25-06-2009, 03:02 AM
Yes, travel sucks horribly. "But I want to see new places and new things", boo-urns to you.
The "seeing new places and new things" is a perk to the torture you have to survive in order to live through the horror that is modern day travel. In this rant I will go over a few horrible travel related sub-categories: airports, small planes, car rentals, and hotel televisions.
Here's a no-brainer, airports suck fangoriously. All of them. The airport could be gold-plated, wine in the water fountains, and a massive rack employee policy and it still would barely offset the massively gargantuan bother that is known as the airport. Oh, and when I say airport, I mean American airport. Canadian airports aren't as bad, but then again, if you want to go in the air for less than 1200 dollars you'd better be landing where you could have gone during a 3 hour car drive, or Cuba. That's basically all our inept Canadian airports are good for. But American airports, you actually go to places, this is good, well, it would be good, if they weren't hell holes.
For those of you who don't know, and I'm sure I'm addressing zero people, Americans are massively paranoid of air travel. This means that if you're planning on traveling without checked luggage (carrying on all your luggage) you can't pack shit. Literally, if you have a bag of shit, you can't pack it. You're allowed 300mL split into 3 100mL containers of anything that is non-solid. For example, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, and shampoo. Basically, that means that if you have a normal sized anything, you can't take it, because things that are larger than 100mL are automatically considered explosives. Apparently 301mL is exactly the amount of plastic explosives that can take down a plane.
Oh, also, you're not allowed to take a half-empty container of something that once held more than 100mL. So if you've got half a 4Oz tube of toothpaste you're screwed, can't take that shit.
Want to take a razor? Scissors? Nail clippers? Nail file? Spare batteries? Tough luck, you can't those are deadly weapons. You can hack your way right through the door to the pilots and do them in with those tools of destruction.
So, yes, security is a massive massive bitch, causing you to wait in massive lines, take your shoes and pants off while IN said line, and arrive for your domestic flight 2 hours early so you can accommodate any bonus paranoia they want to throw at you.
Category 2: Small Planes.
Small planes anger me instantly. They are useless pieces of crap. At 4 puny seats wide, and just tall enough for you to stand upright IN THE CENTER AISLE. So, you can't stand when you're in front of your seat. Plus, you're practically sitting on the person next to you. Plus plus, YOU CAN'T TAKE YOUR FREAKING LUGGAGE WITH YOU. Yeah, remember that carry on luggage you painstakingly removed all your goods from so it would be plane safe? Well, you can't take it on the freaking plane with you because they have to do a "carry on luggage check". You put some retarded yellow tag on the bag and they load it on the plane before you get on. THEN, oh yes, THEN, after your horribly uncomfortable flight is over you're forced to wait in the freaking ramp till they unload your luggage INTO the ramp. It's like you're being punished for being forced onto one of those retarded little planes.
Well, at least you get to carry on your "personal item" (laptop, purse, huge rack, whatever). Oh wait, maybe you don't. For example, if you sit in the first row, you're screwed because you don't have a place in front of you to put stuff. So yeah, very annoying. You bring stuff for your flight and you can't even use it because the plane designer didn't bother to put some slot near the front divider so people could put their stuff somewhere. Then they have the nerve to keep begging people to put their laptops UNDER THEIR SEAT..... AFTER forcing me to put my laptop in an over the seat cubby, but not the one over my seat, the one over some other guy's seat. Why would I do that? Oh, because the first few seats don't have a luggage compartment because that's where planes keep their paramedic gear. WTF, why do they have to put it there. It's standard issue to put it there, is there really no where else they could put that stupid thing? No microwave they CLEARLY don't use because they don't give you anything besides sandwiches and pepsi during flights anyway.
Furthermore, recently, I was on a crappy plane right next to an engine. It was so freaking loud it was insane. I asked the attendant for some earplugs, but they don't have that. Are you serious? You don't have ear plugs? On a freaking plane? Doesn't that seem like something you'd need on a horribly noisy crap plane? Clearly not I guess.
So yeah, I hate planes.
