Northwest Airlines/KLM
Customer Services Department
MS C65917500 Airline Drive
Minneapolis, MN 55450-1101

Dear Northwest Customer Service,

My wife and I are both long-time Northwest worldperks members; against our better judgment we have continued to fly your fleet of rickety Airbuses and 757s long after you stopped serving free peanuts and tore out all the video screens on your transcontinental flights. I know we have our pick of bankrupt airlines, but for some reason we always keep coming back to you. You've never delayed us like Delta and you fly direct from SFO to Detroit. For that I'll tolerate planes that still have ashtrays in the armrests and the scab mechanics you use to clean dead birds out of the jet engines.

We have come to love direct flights since the birth of our daughter. She's nine months old and we have now made thirteen flights with her. We consider ourselves relatively experienced at traveling with an infant, and have even developed a set of rules we follow and that we have even recommended to others. One of these rules is to always book the aisle and window seats in the last row of the plane to increase our odds of getting a free middle seat for our baby. Unless the flight is full, it always works.

I am writing to tell you today about our experience last Sunday on NW Flight 0345. When we arrived at the gate, the agent there told us they had been trying to contact us over the loudspeaker. We were surprised when she told us that a full row had opened up towards the front of the aircraft and that they wanted to move us there. We thanked her, but declined. See, we prefer the last row, because if the baby starts screaming, we only disturb the people in front of us. We tried to explain this to the gate agent, and she stared at us blankly, as if we were trying to note the application of Pascal's binomial theorem to the battle of Waterloo.

Once we were on the plane, no fewer than four flight attendants offered to find us seats closer to the front of the plane, which we further declined. We watched them plotting seat maps like John Madden, looking to move entire rows in the back closer to the front. A few of the passengers complied, because the attendants acted as though they were doing them a favor.

Eventually, a surly young homosexual Spanish flight attendant who bore a striking resemblance to a 21 Jump Street-era Lou Diamond Phillips came up to us and tapped his feet. The following is a fully accurate transcription of our interaction:

Lou: Um, Hi. We have just emptied out Row 37 a-c for you guys, so if you would like to move up there you can.

Me: No, it's okay, really. We prefer the last row.

Lou: You prefer the last row?

Me: Yeah, actually we do. The baby doesn't disturb anyone behind us back here and if her toys fall on the floor they're not rolling all over the place.

Lou: Oh. So you're not going to move?

Me: No, sorry.

Lou: Well, thank you for being so cooperative.

Look, we're totally cool with the gay thing. We're comfortable with that three-snaps of the fingers sass that gay dudes like to pull from time to time, especially when done well with just the right amount of femme and a Spanish accent. Let's just say that your flight attendant, Lou Diamond Phillips, didn't pull it off very well. It was bare rudeness without the aplomb. It was half-assed, with the subtlety of a slap in the face. I know you guys are struggling and laying off flight attendants, but you might still consider offering them a seminar in how to be rude without seeming like you're being rude. After saying this, Lou went back to the flight attendant station, a mere three feet from our ears and proceeded to announce to his fag hags with as much vitriol as he could muster what horrid fucking breeders we were for not giving up that seat. "They won't move?" Fag Hag #1 said. "No," Lou replied. "They want to sit there for their fucking baby or something. . ."

At this point, my wife was physically restraining me from getting up and dropping la bamba on his ass. She was right to do so; flight attendants seem to have a certain authority vested in them like mall security guards or bus drivers. You don't want to piss them off until you're practically out the door, screaming obscenities over your shoulder, or else they're likely to throw you into the cargo hold with the golden retrievers in cages. Ultimately, we learned why they wanted us to move. Apparently, they were planning to throw a party back there and we weren't invited. Two gay stewards from first class brought back an apronful of those little smurf bottles of liquor and some leftover first class meals and the entire cabin crew proceeded to get wasted on thimble-sized shots of Dewar's while they ate stinky chicken parm and grew ever more catty perusing the shared pages of a single issue of Us Weekly. When a Chinese guy got up to ask for some water for his bootleg Nalgene bottle, one of the fag hags barked, "What are you doing out of your seat?" Things got rowdier and rowdier as the 4.5 hour flight went on. Turns out they didn't need to sit in the back rows of seats. They just didn't want any passengers back there to find out what they were doing. They wanted us to give up the seats we paid for so they could have a party buffer.

Just thought you'd like to know.

Sincerely,

Sweet Juniper's Parents

p.s. thanks for losing my bag.

*Update*

Northwest to cut flight attendants' pay

Last night was our tenth flight with Junebug in our arms, and over those ten flights we've learned a lot of tricks about flying that we'd like to share:

1. Never, never, never select two seats right next to each other on a three-seat-per-row aircraft. Always leave the middle seat empty. Those are the last ones that johnny-come-lately ticket buyers want. If the flight isn't full, there's a good chance the seat will stay empty. Also, don't be tempted by the seats at the front of the plane. If you choose them, you increase the possibility of having between you and your spouse a fat Chinese man who insists on keeping a large, mysterious box under the seat in front of him, requiring him to "borrow" the area under the seat in front of YOU to put HIS feet when he falls asleep. Always offer to let said fat Chinese man have the window seat if he'll take it. They always do.

