Floatation Devices

Of all the flights I have taken over the years, I can count on two hands the amount of times I have run into people I knew in airports. Since the vast majority of my travel is solo, I am accustomed to Airworld being a solitary place – a world in which I operate to get to places that allow me to earn a living, but then always return back to my friends or family outside of Airworld.

Today at Logan, I bumped into my friend John while waiting for the elevator from the Central Parking garage to the Terminal C walkway. John writes one of my favorite blogs here in Boston called The Boston Real Estate Blog. It turns out he was on the same JetBlue flight that I was taking to JFK.

In an odd second coincidence this morning, I ran into my friend Ashley soon after, while waiting in the security line. I heard someone calling my name, and turned around to find him in a different line. He was on the way to San Francisco.

A few years ago, I ran into my friend Kristen in the gate area at Cleveland’s Hopkins Int’l Airport. We were both flying back to Boston. I believe she was at a wedding in Cleveland, while I was just passing through there (as usual).

My other friend John – once he was on the same exact JetBlue flight from Austin to Boston, but somehow I didn’t see him on the plane, in the gate area, or anywhere else. I learned he was on my flight a couple days later when we were chatting on the phone. A few weeks prior to that, I saw his boss at athenahealth, Jonathan Bush (of the Bush family), in the gate area of a Southwest flight from Nashville to Providence. We met briefly in Las Vegas last fall when I was in town at the same time as John and his crew during a big medical convention.

Seeing business acquaintances in Airworld is less coincidental if flying home from a convention or such, but twice I have bumped into industry folk in occasions that caught me off-guard. In fact, when I was working for the research and consulting division of Clear Channel, I was always so cognizant of the chances that other industry folk were within earshot of my conversations or eyeshot of my laptop screen, that I was always hesitant to “work” while traveling. After all, if I heard other industry conversations or saw sensitive research on computer screens, I would snoop. I’d imagine others would do that to me. Once while sitting in First Class to LA, I was reviewing a research project for a station I was working with that week. When a guy walked past me to use the bathroom, I realized he was a West Coast regional manager for a major competitor (in fact, he could have recognized me from when he worked for Clear Channel), and it turns out he was seated immediately behind me. That’s the final time I worked on an airplane. Airworld time is my time.

My one time (thankfully) flying to Detroit, I was going to work with a CBS radio station, while a couple Clear Channel NY executives were also flying there on the same airplane to work with their sister stations. Since they knew me well from my work with Clear Channel NY, they were surprised to see me working in Detroit with a competitor (our /US work was only about 70% Clear Channel).

Finally, during one flight from Newark to Las Vegas, I sat in First Class next to Nick Lachey. I’m not sure if that counts, but I did know who he was. It was around the height of popularity of Newlyweds on MTV, and I felt a bit strange reading that month’s MAXIM, using as a bookmark a subscription card that included (at the time) his wife Jessica Simpson wearing practically no clothes. He slept much of the flight. I never said a word to him.