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Additional Gratuity: $____

Room service is notoriously bad. The food comes from the same restaurant next to the lobby that features such anachronisms as chicken cacciatorie. Once I ordered prime rib at a boutique hotel in San Francisco. You know -- boutique -- the kind of charming establishment that charges double the market rate, uses nineteenth century keyholes, and earns you points toward absolutely nothing.

The hotel had already automatically added 19 percent gratuity, plus a five dollar delivery charge. It was the space right under the subtotal that nearly made me laugh out loud. It read --and I am not making this up -- "Additional tip: ______." What additonal tip would be appropriate, considering I'd already paid $29 for a sinewy piece of overcooked meat and limp vegetables, and a square of cellophane stretched over my glass of house wine?

Don't forget - there's a 10 percent sales tax, so with all charges so far I'd already sunk $44. I thought of a really small amount, maybe a couple of dollars, just to show that I hadn't veered off protocol. Then I thought of a big, fat goose egg, as if saying "I saw the space and intentionally chose to give you nothing."

The Collective Karma of Flight

Airplanes don't take off because of the laws of physics. That's just a ruse, an easy explanation for a dark secret that one of the Wright brothers stumbled upon. All that talk about curved wings and air pressure is nonsense. No, the airplane is willed into the air.

Observe this on your next flight. The engines gear up, the plane lurches down the runway, and everyone stops what they're doing. Readers look up. Sleepers wake up. Churchgoers pray. Agnostics look indecisive.

It's the collective karma of the plane that gets it into the air. Orville simply had the mojo; Wilbur did not. This fact makes the risks of flight somewhat under your control. On a Monday morning your fellow passengers will be scowling vice presidents. Hear that hissing sound? It's not the adjustable jets of air, my friend. It's the sound of a negative karma vortex, spiraling into the dangerous territory of iced wings and freak turbulence. Tread carefully.

You're better off booking a flight in the hooky hours of the day: 10:30am; 2:15pm. Here you'll find breezy security lines and throngs of vacationers on their way to their Sandals vacation package in Cancun. The earnest working stiffs of the world, positive energy abounding. If you're really lucky, children will be well-represented. They can be a headache, I admit. They knock over the venti that had been perched so precariously on the floor next to your rollaboard. But you must remember that unless they're one of the Hiltons, this is their first flight, maybe their second. Their belief in the miracle is strong, so strong.

Reincarnated

Wondering why that Toyota Prius silently plying the street looks so familiar? Maybe it was designed "in the tradition" of another Japanese subcompact.

And the Chrysler 300. Finally, an American car with style. But were the designers inspired by Magritte?

Consulting Tip No. 1

Streets named "Compton" are usually in the 'hood. If you are on Compton, you are probably lost. See the currency exchange? Another hint. Your client's office is not on Compton.

The Shame of Air Travel

In theory, it takes less than an hour, strapped into a CR7 or an MD-80, to fly from St. Louis to Chicago on a humid Thursday evening. Jets are a marvel, scooting from here to there somewhere in the neighborhood of 550 mph. But what we've done to shackle this modern ease is shameful. The one-hour flight has become the shortest segment of a six-hour scourge.

It starts with the arrogance of the airlines. They're so cavalier with their own time, yet so demanding of ours. Arrive 90 minutes before your 6pm departure, they say, or we might just take your nonrefundable seat away from you. If you're crossing an international border, be here two hours prior.

Airlines seem to delight in holding small freedoms hostage. No iPods during takeoff or landing. The small bag on your lap must be stowed. Don't queue up for the lavatory. No BYOB. Whenever they say these things, they invoke regulations of the FAA, that omnipotent big brother of the skies. I'm waiting for the flight when an octogenarian raises his hand and asks, "Can I leave my pacemaker on, or do I have to turn that off, too?" The flight attendant, smiling warmly like an enlightened despot, will reply, "You can leave it on. We'll let you live . . . this time."

And those canned announcements, full of middle-class euphemisms such as "lavatories" and "emergency landing." Call me crazy, but if they just said "toilets" and "plane crash" people would actually listen.

Security measures seem designed more to irritate than to secure. It's the tiny redundant steps, the small inefficiencies, that madden me most on my weekly commutes. You have to show your boarding pass at the beginning of the security line, and again at the end. Why? What could have possibly changed as I shuffled through the velvet rope maze?

Why does the list of prohibited items read like the inventory of a well-stocked Ace Hardware, yet I can bring a bottle of Snapple aboard and shatter it, yielding chunky shards of glass? Besides, if terrorists want to crash the plane, all they need to do is turn on their iPods.

Every time I have to take off my shoes, throw them in a filthy plastic bin, and skuttle across the gritty floor in my stocking feet, a little part of me dies inside. If I've booked a one-way flight, I'm doomed to the cavity search regardless of whether I beep. Here the FAA's logic borders on creepy: terrorists are just as thrifty as the rest of us, and who would book a roundtrip when the journey is going to be a one-way trip to hell?

It isn't just security policies that need an overhaul. A drop of rain splashing the tarmac in LAX sends shockwaves across the nation's aviation infrastructure. The 6pm flight pushes to 7:19, then 8:38. "We're hoping for wheels-up at 8:51," the barely audible statement crackles over speakers seemingly located three gates over.

And oh, the jockeying, the eager anticipation, of that moment when the gate clerk props open the jetway door and reaches for the microphone. We perk up like a kennel of dogs as our master opens the cabinet where the Purina is kept.

Other aspects of air travel are a study in poor design, in which the slowest common denominator becomes the critical path. Betty the snowbird, flummoxed by the whole process, holds up dozens of business travelers in the security line. Boeing 747s have several doors, but the jet bridge only allows usage of one. Combine this with boarding the plane from fore to aft, and catching your strap on an armchair as you squeeze down the aisle holds up everyone behind you. If your flight touches down early, inevitably another plane is occupying your gate.

We accept all of this. Late flights, poor service, and stolen dignity have become so commonplace that they've become the standard.

I'm calling for civil disobedience. A whole planeful of us should show up 47 minutes after planned departure, explain it was due to weather and mechanical problems, and board at our leisure. We'll recline our seats to 86.7 degrees, slam shots of whiskey we smuggled aboard, and ash our Cubans in the seat pockets. Upon takeoff, every person on the plane will brandish electronic gadgets, and, in a solemn display of solidarity, turn them on.