led me to the conclusion that traveling with one carrier for both legs of the non-direct trip and flying through an English-speaking hub might alleviate our problems. To others whose experiences have been less than satisfactory with Spanish carriers or any elements of the hospitality industry in Spain, I have one word for you "El libro de reclamaciones," a Franco holdover from an era when individual liberties might have been curtailed but, by God, the trains ran on time, and the consequences for poor service were serious.

So how did things go with British Air the past two years: 0 for 2 and I'm thinking of going back to sucking it up with Delta.

It all started late July last year when the long arm of Iberia managed to reach out and screw us from afar. It was one of those ridiculous strikes that only seem to happen in Europe. The Iberia baggage personnel occupied all landing strips of the Barcelona airport, shutting down Spain's number two airport, costing millions of dollars, creating a security and logistics nightmare, not to mention pain for thousands of travellers whose flights had to be re-routed in Barcelona and the surrounding airspace. For some reason known only to themselves, in an era when they tell you to show up three hours in advance for international travel, British Air considers that one hour is suitable connection time between flights in a major hub like London Gatwick. On the delayed outbound flight to London, the pilot came to reassure us that he had been in touch with the Atlanta-bound crew of the connecting flight and that we should sprint out as soon as the plane landed beause they would hold the plane. I told him that I was six months pregnant and asthmatic, with three children and could they please arrange to have one of those motorized carts or at least some airline personnel to escort us.

No personnel and no motorized assistance were forthcoming when we exited our plane. I did manage to sprint it out with the kids and make it to the terminal with the Atlanta-bound plane still there. So, imagine my surprise when they would not let us board. They pretended that this was some sort of formality of it being too close to the departure time (none of which prevented them, earlier, from telling a 6-month pregnant woman with three children to run through Gatwick to try and make the flight). The reality, which everyone who flies frequently these days knows-- the real truth--was that they had already given up our seats due to overbooking. What ensued was two hours with my tired kids (who had had to get up at 4am that morning to make it to the airport on time for the first flight) as the gate agent tried to figure out how to get us to Atlanta. Ultimately, the only way they could make this happen was to put us on a 5:30am flight the next morning to Dublin, followed by a noon flight from Dublin to Atlanta, putting us up for the night in some squalid, fleabag motel in the vicinity of Gatwick.

First Class All the Way, Baybee

Awful as my experiences flying have been, they have all been in Cabin Class, so I still held out the illusion that somewhere in first class people breathed a rareified air where the airline passenger is treated with something better than contempt and disdain. I am told this is true--if you fly Singapore Airlines, which sounds like a nod to the 1960s when flight attendants were hired on the basis of being young, cute and chipper. Meanwhile, on the major American and European carriers, those same attendants they hired back in the 60's are still flying and many of them ain't so elated about it.

The first thing that set me against British Air this year was that they forced us to pay over $2000 to change two business class and six coach class tickets (for the children and nannies) to fly one day earlier from Mallorca. The service agent was completely unsympathetic about our experience missing the one hour window for the connecting flight last year and refused to give any statistics on the percentage of their Palma to London flights that actually make it on time. Nope, we had to pay the full "international" change fee for all fares.

So, imagine my surprise after purchasing my tickets five months in advance and shelling out a fortune in change fees, not to mention the cost of staying overnight in London, to compensate for their ridiculous one hour layover, when we get to the airport two and a half hours early the next morning only to be told by the bubblehead in charge of issuing the boarding passes that two of our party are on stand-by. I ask exactly how they plan to sort this out since, with the exception of my husband, one of the nannies and myself, everyone else is a minor and cannot fly alone. She replies that it's not the airline's fault: they are forced to overbook or "they will lose money since not everybody shows up to fly." It must take some practice to look people in the eye and say in so many words "We're not greedy bastards trying to get an extra 5 or 10% on top of our profit margin. It's economic necessity that forces us to screw you." Because the no-shows wouldn't have to pay their fare up front like everybody else, would they?

Bubblehead assures me that we will get on the plane it is just a question of re-assigning seats because of all the people who had the foresight to check in online 24 hours in advance grabbed up all the primo seats and made it impossible for our children to sit with their sitters in the economy cabin. She implies that it is our fault for not having the foresight to take advantage of the 24 hour advance check-in, something that I have just heard about for the first time that day. This seat re-assignment apparently takes computing and logistic qualities beyond those she possesses because she taps around for an hour with no results, as my children and baby grow more and more restless. Ironically, had the plane arrived on time, we still would have missed the one hour connection window due to the overbooking saga.

During this period the kids get thirsty, need to go to the bathroom, and the baby becomes hungry. My back starts to hurt and I ask for a chair to sit down and nurse him. She says that it's not possible to provide one. That's when it hits me: the revelation of how to extract myself from this situation. Denied a chair, I pull out one of the suitcases to the middle of the Club World First Class ticketing area, glare at her and sit down to nurse my baby. I do have more innate modesty and less need for drama than the breast-feeding mother traveling Delta who insisted on flashing everybody (my experience seeing the masses of flesh roasting on Spanish beaches is that what is most exposed is usually not what you want to see). However, I can also see that plopping myself down on top of a suitcase to breastfeed, surrounded by the gypsy encampment of my children, including my eight year old daughter singing girls' camp clapping songs: "Miss Merry Mac, Mac, Mac, with silver buttons down her back, back, back" is having the desired effect. Quite simply, we are not projecting that Club World First Class travel image with which British Air like to associate themselves. Too bad we don't have some domestic animals running about or some flint and firewood to start grilling out sausages, while we're at it.

Within five minutes: the solution arrives. Her matronly appearance, grey helmet-hair and perma-scowl let me know this is the answer to my prayers, the supervisor--"She who talketh to the computers." Remember the Spacing Guild in Dune? You start out with the novices who exhibit rather standard patterns of human interaction and appearance, moving all the way up to the guy floating in an orange cloud of Spice in the aquarium? When it comes to interstellar travel, he's your man. Unlike her younger colleague, this woman's typing produces results. In 10 minutes and we are finally issued boarding passes. I have achieved another one of those life lessons. If you are denied first-class treatment, even when you've paid a fortune to try and ensure it, find some politically correct way to act like their third-world nightmare of third class and you'll achieve the new standard in airline service--getting screwed, less.