This week, Merlin and John talk about:

The Problem: John’s the only one who’s seen the ocean, referring to people living in the middle of the country not having experienced a life that is different from theirs.

The show title refers to young people’s pickup trucks in the middle of the country that communicate a no-fear radical vibe and they are all repping this kind of vibration.

John couldn’t find his microphone.

Raw notes
The segments below are raw notes that have not been edited for language, structure, references, or readability. Please do not quote these texts directly without applying your own editing first! These notes were not planned to be released in this form, but time constraints have caused a shift in priorities and have delayed editing draft-quality versions to a later point.

John buying a Suburban and driving it home from Massachusetts to Seattle (RL130)

John has been busy and America has been watching him drive from Massachusetts to New Hampshire to Vermont to New York to Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana to Illinois to Missouri to Kansas to Nebraska to South Dakota to Wyoming to Montana to Idaho to Washington in a bicycle with an electric motor on it and it took him 4 year. In reality John averaged 10 miles to the gallon with his 1979 Suburban in full-time four-wheel-drive the entire way, which is like a fast snow plow. In the middle of the country gas is $2.50 and a couple of times he put premium in it even though he doesn’t believe in premium gas. Fuck it, this is America! He took a big old cap full of gas and poured it on the ground.

This has been a grail quest for him, looking for his white whale truck, and there weren’t that many of them. His perception growing up in Anchorage was that there was a limitless number of Suburbans. They were the rich kid car and if you were a pretty well-off kid your family definitely had a Suburban in addition to 3-4 other cars, a boat, and an airplane. They were everywhere and he thought that in the 1970s it was the most popular car, but with a little more research he found that in fact Chevy was solidly in 3rd place of US truck sales all the way through the 1960s/70s/80s. Ford has always sold the most trucks and even Dodge sells more trucks than Chevy.

General Motors owns Chevrolet and they have now caught up in the truck races. Driving across the country now you are astonished how many Dodge trucks there are, they might be number one. Merlin sees a lot of Toyota Tundra, but he lives on the coast and the cars that are in San Francisco and Seattle are not representative of the cars that are on the road anywhere in the middle of the country.

Truck culture in the middle states of America (RL130)

During huge portions of John’s trip the ground was flat and he could see 3 miles in every direction and every single car he could see was a pickup truck and they are all hyped up, jacked up, customized. They come right out of the factory pre-customized now. It is like the nomenclature of the Espresso Wars (is that by Frank Herbert?) when a small certainly became a tall and a medium was a Grande and the Venti on top of that. The smallest least-optioned truck is already branded as the Extreme Omega Yukon and it already got flames on it from the factory and you can decide how many more ridiculous skull heads you want and if the grill should look like shark’s teeth.

The Rock’n’Roll rebel iconography of 25 years ago was used by people who saw themselves as the opposite of some dumb middle-of-the-country hick, but it is now completely embraced and endorsed by young guys in the middle of the country, including Extreme Sports talk and Hip Hop. There are the coastal affectation that came out of Hard Rock and Punk Rock, the dice tattoos over the checkered flags, the weird Rockabilly offshoot of Punk Rock, spray-painted graphics and ”No Fear!”

All the way across the country every single young guy is repping this vibration that they are radical and have no fear and their truck and their driving etiquette certainly communicates that. A lot of them are pulling trailers with more rad 4-wheel off-road gas-burning things. As John was driving across the country in his vintage Suburban where all the logos were in Comic Sans.

He was thinking at first that these guys that were coming up behind him and were also in a GMC truck were going to tip their hat and recognize as they blow by him at 90 mph as he went 60 mph, but there was no acknowledgement that the thing he was doing is cool. It is their grandpa’s truck and the fact that their truck is made out of plastic and that most of it was probably made in Korea doesn’t matter because they are representing a whole different philosophy.

John wants to call up his good friend Elon Mask and tell him that if he really wants to revolutionize this country, electric motors have a ton of torque and you hear torque talked about a lot in the middle of the country, it is why they want a Diesel motor in those trucks because they have a lot of torque, but nothing has more torque than an electric motor and if somebody just makes a ridiculously torquey truck and builds an advertising campaign around it featuring Travis Tritt and Pauly Shore in the truck with a bunch of guys in their Dodge trucks in a mud bog, and here you come in your Tesla truck and just school these guys in the mud bog, and it has to make some cool sound while doing that, and you will transform the country.

