Business friendly or Unfriendly?

I do a little bit of traveling here and there in the lower 48. And I'm old enough to remember a little further back than last week. I remember when airlines and hotels began to promote certain aspects of their offerings as being especially useful or nice for those on business trips.

Have to fly to <insert city name>? XYZ Airline has Business Class seats available! Not as expensive as First Class, but more legroom than Sardine Class. Need to get some work done between meetings? <ThisHere> Hotel now has a Business Center and internet access in your room, as well as the dry cleaning and shoe shining services we've always had!

I've never been in Business Class on an airplane. For that matter, I've never been in First Class. But I have flown a few times in the last couple years, and if the airlines are offering ANY seats that allow their passengers to breath, then I guess that's got to be considered pretty d****d 'friendly'.

My travels have me staying in a wide range of hotels, from really cheap mom-and-pop roadside motels to modestly expensive high-rise hotels. As someone who tries to conduct some modicum of business even while I'm traveling, I'm learning to like those cheap national brand h/motels far more than those big-city high-rises. If the wifi connection isn't free in my $50 motel room, then it costs a whopping $2.93 a night. Meanwhile, during my stay in that $150 hotel room, an internet connection in my room costs at least $10 a day, and if I want to use their business center, perhaps to print something out, then that's an additional $5.99 PER MINUTE that I'm logged onto their computer.

Seems obvious to me that the only 'business people' these businesses are friendly to are their own stock holders. Every business for itself, I guess.

What’s a Girl to do?

I've been traveling around these United States since I was a little girl, which is a very long time. I want to talk today about restroom stalls. During those travels, I've seen stalls at rest stops along highways, in parks, in gas stations, restaurants, theme parks, amusement parks, and even hotel lobbies. I swear, as I've gotten larger, the stalls have gotten smaller. If any handicapped ladies are wondering why so many women who are not 'challenged' use the handicapped stall, it is because that is the only stall they feel they can squeeze into.

I suppose men don't have this problem; certainly hubby doesn't quite understand my anger over this. But when I go into a stall, and the opening door comes within 2 inches of the toilet bowl, I am left wondering where I am supposed to stand in order to close that door. I suppose an underfed 8-year-old could stand next to the toilet and close the door, but I am not paper thin. The only thing I can think of is that we ladies are supposed to stand IN the toilet to close the door. Then we can step out, shake the blue liquid from our dainty high-heeled slippers and do our business. Hopefully, the toilet will flush before we are required to step back into the bowl in order to open the door to leave.

At the same time, toilet paper containers have become enormous. I recently made the mistake of choosing to use a 'normal' stall, and after contorting myself to get the door closed, and seating myself, I found the over-sized toilet paper container trying to sit on my lap! This would have been quite a feat, since I have no lap. The entire experience was quite claustrophobic.

Please, whoever is designing bathroom stalls these days … give us room to breath!

When Games Make More Sense than Reality

Have you ever played Sim City? It's a computer game where you start with a plot of land, and you try to build a respectable city with housing, businesses, industry, power supply, airport, roads and railroads, even a sports arena. Seems simple enough, actually, and I could spend hours playing it. I found there were some tricks to being successful. If you built a sports arena too early, you ran out money and had to raise taxes. Raise the taxes too high, or leave them elevated too long, and all sorts of things went wrong; industry moved away, businesses died, and houses became empty and dilapidated. It's no fun trying to recover from that.

Not enough police stations? Crime runs rampant. Not enough fire stations? You run the risk of the Great Chicago Fire. And every time you build one of those necessities, your revenue has to cover the increase in salaries, upkeep and so on. It becomes a balancing game, really, to keep growing and still manage to supply the expected services.

Perhaps a few more politicians should spend a few weeks playing that game. Perhaps they'd figure out that if you build an unnecessary sports arena, people get upset. That if you ask the day-to-day city employees to forego cost-of-living wages for several years (while those in the mayor's and city council's offices got some pretty whopping raises), you have started to choke your own revenue sources, because those day-to-day workers number thousands of families who would like to buy more than they currently can, while the dozen who got those whopping raises aren't likely to make up the difference.

Maybe they'd learn to THINK about the decisions they make, before they make them.