The back of the plane is the best. No one behind you to hear the crying! Last night, we did the "empty seat in the middle" thing in the last row and it stayed open while the rest of the plane filled up. Funny how having one empty seat in your row can make you feel like a Raj in his palace compared to those stuffed three in a row like untouchables in a Calcutta slum.

If the plane is full, you're fucked.

2. Get on the plane last. Who are all those masochistic vultures hovering around the gate just waiting for their row to get called so they can get on the plane and sit in misery while the rest of us get on? Generally I find people in airports to be pretty logical with their selfishness, but this makes no sense. With a squirmy baby in tow, I don't get on the plane until they're about to drag my ass down the jetway.

3. There are times to respectfully acknowledge that no one else in the world gives a crap about how hard it is to juggle your parenting responsibilities and there are times to act like a totally self-righteous prick. Airports and airplanes are theaters of human misery, nothing more. No one is really happy. No one expects you to be anything but a selfish jerk, so why dissapoint them? Don't bother with politeness and courtesy, particularly if you are flying Southwest Airlines, which long ago instituted a "survival-of-the-fittest" approach for general boarding, meaning no seats are assigned and it's first come, first served (though three "classes" of passenger board one at a time, with your class assigned based on how early you checked in). A remarkable exception to Southwest's policy are people with "issues": the handicapped, the elderly, and PARENTS with small children. That's right: Parents get to board first. Do not hesitate to shove an old lady out of a way or walk faster down the jetway than the guy dragging his oxygen tank. Your goal is to get on that plane first to grab the bulkhead seats up front. Sit with an empty seat between you and your partner, and put the child in the middle seat as though it were an unaccompanied minor. Ignore the baby while it cries. Costumes may also be in order. Women should wear muslim head scarves if they really want to avoid sitting next to a pharmaceutical salesman from New Jersey. Get one for the baby, too, for effect. Breastfeeding, for some reason, makes a vast majority of the American populace uncomfortable. A woman in a burqa breastfeeding a baby will make EVERYONE uncomfortable. Men, dress as though you have nothing to do with the kid. Wear a Haggar suit with a soupstained tie and read USA Today, coughing loud wet coughs every time a new passenger emerges from the jetway. In a pinch, simply wearing a bowtie might work. No one wants to sit next to a guy wearing a bowtie.

Remember how when riding your elementary school bus, you would avoid making eye contact with the kid with the two gigantic hearing aids and the tick problem when he got on the bus and you had a empty seat next to you? Just pretend that everyone getting on the plane has two gigantic hearing aids and that tick problem.

4. There is no better sound than hearing the aircraft door shut with an empty seat between you and your partner holding the baby. Remove burqas and bowties, stretch out and enjoy yourself. We call this Dutch first class.

5. Make friends with the stewardess. Make sure she gets plenty of the face time with the baby before the plane takes off. If you order a beer, she may bring you an extra one later because the kid is so darn cute. And that brings us to getting drunk. We highly recommend it.

6. When your baby is screaming and there seems like nothing you can do and the guy who looks like Donald Rumsfeld in the next row is scowling and shaking his head, remember that half the people on the plane have probably gone through it themselves and the other half are probably fucking assholes anyway.

7. Be prepared for the pilot to drunkenly announce halfway through the flight that you just flew over the world's biggest ball of twine or those on the left side of the plane can look down and see what Canyonlands National Park looks like from 38,000 feet (rocks). This announcement will wake your child. There is nothing you can do. I always find it disconcerting, with all the aviation technology onboard that's supposed to keep us safe, how all the airlines keep the same P.A. system in their 737s that Arby's saw fit to replace in its drive-thru windows during the Nixon Administration.

8. If you have an irrational fear of flying (like me), don't show your baby the various charms and amulets you keep in your hands while chanting during take off and landing. She will want to chew them.

9. If the guy in front of you reclines his seat the whole way, let your baby stand on the tray table and play with his hair. That'll teach him.

10. Don't sweat it too much. Babies want to sleep just as much when they're circumnavigating the skies as they do in their cribs. Just figure out a creative way to get them to that place in limited space. If all else fails, breastfeeding combined with a scrupulous application of Rule #5 (above) works wonders.