Those people don’t buy the things because of USA, all you have to do is open the glovebox and it says Made in China in there, but it is peacocking, it is a display of no-compromise attitude, and nothing says ”No compromise” than Elon Musk.

Both the Right and the Left see themselves as counter culture and feel not represented by the government (RL130)

They are in the middle of a baseball tournament (San Francisco Giants vs Kansas City Royals) and everybody in San Francisco is wearing their gear. John was in the town of the opposing sports team (Kansas City) and drove past the stadium where the tournament was being played. He had the most American experience in his life when he was driving out of Kansas City in the middle of the night, trying to get the baseball game on his AM radio, he tuned it in, it was all dark, nobody else on the road, and he was driving on those little roads outside of Kansas City, listening to the World Series on the radio. God bless America!

The same is true for the trucks: There is this whole mythology around them, which is pretty hilarious. It is completely cosmetic in some ways, like a car costume.

John had a lot of time to think as he was driving across the country with just an AM radio for company and his CB radio which the antenna fell off the roof and he wasn’t really able to get a lot of CB traffic. The middle of the country is really different, it is a really nice place full of really nice people. A lot of the people he met on this trip have never seen the ocean and there were moments where he recognized that the subtext of their conversation was how the Jews control the media, but he was the only person in the room who had ever seen the ocean. They all felt like they had the truth of this story, but what they are missing is knowledge. They might even have the truth, but they don’t have any knowledge, while John does not claim to have the truth at all, but he does have knowledge.

John really does understand the center of the country a little bit and he likes it there, it is not primitive by contrast, but it is very different! The values are different, the trajectory is different, they are not headed the same place that the people on the coasts are headed. People on the West and East Coast and people in Paris are churning ideas. There are fashionable ideas and they are going through them faster and faster, it flashes around, everybody is talking about it.

If you are living in Kansas City, but your primary life is on the Internet, you are also part of this conversation, but if you are not part of it, you are not aware of these intense fashions of thought that seem to be leading us somewhere. We are the product of 5000 idea storms that are supposedly building something and we are further along. But if you are living somewhere where none of those idea storms have happened, the tempo of thought is slower, and your thought evolution is slower and you end up on the road that you perceive to the The Road, while out on the coasts they have a fracturing of even what the road is.

John didn’t come through the country feeling more hopeful that we are going to achieve a national consensus at any time, and yet he had that experience that you can’t help but having that everybody there is great and it is really nice and everyone has good will, there are also very Liberal people out there with very Progressive ideas, but in general it feels like that this part of the country is starting to really want different things.

John was looking at guys in their early 30s who were peacocking the hardest, that were the most expressive about the ideas they were repping, and around 33 years old was the peak, but it started in the early 20s. He had several tweet-ups across the country and he could walk into a bar and pick out the people who were there to see him from across the room, not because they were wearing beards - everybody was wearing beards - and not because they were wearing Warby Parker glasses, but there is a subtle combination of the ironic Negro League Baseball shirt, or the cut of their jib.

In those places the idea fashions lodge themselves, those are the progenitors of the cause of the day. For instance suspicion about the government: When John was young, conservative people were generally pro-government and liberal people were generally suspicious of government because government was the cops and Ronald Reagan and The Man. Leftism was the counter culture all the way through the Grunge years while the Right was synonymous with small-town people and church values. They were connected to the government and the status quo.

But now we are living in a world where all of the people in the prime of their life in the middle of the country, if they think of themselves as conservative they also think of themselves as opposed to the government which they perceive to be a product of all these years of political correctness and university people and the liberal media. It started when somebody came to their dad’s club and told them that they have to start letting women into the club, it can’t just be men only anymore, and what the fuck is the government telling me that?

The Liberalism grew a tremendous power in American at the bureaucratic level. It doesn’t matter who the president is, or if George Bush is in Iraq and we are in a police state, but the Department of Health and Human Services are still enacting a generally liberal project. As long as there is public housing, public assistance, social security, and food stamps, and every time a government regulator tells you that you have to clean the asbestos out of your furnace flue, it is liberalism in action and it doesn’t matter who the Commander in Chief is.

The middle of the country perceive that at a street level. They see those changes enacted, they have grown an estrangement to the government, and have adopted a froth that almost sound anarchist and they see themselves as a counter culture to the inevitable forward motion of the liberal conversion. The problem is that the Liberals on the left coast also still see themselves as a counter culture, so everybody in the fucking country now sees themselves as a God-damn counter culture.

