Patrick, thanks as always for the column. Look forward to it each week. Sad, I know...

Love the idea of giving departure preference first to the heavies and then on down the line by headcount/type. Just makes plain sense from an economic sense as well as a practical one. The smaller planes have fewer bodies, which means fewer refunds to issue upon cancelations, which one would think would somehow make more financial sense. I am sure I am oversimplifying that, but I think if you're looking at 6 company aircraft in the lineup, and you get the three biggest out, there has to be some gain in there somewhere for everyone.

As another thought, I pose a wackier idea:

Offer business-class-only service through smaller regional portals for key domestic routes.

Just as a couple of the new carriers have done from JFK to Europe, offer a flight of business-only seating from a smaller, nearby regional airport. Like White Plains, instead of LGA/JFK for flights to the west coast. Price the flights such that you keep the tourists flying out of bigger fields, and basically offer a more consistent service for the business crowd that really, really needs to be their on time to keep our economy moving.

Perhaps it is the worst idea ever, but to me it seems like their has to be a way, especially in the Northeast, to utilize the existing smaller infrastructures better. I realize actual weather delays would still be weather delays, no matter where you're taking off from, but in terms of the problems of sheer volume, it seems like one way to redistribute the load a bit.

If only $50 was all it took to fix a PC.

My family has spent more than $300 on techs to try to fix problems with my mother's computer so she can simply use email and play word games on her desktop. If she lived closer, maybe we would have been able to find a cheaper way around it, but even after completely wiping her hard drive and re-intalling, the thing wouldn't work within days.

Granted, she's working off of a local wireless network that she understands how to fix about as well as she does how to perform cold fusion, but really, it should take more than that...

We spent months, off and on, trying to have things fixed for her so she could email her grandkids and do her minimal surfing...punctuated frequently by phone calls that start "It's not working again, I can't get online..."

After several heated debates within the family, I finally bought her an iBook. Six months later, she has not had a single problem. Not once. Doesn't lose the network. Doesn't give her the blue screen of death. Doesn't misbehave at all.

One story? Sure. But having worked in creative environments my entire career that have people on both Macs and PCs, my favorite statement from the IT guy sums it up: "I never learned that much about getting deep into Macs because I never had to...they just work. The PCs have always been the reason I have a full-time job."