No, you did pick your seat when you boarded, and it worked just fine for 50 years.
When you checked in, you got a boarding group (A, B, or C) and a number, 1-60. You weren’t assigned a seat, you lined up to get on board in order, and took whatever seat you wanted.
Families were permitted to board between groups A and B, so they could all sit together.
SW did this because it had been proven that open seating was the fastest way to fill a plane. (Mythbusters demonstrated this in one episode.) This allowed them to tighten their schedules by completing the boarding in 30 minutes instead of the 45 or more other lines took, and get more flights in a day.
Some people didn’t get it, but I thought it was great, and it made me (and lots of others) loyal to SW for decades. Until this year.
Under the traditional SWA system you board in check-in order. And pick whichever unoccupied seat you want once on board. So scramble seating, but sorta orderly scramble seating.
Families w little kids and the handicapped go ahead of almost everyone to facilitate that group being together.
Washing my hands today in the downstairs bathroom there seemed to be a lack of hot water, which eventually came out but took longer than usual. Which immediately made me paranoid about a potential problem with the water heater, which ironically I had cancelled the service contract on just a few months ago.
So I ran hot water in several sinks, which usually causes the heater and the loud forced-air ventilator to come on. I got hot water but no sounds from the heating equipment. After several hours of waiting and poking about, I gave up and started looking up the numbers of water tank service businesses to call tomorrow morning. But, hark, I went downstairs just now and the familiar hum of the water tank gas heater ventilator was thrumming once again. I guess I’m just excessively paranoid, but this was unusual behaviour.
Remember the old saying from the military:
Once is bad luck. Twice is coincidence. Three times is “Gee, I shoulda kept that service contract.”
Good luck. I fear you’re gonna need it.
The bathtub curve applies to equipment failures. Once you get past the factory-defective very early deaths the math on service contracts gets … interesting.
The result tends to have consumers paying e.g. 15 years of annually renewing service contract on a device with a 20 +/- 2 year lifespan. After a bit of procrastination, along about 17 years they finally decide they’ve thrown too much money at this troublefree household gizmo. So they cancel the contract just as the gizmo is reaching its design life limit and it promptly fails on them. Oops.
There is wisdom in what you say, but note that there wasn’t anything actually wrong with the water heater, just my paranoia. Will it eventually break? Sure, but deep in my canine brain is also the realization that I need to sell this place which is way bigger than I need, get rid of many metric tons of junk, and move to a small rental. The whole thing needs to be viewed in context. Meanwhile I’ve saved over $150 in just a few months by cancelling that contract, which I should have done many years ago.
Naturally, with my luck, the entire water heater will explode next week, but such is life. You throws your dice, and you takes your chances.
JFC, here in the Great White North, the land of ice and snow, it will be 36°C today (97 American Ferrets). It’s already too oppressively hot to sit out on my shaded porch without the aid of a well-iced beverage, such as a pina colada.
It’s 93F in the southern Appalachians, which is Ungodly for here. And the A/C has decided to board the struggle bus. And neither i nor my roommates have the money to fix it right now. Thank Zeus for fans.
Omg. In my grocery run, I thought I’d get a 5 ounce container of cottage cheese. A good healthy snack. A little over a dollar.
Then I looked at the label. 670 mg of sodium.
Hell? I took a small bite and threw it away.
A whole large bag of chips has less!
Cottage cheese is a relatively healthy snack; lots of protein and very low in carbohydrates. (Note that I say “relatively”, it’s not perfect.) You can also get a low-fat version (which in my opinion is still really good.) However, salt is often added for both flavor and as a preservative, so most will be high in sodium. You can certainly look for a low-sodium version of cottage cheese; they do make it.
It’s too bad you threw it out. You could have rinsed off the curds and eaten them afterward. The salt is typically added after the fact, not put into the cheese itself as it is made, so it will just be on the outside. It would have gotten rid of the salty taste and the high sodium, and after patting down the curds with a paper towel they would have been perfectly fine to eat. Maybe next time if you grab some cottage cheese and can’t find the low-sodium version, you can try that.
Really minor rant… In this past week, YouTube removed the “dislike” button from their “shorts”. So now you can’t quickly give negative feedback if a video you don’t like pops up. At least you can still tell YouTube not to recommend any more of their videos to you, but still. This seems like an annoying and completely unnecessary change.
YouTube said the player updates will roll out over time.
What sucks is that the new features discussed in that article aren’t there yet. So I can’t say “not interested”, there are no speed controls, and so on. Just a removal of the dislike button.
Here in Chapel Hill NC it is currently 102, and not expected to drop below 100 until Monday. I shudder to think what my electric bill will look like this month.
I went out to fill the watering can this afternoon, and happened to notice a thin trickle of water coming from the water heater drain on the side of the house.
Fuck.
So I went up to the attic with a wet vac, and got about 4 gallons of water out of the pan. I don’t see or hear an active leak, but this isn’t normal. The plumber can’t send anyone until Monday.
JFC! When my oven is heating up, it starts registering a temperature at 100°F. You could do some slow cooking at that temperature! The 97°F we hit during this heat wave is downright chilly compared to that!
Right now, just past midnight, the temperature is 27°C (80°F). We’re now in a cooling trend but it will still be 32°C (90°F) tomorrow with a humidex (“feels like”) value of 40°C (104°F). The problem with heat around here is that it’s usually accompanied by high relative humidity – right now it’s 79%. The furnace is gushing condensate from the cooling coils. Humidity also tends to make winter cold feel harsher – it’s not a crisp dry cold like on the prairies.
You are a wise man, my friend, and so right. I don’t think cancelling the rental contract was the right thing to do, but as it turns out, it probably doesn’t matter that much.
The hot water tank is as old as the house – about 19 years. As I said earlier, I was worried that the heating element for some reason wasn’t turning on, but it was just my paranoia. It’s a large 60-gallon tank and in this single-person household that’s enormous, so it doesn’t cycle very often. I was relieved when it finally turned on, with the usual snap, crackle, and pop as it ran.
And therein my problem and my new rant. Discussions with various AIs – ChatGPT was the most helpful – were unanimous that the Kellogg’s Rice Krispies popping sound was due to a high level of hard sediment buildup at the bottom of the tank, and that flushing the tank at this point in its life was both pointless and likely counterproductive. It really needs to be replaced before it springs a leak, or worse.
But this is actually no big deal as all I really need to do is get back into another rental/support agreement with a new tank for about as much as I was paying before.
Meanwhile I’m just keeping a cautious eye on it. Between the furnace A/C still running on the secondary drain and the snap, crackle, and pop of the hot water tank, there is much to keep a watchful eye on!
