Saved by Jack Bauer

Monday night, for the second time in the past year or two, I was watching TV in my living room, and happened to glance up from my magazine to see someone I knew personally right there on the screen staring back at me, but in a difficult situation.

My high school class was small - 85 people. We all knew each other, by name and face at least. I wasn't close to this guy named Peter, but last night his helicopter crashed into a house outside LA. He survived that crash, and encountered Jack Bauer who helped his injured co-pilot still in the chopper. Jack told them that an energy ring from the nuclear blast in Valencia caused them to go down. Good thing Jack was there to save them.

Second time was while watching a show called Airline, which ran on A&E for a couple years. The beauty of this show, based primarily on the operations of Southwest Airlines in Baltimore, Chicago/Midway, and Los Angeles, was how convincing it was in making me never want to fly Southwest willingly. Watching it, you would think that the only passengers who flew Southwest were drunk, angry, litigious, irrational, or just plain dumbasses.

My aunt and uncle fell into the "angry" category when, just like last night, I glanced up from my reading material to see them screaming holy hell after deplaneing from a jet that was called back to the gate, filled with patrons to whom this occurred once prior on this same attempted journey. There were my irate relatives, yelling about Southwest's incompetency right into the camera. Thankfully, their complaints were merited and relatively civil compared to some others shown on that TV series. I laughed so hard, I called many family members right then and there, and due to the magic of TiVo, transfered the video to VHS to show everyone in person.