Airlines are dumb, with one exception - Southwest Airlines. I grew up with Southwest because they’ve always had the cheapest flights to the places I wanted to go (different cities in Texas and Oklahoma) and now I’m just too used to it. I woke up late for my flight this morning, hauled ass all the way to the airport, ran up to the Southwest gate 10 minutes before departure and the woman working the desk didn’t bat an eye. She rushed all of my paperwork, took my checked bag and got me on the plane. Flash back to my trip to Canada, when I got to the Delta desk 15 minutes before departure the woman immediately told me I wasn’t going to get on the plane and I had to argue with her before she reluctantly looked up the flight and realized it was delayed 45 minutes. And it was still a fight to get on the plane. I’m not saying that SWA is perfect, but they are a hell of a lot more willing to work with you to get you on your flight.

As for the people at airports, I haven’t determined if people area really dumber in airports or if I just notice it more then. Airports are places where people are in a hurry. No matter how much time you have to kill at the airport, the people behind you in line don’t have any time for you to figure out what you want to eat. I can’t even begin to list the number of times that I’ve been trying to get something to eat during a layover only to have some dumbass hold up the line for 5 minutes trying to decide amongst the complex McDonald’s menu. And the clothes people wear at airports. Seriously: spandex is not attractive. It can only vary from disgusting to mildly nasty, depending on how ugly you are. Really thin white material is see thru when your fat ass is buldging out of it, so pay attention to whose face your ass is in when you lean over to pick something up (especially when I’m trying to eat). A guy standing in front of me in the boarding line had a Big Dogs t-shirt on. If you don’t know what the Big Dogs corporation is, then you’re lucky. But to give you an idea, this t-shirt had a cartoon dog dressed up like a cowboy on the back with a caption that read “Garth Barks”. Get it? Not Garth Brooks (because that would be *cool*), but Garth Barks (because dogs are *funny*). When he said goodbye to his kids I was waiting for him to say “Git ‘er done!” That seemed appropriate.

I went to Detroit to attend the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) World Congress. We stayed in downtown Detroit, which is about as glamorous and you’d think it is. Someone told me that there are 51,000 abandoned buildings in Detroit. I think that might be an underestimate. I saw so many condemned buildings, where I expect a number of crimes occur every day. For the most part, any time I saw a nice car parked in the parking lot of an abandoned building, I made it a point to walk away as fast as I could and pay as little attention as possible. I don’t want to be involved with whatever crime they have going on. I’ve seen The Client.

On the other hand, my hotel (the Omni) was the nicest hotel I’ve stayed at in a long time. They have bathrobes for everyone. My room had 15″ ceilings with floor to ceiling drapes. Free shuttle service to anything worth seeing in Detroit. A friendly staff that was willing to bend over backwards to help me with any problems I had. And to top it all off: a phone in the bathroom right next to the toilet, because I’m an important business professional who takes care of business while I take care of business.

Overall, the trip was good. I learned more about automotive engineering than I ever though I would. I partied with a bunch of marketing people, and proved to myself that my I’m not too old to pull all-nighters playing poker outside of Vegas. To Detroit’s credit, the casinos there were nice. I mean, much nicer than the Lake Charles, LA ones. But it was still no Vegas.

Detroit Gambling

There are a few places to play poker in the Detroit area, but the only place I played was Greektown, because it was next door to the number of the restaurants where we had dinner, but also because it was a $6 cab ride from the hotel and I was frankly terrified to be wandering around that city on my own. There are two times in my life that I have ever put money in my sock because I was afraid I was going to get robbed; one of those was while I was in Detroit. The first night there, after winning $150, I looked out to the desolate, poorly lit city and determined that there was a good chance I might get mugged on my way home. The other time, incidentally, was when I was living in St. Louis and I walked out of the downtown riverfront casino there (not the Casino Queen which is on the East St. Louis bank of the Mississippi, I value my life).

Poker In Detroit
The first night I was at the casino, I was getting complete junk cards for the most part. I was there for two hours and I only won one hand. Yet I left the poker table up $50 (it was a really big hand). After watching top pair hands get killed by people playing hands like 3-7o and the like, I called a raise from a maniac when I am in the big blind with Q-8s. The flop came K-Q-4 with two hearts and I called, figuring I might be up against a pair of fours. Turn card was a 8 of hearts, making two pair for me and I called two bets. Last card was a glorious 8 of diamonds making my full house and with three players we capped the river. What did I destroy with runner-runner 8’s? K-Q offsuit for top two-pair on the flop and A-J hearts for the nut flush. These people were raising with the most absurd stuff previously, so I couldn’t respect their hands. But I won a huge pot and after another orbit, decided it was time to get the hell out of there. That’s right. I won one hand.

Crapless Craps
Michael Shackleford has a very strong warning about playing crapless craps and other gimmick games. He’s a really smart guy and I trust his opinions, but he doesn’t account for the fact that Detroit is the unluckiest city ever. After leaving the poker table I headed out for some craps only to lose a significant amount of money in a very short thirty minutes because people were crapping out like crazy. Then to make matters worse, my table was closed for the night and they instructed me to go down to the other craps tables. They didn’t mention that the tables were crapless, but I was anxious to play a bit more craps so I gave it a shot. I made all my money back and more because the guy with the dice couldn’t roll anything but 2, 3, or 12. It was insane.

Latenite Poker in Detroit
The last night I was in Detroit, I developed a brilliant plan to make sure I would be awake for my 7:20am airport shuttle, it was simple. Have dinner and go out drinking with the rest of the marketing peoples until 2am, drink enough to sustain a buzz until 6:45am, catch a cab back to the hotel, shower, pack, and get to hotel lobby by 7:20am. Perfect. The night started out well, we did dinner at the MGM, played some blackjack (yuck!), went to a silly teenybopper dance club, and by 2am I cabbed it back to Greektown to play some poker until my flight. Frustrated by the 3-6 poker play, I decided to try my luck at 5-10. My buzz was still working strong and for some reason people kept letting me into hands without a raise when I had J-x hands and I seemed to flop a jack every time and many times two pair. Feeling a little buzzed, I kept making up names for my hand relating to the Jackson Family. So (of course) there is J-5 (”The Jackson 5″, which incidentally is called “Motown” for real), J-4 (”no Tito”), and J-6 (”Featuring Latoya”). For the rest of the names, I would babble off really long names:

Player: “What do you have?”
Me: “The Jackson five, with latoya, janet, macaulay culkin, and that monkey. J-9.”

Yes it was obnoxious, but damn was it funny and it was putting people on tilt like you wouldn’t believe. In the end, I didn’t win much at poker and overall I lost $50 on the trip after adding in blackjack and craps losses, but I can’t complain. I got up from the poker table at 6:42am and managed to get showered, packed and was in the lobby right on time. Perfect - but damn did I have a horrible hangover. Isn’t that how all good plans end?