The culture that we perceive ourselves to be at war with… If you ask the people at El Centro De La Raza in Seattle if they feel like the government is on their side, they are going to say: ”No, are you kidding me? We are living in a white male supremacist police state which still has systemic discrimination!” and you ask the same question to some kid on the back of his truck out in the country and he will say: ”What? Are you kidding me?” Nobody feels like the government represents them, which is fucking bizarre! Merlin says that actually it is about ethics in video game journalism (Gamergate was 2 months prior to this episode).

John visiting his nephew the firefighter in Ashland Ohio (RL130)

John stayed in Ohio for 4-5 days to see some family. He has a nephew who is a firefighter and they were at his fire station in Ashland Ohio (John said Oregon at first) and he was showing them around and there was the same sound effect like in the television show Emergency! with characters John Gage and Roy DeSoto. Merlin gets a total boner from that sound. John’s nephew was standing right in front of him with kids all around him, talking about the pumper truck, and when that sound came his eyes went black like a shark, communicating by body language: ”Get the fuck out of the way! Do you hear the sound?” and they were in that truck, hauling ass out of the door with the siren on seconds.

John has known firefighters, he has a good friend who is a paramedic, but to be in the fire station in this state of padding around in your underwear, checking on the chili, watching your stories, and then that bell sounds and they leap into action and as they were going out the door they had no idea what they were about to see. It could be a cat stuck in a tree or it could be a Lincoln Continental on fire with 6 people in it.

Statistically for these guys out in Central Ohio it is not a big car wreck full of people or a house fire that often, 98% of the time it is somebody who finally ate the last Cheeto that put them over 750 pounds and they have to go get the winch to get them out of their house. They have a special truck to get people out of their houses that can’t get out of their door anymore! John’s mom was there and asked what they do about the people that are too big to get out of bed and he gave a little head nod and walked them to the back of the fire-station where they had a special ambulance for them.

The idea that through the entire career of a fireman they are sitting there in a state of: ”Nothing happened a minute ago, nothing is happening this minute, I am stirring the chili, watching my stories!” and then that bell and maybe they are going to see the worst thing they have ever seen in their life right now and they are only one on the scene that is able to fix it if anybody can. It seems super-human! They are also on duty for 24 hours where they are oscillating between those two poles of total calm and manic borderline… you have to compress your emotions so hard, and then you are off work and are just a normal family guy bumbling around the house for a few days. It is extraordinary!

Merlin’s wife has worked with doctors for years and he has never understood why there are such long stretches of 24 hours. John doesn’t understand it either. He has had the experience of being worked on by an emergency room doctor who has been on shift for 23 hours, and the bleary-eyed hyper-competence of somebody who has been up that long makes you feel that you who is injured and the doctor are in the same boat in an off-world, both tripping balls, just different balls.

They have Murphy-beds at their fire-station that they pull down and sleep on. Merlin was watching a thing about Submarines not that long ago, maybe the Stephen Johnson documentary thing, and they monkey with their clocks so that you have three 6-hour shifts in a day: 6 hours of on-duty, 6 hours of light-duty and 6 hours of sleep, but that sounds like a recipe for insanity.

Wishing the day/night cycle would work differently in Physics (RL130)

As John was driving across the country there was perfect late-afternoon light every day and he thought why the sun has to move smoothly across the sky, why can’t it just be 4 hours of early morning light, 4 hours of 1pm, 4 hours of 5pm, 4 hours of 8pm, and so on? There are these perfect moments of the day and night. Then it could be dark for 8 hours when everybody went to sleep. If John were George R. R. Martin he wouldn’t have done this whole ”Winter comes every once in a while”, but he would have the sun tick across the sky like an old knob. Less like the second hand, but more like the hour hand, it would just click from one state into the other. It would require physics to be different, but if you are a fucking novelist?

Standards are declining everywhere, hat etiquette, people talking on the phone, TVs in airports (RL130)

When Merlin was a child and you were in a car and heard sirens coming, there was never any question about it that every person on the road fucking pulled over and let the ambulance go by, but today many people don’t do that anymore. Merlin likes to think it is the law and John of course also does it. What is wrong with those people? You have to get out of the way, not just stop the car! John sees declining standards everywhere and people are not obeying the moires anymore. It might be time to revisit a bit of Keep moving and get out of the way.