Ah, car rentals. What kind of joke are they anyway? Firstly, Americans are so freaking paranoid of credit fraud that you're not allowed to get a rental car with anything but a credit card in the name of the person driving it. What a freaking huge inconvenience that is. Seriously. I have to put it on my damn card THEN get a refund from my boss. Why couldn't they just use his card? WTF! Once the rental car place was so retarded they decided that they'd keep the deposit on my card till it just naturally expired, 5 days after returning the car. Here's the problem, when I went out of town again, 3 days later, and tried to rent a second car, for a longer time period, bam, my card was maxed out. Why did my card max out? You may ask? Well, here's the funny thing. I actually had a balance of -$800. Yes, negative 800 freaking dollars. See, I paid off the first rental BEFORE the deposit expired. SOOOOO... if things don't get posted they don't equalize out. The negatives don't subtract out the positives till the positives get posted. I don't know why, that's just how it is.
So, the rental car company denied my card, and I couldn't rent from them till their credit system reset the card banns 24 hours later. AND WHY? Because THE VERY SAME COMPANY forgot to take the deposit off my damn card. Good job retards, I had to cancel the first half of my reservation and get a shorter reservation elsewhere. Totally retarded.
Here's another problem with rental car companies. They are idiots. For some reason they don't bother doing anything with your rental reservation. Like, I reserve a freaking Kia minicar or whatever it is with all the insurance I'm supposed to get, but when I get there they ask me what I want. Why did I reserve specific things, then lock in a price online, only to have you just start over when I get there?
Ok, long story short, I had to get a freaking PT Cruiser instead of the KIA. I would rather eat my shoes than drive a PT Cruiser again. It is the biggest pile of shit I have ever driven. I almost ripped the center console out of it in spite. Get this, the outlet, the ONLY outlet, was dead. Yes, dead. Not connected or whatever. Know how I found out? When my GPS died AFTER BEING PLUGGED INTO A DEAD OUTLET FOR A WEEK. WTF. I was mid-travel, I had to guess how to get back to my hotel because that waste of molded plastic crap ONLY HAS ONE FREAKING NON-FUNCTIONAL OUTLET. Are you freaking kidding me? A dead outlet? How would they NOT realize this? They rent out freaking GPS units! How the hell are you supposed to power them without a freaking outlet? WTF!
If I ever get a non-Focus again I am going to burn something down. They seem to be the only rental cars that don't suck fangoriously.
Here's another rental car horror story:
I was scheduled to pick up my rental at 12 noon a little while back, but it was at a location about a half hour from where I was currently located (home). There's a much closer location, so I asked to pick up my car at the closer location. Oh wait, apparently they don't have any cars at the closer locations. Only mini vans. Wow, screw that, I want a car, not a bus. So I get to the farther location and, oh, woopsie, they don't have the car I reserved. How do they not have the car that I reserved? How is that possible. So the retard at the counter tells me that my car is at the dealership, getting an oil change. So I wait 20 minutes. I get pissed off, and ask him where the damn car was again, so he's like "oh apparently that car's engine just seized". Are you kidding me? I couldn't pick up my car 15 minutes closer to my house, but you're shipping in some car that's not even repaired yet from another half hour away? Are you kidding me? I ended up having to take some car that someone returned while I was waiting. The car sucked, just so you know.
Finally, my final category. Hotel Televisions.
Hotel televisions are somehow made to be as crappy as possible.
I normally get an LCD television in my hotel rooms. Great, digital television, double great. Oh wait, somehow the picture is bad? How is that possible? Oh, I get it the crappy-ass hotel television network programming boxes. Greeeeeeat.
Whatever, I'll live with crappy picture, but what's with the sound? First of all the volume goes back to it's incredibly loud volume every time you turn the set on, BUT, everything is MEGA un-equalized. Like, literally there's parts of shows that you can't even hear, but then when something loud happens it knocks the walls of the room down. Greeeeeat....
So, here's another thing, if you're watching a movie, the commercials are at least triple the volume of the movie. It is actually so horrible that I was trying to enable subtitles so I could watch the movie without dying of noise poisoning.
