Kicking a family off a flight because the kid kept repeating, "Byebye, plane!" is so far beyond the pale that it's not even worth discussing. The flight attendant was way out of line and should be disciplined accordingly. Period.

Yes, there are a lot of annoying parents and kids who make travelling hell. I've run into plenty of them on every mode of transportation. However, I'd bet the people who are bellyaching the loudest here on Salon.com have themselves annoyed the living crap out of others at one time or another. Everyone is bound to get on someone else's nerves at some point, so why don't we try going easy on each other? A little politeness, tolerance and forgiveness goes a long way; let she who is without sin cast the first stone and all that. Your little kids may annoy me, but my conversation with my seatmate or the game I'm playing my laptop may annoy you in turn. How about we give each other a break? Being stuffed in a flying sardine can is bad enough without declaring war on our fellow travellers.

Also, taking your kids on a plane is not the same thing as taking them to an expensive restaurant. This blindingly obvious fact has apparently been lost on some people here.

Finally, to the person who dislikes the noise level of travelling on a plane: get noise-cancelling headphones. They work wonders! And you can use them in the office, too, to tune out all your annoying coworkers.

... the IT department announced a few years back that, to save server space, it would arbitrarily delete email that was more than a year old unless it was archived. This doesn't sound all that bad at first glance, but it ended up being a royal pain in the neck.

First, said company used Lotus Notes, whose email client had the worst user interface of any then on the market. (I haven't worked at this company for several years and thankfully haven't used Notes since then, so some other email client may now have this dubious honor.) Its email archiving was not exactly intuitive. Second, the volume of work-related email was such that sorting and archiving it would take up a significant chunk of your day -- time that could have been spent, well, actually doing work. Finally, despite your best efforts, you'd inevitably forget to archive some crucial email message that you'd need right after it was deleted. Or you'd forget where you stored it, and have to hunt through your archives.

The money this company saved by not springing for additional email storage was probably wasted a thousand times over in lost productivity.

Anything a Republican politician does is fine, no matter how heinous, disgusting, illegal, or illicit. God is on the side of the Republican Party, you see, and they're the party of Good. Whatever a Republican does is therefore done in the service of Good and must be forgiven because Forgiveness is the Lord.

The only unforgivable sin is supporting something that Democrats believe in. The Democrats are Evil, no matter how virtuous, moral and upstanding any of them appear to be. They're just faking it. God is going to Get Them come Judgement Day, with none of this namby-pamby love and forgiveness nonsense.

Vitter is A-OK because he's God's Boy and is standing firm against evil homosexuals who take marriage seriously (unlike him) and just want to be good family men (again, unlike him). It's moral relativism, Republican style. Anything whatsoever that a Republican politician does is moral. Didn't you all realize that?

A die-hard social conservative is caught consorting with high-priced prostitutes ... and the only surprise at this point is that they're FEMALE prostitutes!

We finally broke down and got whole-house AC this year. My husband suffers from hay fever and has been feeling much better because the pollen is being filtered out of the air when we run the AC.

The longer you wait, the more her Mom's presence will seem like the new normal.

Talk to the subletter when Mom's not around and try to find out what's going on. Ask her about her illness -- if it's really as serious as her Mom says, what should you do if she suddenly gets sick? What are her plans for the summer? And, finally, how long is her Mom planning to stay with her?

If daughter tells you Mom's visit has a firm end date in the near future, wait her out. If daughter tells you that Mom is planning to stay longer or is vague about when she's leaving, go with the sublet agreement Cary mentioned. It may even be possible that your subletter would like her Mom to go home but doesn't feel up to a confrontation about it; in that case, the two of you will be natural allies.

However, be aware that Mom may have different ideas about how long she's staying than her daughter does. If the subletter tells you that her Mom is, say, definitely leaving on Wednesday but Mom's still around on Friday, go official on them as Cary suggested.

Also, if you're going to be out of town for the weekend, lock up all your stuff in a bedroom, a closet, or in some other securable area.