Last night Merlin was watching the baseball game, and at the end of the game they were interviewing a 25-year old pitcher for the Giants and you can hear the audio inside the stadium and only a couple of words got out of the interviewee’s mouth before he turns and tips his cap and says to the audience: ”Thank you, everybody!” Fucking A, yes! He was doing what people used to do, which is tip your fucking cap to the stadium. Don’t get John started on tipping your cap!

John thinks that the place to start is to take your God-damn hat off when you walk inside. It is not even kids today, but it is people John’s age who are the only ones who are wearing stupid hats and they are bald, but John doesn’t give a shit! In 1980 being bald was difficult, the standard was that you were the star of the Bee Gees and not his bald brother (Robin Gibb). Everybody wanted a big head of hair, and if you didn’t have a big head of hair you had Wallace Shawn little tuffs on the side and that was embarrassing.

Somewhere along the line in the 1990s we invented the technology of shaving your head and now bald guys look amazing, tuff, and cool, and only you know if you are bald and you hat is a hat and if you want to bring hats back you also have to bring back the whole retinue of hat etiquette, the first and easiest part of which is that you take if off when you come inside. Then of course you have the awkward problem of carrying your hat around where it is much easier to carry your hat on your head where it was before, but wearing a hat is not a simple thing and brings with it certain responsibilities.

It is like fucking carrying a sword around, you don’t get to carry it on an airplane, and you don’t get to wear your freaking hat wherever you God-damn want. If the doors of the building are barn doors, you can keep your hat on. It bothers Merlin when people sit down to eat dinner wearing a hat because it is an affront to humanity! Also: Take your hat off when they play the national anthem! Get up and sing the damn song, no matter if you are a patriot or not, put your hand over your heart, or take your hat off and put it over your heart.

In a lobby of a hotel if you are wearing your overcoat and you are carrying your suitcases, keep your hat on! You are still in a transition between here and there. But once you get on the elevator, especially if there is a lady, get your God-damn hat off. Rejoice in it! You are already rejoicing in wearing your hat, it means something to you, and John includes baseball hats in this, he is not just dumping on people with Fedoras. Rejoice in all of the little dance that wearing a hat allows you to engage in! Merlin wears a Carhartt hat a lot of the time to keep his head warm, and he got a new haircut which makes it easier for him to take his hat off without having a hat head.

John wearing a hat on his walk across Europe

When John was walking across Europe, shortly after he started walking across the flat planes which starts all the way up in Holland, he noticed that the sun was beating down on him all day long and it was brutalizing him. He stayed the night in a little farm house and in the morning the wife of the house told him that he needed a hat and he gave him an amazing straw farmer’s hat because she thought he needed it more than they did.

John wore this hat all the way across Europe and over the weeks he realized that out in the country all these little hat gestures still convey a ton of information, like if you put your finger up to the brim to salute a guy that is on a tractor, you pull the brim down slightly to salute someone driving by in a car, you reach up and lift it off your head and put it back down if you pass a woman walking on the road, you take it off when you are asking a question because the gesture of taking your hat off says: ”I besiege you! I need information! I am here at your service!”, and there are so many times in a day when you can communicate ”I am at your service” to someone, simply by taking your hat of. In a lot of cases John was able to surmount his language barrier because he hat learned the sign language of the hat. You can also do little hat tricks, flip it around to impress a little kid.

People who don’t take their sunglasses or headphones off

Merlin finds the same is true for people who don’t take their sunglasses off inside. You better be Jackie Gleason. If you want a little wall around you, then stay in the bathroom at your house, there are 4 walls there, you can turn the sink on to get water, you can poop and pee, it goes away, and don’t fucking come out and deal with the rest of us!

This is a thing that we are trending toward, and that is more true on the coast than it is in the middle of America for sure, you early adopters and technologists are not entitled to your Google Glass, but you take them off, not because anything, but you just take them off out of old-fashioned respect. If you give 25 reasons why you need them on, those are just 25 bullet points about what a bullshitter you are. Take that shit off! Take your headphones off!

When you are interacting with people, when you walk into a room for the first time, when you meet somebody for the first time, when you are showing a public conveyance with somebody be conscious of the fact that your little bubble is rude. Maybe you are out for a jog or you are working on a big presentation, we allow you to be in your bubble to a certain extend, but that is not your entitlement all the time and you don’t get to be out sharing our fucking world with us and also be in your bubble.

