Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Vegas Travelog #1
SJC Airport - Tue, 14 Feb, 2023. 3:55pm

Today is Valentine's Day so I'm off to Las Vegas... alone. 🤣 My company scheduled its annual Sales Kickoff (SKO) meeting for this week. They were aware it could cause some conflict for US staff. Is it only the US where Valentine's Day is celebrated? Probably it's only the US where it's commercialized to a ridiculous degree. Thankfully Feb. 14 is just another day of the year for Hawk and me so there's nothing disruptive about this trip.

...Nothing disruptive except the travel itself, that is.

Rolling Delays

My flight to Vegas is delayed. Delays are pretty common with Southwest. Usually they're small. Usually they don't result in stranding me somewhere overnight. Usually. Fortunately SJC-LAS is just a 90 minute nonstop trip (only 58 minutes in the air) so it's hard to screw it up that bad. But, you know, if they try hard enough....

While I bash Southwest for their habit of delays building up pretty much every afternoon, and they have stranded me overnight twice, this delay wasn't due to their antiquated operations systems. Las Vegas got socked with a surprise storm this afternoon. There were high winds and even sightings of snow. Snow in Vegas! A ground stop at the airport inflicted delays on flights on all airlines.

Our flight was on a rolling delay. Our 1:30pm departure was pushed back to 2:00, then 3:09, then 3:38, then 4:35. Over 3 hours late. All for a 90 minute flight.

Update 1: Flight Canceled!

Can it get worse? Sure it can. My flight got canceled.

I got rebooked to a flight originally scheduled for 12:15pm that had already been pushed back to 3:52. Over 3.5 hours late.

It's after 3:52pm already, so who knows when I'll actually get there. I assume at least it will be tonight, because Southwest has already canceled multiple SJC-LAS flights and piled everybody onto this one aircraft. Seriously, multiple flight crews are aboard. They all need to get to Vegas, too, to staff flights tonight and tomorrow morning.

Update 2: Overweight, Call for Volunteers

Update 2 (4:30pm): Twenty minutes ago the pilot announced we are overweight. After the airline canceled 2 or 3 other Vegas flights and piled everyone (including me) onto this one, filling every seat, it's not too surprising. They advised us they would look for 10 volunteers to deplane.

Five minutes ago an operations agent came aboard and made the offer. Take another flight, currently estimated to leave 3 hours later, and Southwest would provide a $600 voucher for future travel in addition to refunding the ticket for this flight. The first volunteer jumped up out of his seat so fast at the mention of $600 the agent had to say, "Not yet, let me finish." 🤣

I'm on this flight with two colleagues headed to SKO. Tim needs to be there ASAP to rehearse for a presentation, Tiffany decided to volunteer for the voucher. I considered it myself. If it's only a 3 hour delay that's reasonable for a ticket refund plus a $600 voucher. The thing is, with all these delays already today, there's no guarantee a flight scheduled 3 hours from now will actually leave 3 hours from now. Flights later today could well get canceled, stranding us 'til tomorrow if we take the deboard. Well, enough other people jumped up ahead of Tiffany that she was #11 in line. She remains on the plane with us. And BTW none of us are going anywhere. It's 4½ hours past this flight's scheduled departure and we're still parked at the gate.

It's official, tax season starts today! Where "official" means the IRS is now accepting tax returns. Yay? 

I don't know anybody who really celebrates tax season. Even the accountants who make most of their annual income during tax season look at it with a degree of dread because it means a few months of working nights and weekends.

Likewise I don't know anybody who actually files taxes this early. Even the majority of the working and middle class who expect a refund— ergo, getting it earlier is better— mostly drag their feet on filing. I'm pretty much the only person I know who ever used to file taxes in late January or early February.

Last year I did my taxes on Valentine's Day and filed the return in early March. It's a bit later than I used to file, say, 20 years ago. The difference is that some of the financial statements I need nowadays take longer to be generated. We've actually got our W2s already, along with some other forms. Our 1099s are currently promised mid-February. Maybe they'll arrive a bit early so I can have another fun Valentine's Day!