I'm tiered now, so that's about it. You all know I'm right, travel sucks fangoriously.
The "seeing new places and new things" is a perk to the torture you have to survive in order to live through the horror that is modern day travel. In this rant I will go over a few horrible travel related sub-categories: airports, small planes, car rentals, and hotel televisions.
Here's a no-brainer, airports suck fangoriously. All of them. The airport could be gold-plated, wine in the water fountains, and a massive rack employee policy and it still would barely offset the massively gargantuan bother that is known as the airport. Oh, and when I say airport, I mean American airport. Canadian airports aren't as bad, but then again, if you want to go in the air for less than 1200 dollars you'd better be landing where you could have gone during a 3 hour car drive, or Cuba. That's basically all our inept Canadian airports are good for. But American airports, you actually go to places, this is good, well, it would be good, if they weren't hell holes.
For those of you who don't know, and I'm sure I'm addressing zero people, Americans are massively paranoid of air travel. This means that if you're planning on traveling without checked luggage (carrying on all your luggage) you can't pack shit. Literally, if you have a bag of shit, you can't pack it. You're allowed 300mL split into 3 100mL containers of anything that is non-solid. For example, toothpaste, deodorant, soap, and shampoo. Basically, that means that if you have a normal sized anything, you can't take it, because things that are larger than 100mL are automatically considered explosives. Apparently 301mL is exactly the amount of plastic explosives that can take down a plane.
Oh, also, you're not allowed to take a half-empty container of something that once held more than 100mL. So if you've got half a 4Oz tube of toothpaste you're screwed, can't take that shit.
Want to take a razor? Scissors? Nail clippers? Nail file? Spare batteries? Tough luck, you can't those are deadly weapons. You can hack your way right through the door to the pilots and do them in with those tools of destruction.
So, yes, security is a massive massive bitch, causing you to wait in massive lines, take your shoes and pants off while IN said line, and arrive for your domestic flight 2 hours early so you can accommodate any bonus paranoia they want to throw at you.
Category 2: Small Planes.
Small planes anger me instantly. They are useless pieces of crap. At 4 puny seats wide, and just tall enough for you to stand upright IN THE CENTER AISLE. So, you can't stand when you're in front of your seat. Plus, you're practically sitting on the person next to you. Plus plus, YOU CAN'T TAKE YOUR FREAKING LUGGAGE WITH YOU. Yeah, remember that carry on luggage you painstakingly removed all your goods from so it would be plane safe? Well, you can't take it on the freaking plane with you because they have to do a "carry on luggage check". You put some retarded yellow tag on the bag and they load it on the plane before you get on. THEN, oh yes, THEN, after your horribly uncomfortable flight is over you're forced to wait in the freaking ramp till they unload your luggage INTO the ramp. It's like you're being punished for being forced onto one of those retarded little planes.
Well, at least you get to carry on your "personal item" (laptop, purse, huge rack, whatever). Oh wait, maybe you don't. For example, if you sit in the first row, you're screwed because you don't have a place in front of you to put stuff. So yeah, very annoying. You bring stuff for your flight and you can't even use it because the plane designer didn't bother to put some slot near the front divider so people could put their stuff somewhere. Then they have the nerve to keep begging people to put their laptops UNDER THEIR SEAT..... AFTER forcing me to put my laptop in an over the seat cubby, but not the one over my seat, the one over some other guy's seat. Why would I do that? Oh, because the first few seats don't have a luggage compartment because that's where planes keep their paramedic gear. WTF, why do they have to put it there. It's standard issue to put it there, is there really no where else they could put that stupid thing? No microwave they CLEARLY don't use because they don't give you anything besides sandwiches and pepsi during flights anyway.
Furthermore, recently, I was on a crappy plane right next to an engine. It was so freaking loud it was insane. I asked the attendant for some earplugs, but they don't have that. Are you serious? You don't have ear plugs? On a freaking plane? Doesn't that seem like something you'd need on a horribly noisy crap plane? Clearly not I guess.
So yeah, I hate planes.