People talking on the phone

John went by a café today and saw through the glass a guy his age in Moscot-glasses and top to bottom hipster clothes. He thought that this is a guy he might have an interesting conversation about Hitler with, but as he walked in he noticed that the guy was talking into his phone, he was the loudest thing in the room, while there were 40 people in this café. Are you kidding me? John went as far as to like his glasses, and he was this guy? If Merlin gets a phone call and he has to take it he will leave the table and go outside to talk, you certainly don’t stand in line in a place and talk to someone who is serving you while you are talking into a phone.

At truck stops all across America there are little baseball bats to check the tire pressure on big rigs, called Tire Thumpers, and John should carry one of those to either knock the phone out of their hands or whack them on the side of their knee. For a long time it was weird to listen to a Walkman, but now Merlin listens to podcasts all the time when he walks around on the street, although as soon as he gets in line he tends to want to take off his headphones because he feels like he is already engaged in a process. There are guys who leave one headphone in when they talk to you and hold the other one in their hand like a Petunia, and a few times a month Merlin will see a situation where the customer and the barista both have headphones on. It is like something out of Philip K. Dick, this can not end well.

TVs in public places, in airports, and on planes

For a while they were selling a universal television remote that you could use to shut off the TV in public places and John always thought about getting one, but it felt like he had to balance that desire against his stronger desire to never carry around a thing and the last thing he wanted was carry around an asshole gizmo like this, but if he would carry around stuff anyway he would love to have a thing that turns TVs off. Merlin feels that is a dick move because it is not your place, but his huger feeling is: Why is FoxNews, CNN, and Sportsball on in every restaurant and every airport, probably because men in particular are terrified of being alone with their thoughts. No remodel in San Francisco is complete until two TVs have been added.

There should be a TV lounge in the airport if you want to go watch TV. Particularly if they turn the volume on, John’s mind is already cluttered with travel thinking and flying thinking, trying to get his bags and his tickets, trying to talk to the woman about maybe getting an upgrade, and at the same time CNN is yelling at him about Ebola right in his face, it is profoundly rude and intrusive, but it is perceived to be a bonus. It speaks to the degradation of public space, the degradation of the idea that we should ever be alone with our thoughts or have a moment of quiet reflection.

On Virgin America when they are showing the safety video you have to watch a commercial or three that you can’t turn off. John would always ask for a piece of tape and then tape a piece of paper over his TV screen because he was so offended by it, and everybody was looking at him like he was wearing a tinfoil hat. This thing is yelling at him and it is programmed to flash in a way so he keeps looking at it and it is one foot in front of his face and he already paid $400 for this chair.

What drives Merlin crazy at the airport is obviously the security theater stuff with TSA, and then you have to listen with half an ear to the announcements in order to know if anything has changed about your flight, you have to hear everybody else’s flights, which is fine, then there are FoxNews and CNN blaring at you, and then there are also the robo-announcements with the extremely important security information about not leaving your bag unattended. Is there anybody who is going to process that every time it comes on? Nobody fucking cares! It is just a drone!

John being in a group that was altering billboards at night

20 years ago John was a member of a little group of people in Seattle who late at night would climb and alter billboards (see RL353). They did some pretty great work! It was only for a couple of years and they might only have altered 15-20 billboards, targeting the really graphic anti-abortion ones or the compensatory jacked-up truck ones, and they would make a good joke and it would get in the newspaper and they had a good time wearing masks and being Banksy before there was a Banksy.

The argument was that billboards are a thing that give you no choice but to look at, and as they proliferate we all tacitly accept the notion that you should not be able to just look around your town without people shouting at you to buy things. It becomes grossly offensive that your eyes, which you need to have open in order to walk or drive, are targeted everywhere you look by people who are renting space in our minds that they are not entitled to just because they own the 3 sqft where the foot of the billboard goes. That doesn’t mean that they own any real estate in John’s innocence of walking around with his eyes open.

20 years ago it seemed like John could mount a resistance to billboards proliferating, but now we are on the other side of that and because we accepted decades before the idea of the billboard our online line is now just billboards and everywhere you look you have no eye innocence anymore because somebody is trying to get in there at every chance.