Every time I go through airline security with the kid I get stressed out. The last few times it hasn't been so bad, but the first experience was so rough it has traumatized me forever. All three of us traveled to New York back at the end of March, when the kid had just turned two months old. We had never gone through security with an infant, and while I was psychologically prepared to be force fed breastmilk to prove that it was not, in fact, nitroglycerin, I thought they'd leave the kid alone. Wood was wearing a sleeping baby in a moby wrap when she set her diaper bag and carry-on down on the conveyor belt, and she had removed all metal from her pockets, but the guard flipped out when she tried to go through the metal detector with the baby in the moby wrap. We had to stand there, holding up the whole security line, while I unwrapped about seventeen thousand feet of black cloth in a strangely unerotic rendition of Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow's first sex scene in Shakespeare in Love. It was more like Boris Karloff and Zita Johann in the Mummy. When the moby wrap "bandages" were removed, one did not get the pleasure of viewing Gwyneth Paltrow's privileged little nipples, but an extremely angry, newly-wakened two month old lump of scrumpled face, a devil child that resembled our sweet Juniper. With the moby wrap off, they x-rayed it and insisted that Wood go through the metal detector without the baby, so she handed her to me. When it was my turn to walk through the metal detector, I did so gingerly holding the screaming baby in front of me.

Then the gheri-curled metal detector guard told me it was my duty as a citizen and a patriot to subject myself to secondary screening. I was not surprised. My name must be on a list somewhere, because I get shuffled off to the guy with the wand and sadistic grin just about every time I fly. But there wasn't a secondary-screener ready this time, so Gheri Curl forced me stand with the screaming baby right next to him at the metal detector for 4-5 minutes. Wood was at the end of the security area, helpless. They wouldn't let her come back and take (or even comfort) the baby. I still have crow's feet between my eyes from the looks I was giving that gheri-curled bastard. In retrospect, such looks probably did not help our predicament. Eventually, a dude showed up who could conduct a secondary screening, and he made me take my shoes and belt off and conducted the wand probe of my outline while another guy went through my bags. He then conducted a wand probe of the baby's outline as I held her out by her armpits. She was screaming. Wood broke back through the ranks of security guards and asked if she could hold her baby. "No," said the guy who seemed to be in charge. "The baby needs to be screened as well."

When they were done screening me, they asked if the baby was male or female. Female, I said, and the guy looked bummed. They had to go find a female screener. There was a guy there who confided in me while we waited for the female screener that his boss was a real asshole. Wood asked if she could hold the baby while they waited, and they ordered her outside of the security area. They were deadly serious. A female screener showed up two or three minutes later, and she ordered me to hold the baby up with my arms outstretched. I swear to God she proceeded to pat her down in her little pajamas, as if looking for the little deringer with which Juniper intended to hijack the plane in the name of jihad for the breastfeeding gods. She was screaming in righteous anger, after all, so she must be some kind of militant. Up and down the screener patted the little arms, the small of her back, the legs, up in between her legs and then she was done.

Then, for some reason they had to pat me down (in addition to the wanding), and the woman screener told me that she would hold the baby.

"No," I said.

These are people unaccustomed to having their commands responded to with anything in the negative. "No," I repeated. "If you're done with her, her mother can hold her. You're a stranger and there's no way in hell you're going to hold this baby while this goes on. That cannot be the appropriate procedure." What I wanted to say: "You've got to be out of your fucking mind, Ma'am. That baby is eight weeks old. Her grandparents have hardly held her, and you're just some fat lady at the airport."

To my surprise, the woman relented, and let Wood take the shaking, terrorized baby and nursed her back to calm in the seats where businessmen usually re-tie their ferragamos. I, meanwhile, had to undertake what seemed like a battery of humiliating tests and checks (but which really only lasted a couple more minutes). Still, I felt like I'd been pulled over for drunk driving on the Las Vegas strip and a crowd had gathered to watch me stumble to walk a straight line while touching my nose with alternating forefingers, singing Shakira's latest Spanish-language release. I kept looking around at the other passengers for some sympathy. Surely someone else would think this was all ridiculous. But that's the thing about airports. At airports, people only think about themselves.

When they were finished with me, the lawyer side of me came out and I asked for everyone's name and position and filed a formal complaint with the TSA. I'm sure doing so just put me higher up on their list. We almost missed our flight. We never received an explanation for why we were treated like this. We can only figure Ahmad Chalabi probably told Judith Miller who told Karl Rove who told Dick Cheney that Al Qaida was planning to use infants to take over 737s. It's the only possibility that makes sense.

Ever since then, when we get up to the grouchy little Filipino woman who checks your boarding pass and ID at SFO, my stomach fills with dread. The other day, we approached the same security checkpoint, the same guards, but it all went down without a hitch.

*note* These were not TSA agents that wanded & frisked our two-month old daughter. SFO is one of five airports nationwide that maintained private screeners and security personnel (like before 9/11) that are overseen by the TSA (the screeners are federally trained). The private contractor at SFO is Covenant Aviation Security. The government is debating the effectiveness of using private contractors to conduct airport screening, and current reports indicate that more airports will be using federally-trained private contractors. Republicans love the application of free market theory to airline security just like they do to prisons. Covenant Airport Security has repeatedly been the focus of several high profile investigations, most recently when it cheated to pass "decoy" screenings and when male security agents were using cameras to focus on women's asses and breasts while they waited in the security lines. I am all for aggressively combating potential threats to aviation safety, but I am against putting the keystone kops in charge of that fight. Using a metal detector wand and then frisking a two-month old infant, I think, is just another example of their complete ineptitude.