Ah, car rentals. What kind of joke are they anyway? Firstly, Americans are so freaking paranoid of credit fraud that you're not allowed to get a rental car with anything but a credit card in the name of the person driving it. What a freaking huge inconvenience that is. Seriously. I have to put it on my damn card THEN get a refund from my boss. Why couldn't they just use his card? WTF! Once the rental car place was so retarded they decided that they'd keep the deposit on my card till it just naturally expired, 5 days after returning the car. Here's the problem, when I went out of town again, 3 days later, and tried to rent a second car, for a longer time period, bam, my card was maxed out. Why did my card max out? You may ask? Well, here's the funny thing. I actually had a balance of -$800. Yes, negative 800 freaking dollars. See, I paid off the first rental BEFORE the deposit expired. SOOOOO... if things don't get posted they don't equalize out. The negatives don't subtract out the positives till the positives get posted. I don't know why, that's just how it is.
So, the rental car company denied my card, and I couldn't rent from them till their credit system reset the card banns 24 hours later. AND WHY? Because THE VERY SAME COMPANY forgot to take the deposit off my damn card. Good job retards, I had to cancel the first half of my reservation and get a shorter reservation elsewhere. Totally retarded.
Here's another problem with rental car companies. They are idiots. For some reason they don't bother doing anything with your rental reservation. Like, I reserve a freaking Kia minicar or whatever it is with all the insurance I'm supposed to get, but when I get there they ask me what I want. Why did I reserve specific things, then lock in a price online, only to have you just start over when I get there?
Ok, long story short, I had to get a freaking PT Cruiser instead of the KIA. I would rather eat my shoes than drive a PT Cruiser again. It is the biggest pile of shit I have ever driven. I almost ripped the center console out of it in spite. Get this, the outlet, the ONLY outlet, was dead. Yes, dead. Not connected or whatever. Know how I found out? When my GPS died AFTER BEING PLUGGED INTO A DEAD OUTLET FOR A WEEK. WTF. I was mid-travel, I had to guess how to get back to my hotel because that waste of molded plastic crap ONLY HAS ONE FREAKING NON-FUNCTIONAL OUTLET. Are you freaking kidding me? A dead outlet? How would they NOT realize this? They rent out freaking GPS units! How the hell are you supposed to power them without a freaking outlet? WTF!
If I ever get a non-Focus again I am going to burn something down. They seem to be the only rental cars that don't suck fangoriously.
Here's another rental car horror story:
I was scheduled to pick up my rental at 12 noon a little while back, but it was at a location about a half hour from where I was currently located (home). There's a much closer location, so I asked to pick up my car at the closer location. Oh wait, apparently they don't have any cars at the closer locations. Only mini vans. Wow, screw that, I want a car, not a bus. So I get to the farther location and, oh, woopsie, they don't have the car I reserved. How do they not have the car that I reserved? How is that possible. So the retard at the counter tells me that my car is at the dealership, getting an oil change. So I wait 20 minutes. I get pissed off, and ask him where the damn car was again, so he's like "oh apparently that car's engine just seized". Are you kidding me? I couldn't pick up my car 15 minutes closer to my house, but you're shipping in some car that's not even repaired yet from another half hour away? Are you kidding me? I ended up having to take some car that someone returned while I was waiting. The car sucked, just so you know.
Finally, my final category. Hotel Televisions.
Hotel televisions are somehow made to be as crappy as possible.
I normally get an LCD television in my hotel rooms. Great, digital television, double great. Oh wait, somehow the picture is bad? How is that possible? Oh, I get it the crappy-ass hotel television network programming boxes. Greeeeeeat.
Whatever, I'll live with crappy picture, but what's with the sound? First of all the volume goes back to it's incredibly loud volume every time you turn the set on, BUT, everything is MEGA un-equalized. Like, literally there's parts of shows that you can't even hear, but then when something loud happens it knocks the walls of the room down. Greeeeeat....
So, here's another thing, if you're watching a movie, the commercials are at least triple the volume of the movie. It is actually so horrible that I was trying to enable subtitles so I could watch the movie without dying of noise poisoning.
I'm tiered now, so that's about it. You all know I'm right, travel sucks fangoriously.