John missing his flight on the way to Cleveland to buy his Suburban (RL130)

When John flew out to Massachusetts he had a ticket on Frontier, but he missed the flight because that is apparently a thing that starts to happen to you when you are in your 40s. He has never missed a flight before the last two years, and in the last two years he missed 3-4 flights, although because they close the gate 15 minutes earlier now. Frontier is a discount airline and they don’t partner with other airlines and they don’t fly to a lot of places. This was an experiment and John can see now what the problem is because they couldn’t get him on a Delta or Alaska flight.

Then the most amazing thing happened: Frontier airline did not have another flight coming in or going out for several hours and everyone who worked for Frontier in that airport disappeared. John went through security to get back out to the counter and there was no-one there. He asked the woman at the Jet Blue counter next door what to do in this situation, and she told him that they will come back in 4 hours and he could pound on that door, but no-one ever comes. John called them on the phone, and they told him that he had to resolve his problem at the airport, but no-one will be there until 5pm.

John has complained about having that same experience with United, one of the hugest airlines in the world, where if they are not actively doing something they are not paying that one person anymore to just stay at the counter all day in case somebody needs help. John has a horrifying anecdote about the time when something got messed up and he had the one flight out of Los Angeles with his family that day and he couldn’t find a single person in the whole airport (see TYFC).

This is where we are living now! You call up on the phone and the first thing the recording says is: ”You will probably have better luck if you go to our website!” The machine is pushing for efficiencies to direct people to the website because it is costing a lot of money to talk to people on the phone. But does it really? You are a billion dollar company! These are companies where the CEO is flying back and forth across the country in a giant airplane 6 times a day because at the corporate office in Minneapolis they are out of coffee filters and they have some in the warehouse in San Jose and he decides to just fly out there because he had to sharpen some pencils anyway in Minneapolis.

The cost-savings are then at the level where they can’t have real people anymore do any of the jobs where they are interacting with real people and all it takes is that this person has their headphones on and we have finally arrived at the moment where Supertrain is necessary. All the innumerable young people under 25 that John talked to on the entire trip across the country were all listening to Electronic Dance Music, nobody listens to guitars anymore. It is the one thing that unites us.

Merlin has to pee really bad

What happened was that John’s bags were already on the flight to Cleveland and he ended up buying tickets on Alaska and flew them to Boston and they didn’t get to Cleveland for three days and their bags were there, but John didn’t know about that when he was in the airport in Seattle because no-one told him that, he thought that maybe they were taken off the place because they used to threaten to do that if you didn’t get on the plane, and he was about to get on a flight to Boston and he was afraid that his bags were somewhere downstairs and he couldn’t find a Frontier employee.

John ran around the airport for an hour and he talked to somebody at Alaska and to someone down in the baggage area, but nobody could help him. He called the same Frontier number back and got a different woman who offered to try to call the baggage people, but nobody answered. It drives Merlin crazy that they act as if this has never happened before. How would they handle an actual emergency? It felt like an emergency to John! Doesn’t this happen a dozen times a week? Still, you are treated like a weird edge case!

John asked her where the bag was likely to be, but she just couldn’t say, she didn’t know, and there was nobody else he could leave a message for, he just had to call back later when the office is open. John was in a state of panic and anger and he had to go through security again to meet his family on the other side to get on a different airplane, and he was about to get on a plane and his bag was just in who-knows-where!

In a last-ditch effort he called the same number again and each time you have to go through the menus and it takes 5 minutes to get to a person. The third time he got to another woman who asked him for his ticket number and his baggage number, which was a first, and she told him that she could see that the bag had made it on the flight and was waiting in Cleveland. How did she have access to that information, while two of her co-workers… John could hear in voice the voice of experience. She had worked there for a while, and she helped John effortlessly.

It is same when you call AAA from the side of the road when you are running out of gas or have been in an accident. They are an amazing company and have saved John’s ass a million times, but when you call them there is a 1 in 4 chance that the person who answers the phone will actually be able to help you, the other three times you are talking to somebody who is reading from a script.

She even gave John the number of the baggage handlers in Cleveland and she was going to send an email to them right now, flagging those bags and John could call them and they will have his bags set aside. Why didn’t this happen an hour ago? Why wasn’t the first person he called able to do this? It turns out they were able, they just didn’t find the person with the juice who was willing to do it, and that is a crazy business model and it feels like it is nationwide any time you are dealing with a big company now. ”Sorry! You are on fire somewhere and your children are dying? Try turning the fire off and back on!”