Our RV Adventures

First off, thanks to everyone for their kind comments and emails about yesterday’s post about the recent United kerfuffle. I’ll keep you updated if any thing more substantial comes along.

Early in the afternoon I headed down to the Home Depot to get a new exhaust pipe for my generator. I had called a nearby garage and a couple of auto parts places with no luck. It seems that no one really does exhaust system/muffler work anymore, except for custom work and special orders.

So at Home Deport I found a 10’ section of 1-1/4†E.M.T. conduit

and a E.M.T. coupling in the Electrical area.

I only needed about 3’ but they only had the 1-1/4†stuff in 10’ sections. I asked them if they could cut it for me to make it easier to get it home. They said No. They don’t cut pipe for you at Home Depot.

Huh?

So I took my pipe down to the plumbing area where they cut it for me in about 30 seconds.

I’ll use the coupling to connect the present exhaust pipe to the new section after smearing the ends of the two pipes with high-temp sealant to seal from any exhaust flumes leaking out.

After talking with the company about my Transfer Switch problems about a month ago, to see if I had missed anything, I ordered a new one this weekend which arrived today. You can read about it here.

MacGyvering It

Turns out the coil that controls the main contactor had opened up.

I’ll probably replace the unit tomorrow.

About 4pm we headed over to the Strip to have dinner at Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville, located in the Flamingo.

And what do you have at Margaritaville?

Why, a Cheeseburger in Paradise, of course!

It was delicious, but it wasn’t a Cheeseburger in Paradise. At least based on the song lyrics. I’ve put the lines together that describe the burger.

But a big warm bun and a huge hunk of meat.
CHECK!

Heaven on earth with an onion slice
NO ONION SLICE!

Medium rare with Muenster’d be nice
AMERICAN CHEESE, NOT MUENSTER!

I like mine with lettuce and tomato,
CHECK!

Heinz Fifty-seven and French fried potatoes.
FRENCH FRIES – CHECK.
HEINZ 57 – NO  But I probably could have asked for it.

Big kosher pickle and a cold draft beer.
KOSHER PICKLES – CHECK
NO BEER   We had a Margarita, instead.

Now a lot of people think the line is

Medium rare with mustard’d be nice

and many lyric sites say the same thing. But if you notice the lyrics list all the ingredients EXCEPT cheese.

When Jimmy was asked about this, he said it’s Muenster, not mustard. And then he said, “Who the hell puts mustard on a cheeseburger.â€

A little disclaimer here: I put Mayo on mine.

As we were walking through the Margaritaville Casino on the way to the restaurant, we were given a coupon for a free Margarita if we spent $20 or more at dinner. Not a problem since our burgers were $15 each.

So, hey, a free Margarita.

But there was a reason it was free. There was absolutely no alcohol in this drink. At first I questioned why they would give us a coupon for a free one anyway. But then I realized that most people who get a free Margarita are going to order paid ones for everyone else. At $10.75 ea.

But Jan and I only ordered one to split. Which probably explains why they didn’t put any alcohol in ours.

Thought for the Day:

Without the dark, you can not see the stars.

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We never left the rig. In fact we never even opened the rig door.

Very nice.

I did spend a good bit of time working on a new website, trying to configure a lot of photos so they can be posted. I’ve got a ways to go.

Still enjoying my new Jetpack MiFi. I checked the speed this morning about 2:30am and got over 30 Mbps.

Looking forward to picking up my new Galaxy S8+ this coming Friday. Of course then I’ve got several days work loading and setting up a lot of apps. But this will be a good chance to weed out programs that I really don’t use any more.

Following the recent story of the doctor who thrown, literally, off a United flight. I’m always interested in how the story changes after one of these big events break, and this one has been all over the place.

But right now the consensus of the many law blogs I read is that he’s in line for a big payday, maybe as big as 8 figures ($10,000,000), but we’ll see.

Initially everyone pointed to what’s known as the Contract of Carriage, the 30+ pages of Federal rules, the fine print on your ticket.

Because the initial story said the flight was ‘overbooked’, people looked at that section of the rules. And if you’re still at the gate on an ‘overbooked’ flight, they can deny you boarding for pretty much any reason. But the kicker here was that the flight was not overbooked, but was fully booked, with every seated filled.

And all the passengers, including the doctor, had been seated.

Then four United cabin personnel showed up at the gate and needed to get to Louisville so they could work a flight the next morning. The gate agent then went on the plane and ask for four volunteers to take a later flight (at 3:45 the next afternoon) and offered up to $800 in compensation.

When no one volunteered after repeated tries, they had the computer pick four passengers at random, who were basically told to get off or else. The ‘else’ being they would be forcibly ejected. At this point two passengers left.

Turns that the ‘at random’ picking wasn’t really random, but used an algorithm that looked at what class they were flying, (economy class got kicked off before business class who got kicked off before first class, etc.), what clubs they belonged to, how many miles they had, and how early they had checked in for the flight. The problem with all this was that once the Doctor was on board and seated, a whole new set of Federal rules come into play.

Under Part 21 – Refusal to Transport, there are 19 specific reasons a passenger can be ejected from a flight, like being drunk, barefoot, smelly, 9 months pregnant without a note from your doctor, blind with no escort, etc.

But not one of these reasons is needing his seat so a company employee could fly instead.

So then when the Doctor refused to deplane the ‘police’ were called  The problem here was that the three gentlemen were NOT really police, NOT Law Enforcement Officers. They were Chicago Aviation Police, i.e. they were licensed non-armed security guards, just like Jan and I are for gate guarding. In fact it is questionable whether or not they had any legal right to even be on the plane.

According to eyewitnesses and the several videos, when the Doctor refused to leave the plane, he was tazered, punched in the head several times, dragged from his seat, hitting his head on the opposite armrest and was knocked unconscious.

At this point he was dragged out of the plane and left bleeding and still unconscious in the jetway while the three ‘gentlemen’ went to find a gurney or stretcher. I guess they figured that just continuing to drag him thought the terminal would be bad form.

At some point he came to, and dazed,confused and bloody, stumbled back into the plane, mumbling both that he had patient’s to see tomorrow morning and he wanted his laptop.

At this point he was once again dragged from the plane.

He ended up hospitalized with a severe concussion, a broken nose, and two missing teeth.

At first the United CEO blamed the whole thing on a ‘rowdy’ passenger that they were required to ‘re-accommodate’. But that didn’t stick, as the videos of the bloody, unconscious 69 year old Asian doctor went viral on the Net.

Then it was a ‘sincere’ apology. And when that didn’t help, the CEO promise to never, ever throw a passenger off a United plane again.

At this point the rest of the Internet piled on with some really hilarious themes.

Fly Delta – We Beat The Competition, Not Passengers!

United Airlines – We have an offer you can’t refuse. No, really.

Flight: $400, checking a bag: $25, getting dragged down the aisle: priceless

And even new seating charts.

So that’s pretty much the story at this point. The three ‘gentlemen’ have been suspended and will probably fired. But we’ll see how it plays out for the rest.

Some people are Humbly Grateful, while some are Grumbly Hateful.

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