And after another delay...

Yesterday I had first hand experience with "excessive" flight delays. I was coming back from Atlanta and I noticed upon check-in that my flight was already delayed (great). Once I get to the gate, I see that not only is the flight delayed an hour, but in fact there are no seats anywhere in the general vicinity (not even one). Me being the old guy I am (2o years young) I decide I need to sit down in one of those generally uncomfortable chairs - so I stalk across the corridor. At that point, I'm peacefully reading my book when I look back towards the gate and notice that the plane is BOARDING! Oops! So I run on over, get in line, and get on the flight.

Once I get to my row, I notice a guy is sitting in my seat. I kindly ask him to move over, since it's my seat, and he complies. At this point, I see that two little kids are being loud just across the aisle and I mutter to the young guy that it looks like we're going to be dealing with "two lil' terrorists" for about 2 hours. The guy chuckles nervously and says, "Yeah, I've been dealing with them for 8 and 6 years, respectively" and we both laugh awkwardly when I realize that, well, my comment was *so* awkward.

Fortunately, this mystery person ended up being a pretty fun flight companion. Even though the flight ended up taking off after 7:30pm (it was originally set to depart at about 5pm) I actually had a lot of fun talking about random topics ranging from acai berries (sp?) to 747's.

Oh and the mystery dad, whoever he is, ended up discussing education with me (ah, that was the original point of this post!) We got to talking about CK Tutors, which he got excited about, and he told me that we "are doing a great thing". We then talked about the public education system and he raised an interesting point - if the public education system through high school is so poor, why do we keep funding it? In his words: "why are we throwing money down the drain that could be used to fix so many other problems? why don't we figure out what we pay for public education, figure out what percentage this forms of each person's taxes, and stop taxing that amount?" These are good questions - what do you think?