Dad Brog (#158): I’m not ready for anything prefaced by “adult”

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I’m in the middle of one of those weekends where I’ve sparsely had any time for myself; even more so than usual.  The kids are still in this weird adjustment period of daylight savings as well as simply adapting to their general schedules, and this particular morning, they were up at 7 am, not long after I had gotten up to begin my day, and I was completely unprepared as far as having breakfast ready, but it didn’t matter that my kids were ready to begin their day.

Instead of a 60-90 minute quiet time reprieve in the middle of the day, this was a day in which there were two concurrent birthday parties happening at the same time, so mythical wife and I decided to divide and conquer and take each kid to a different party, in different parts of town.  I watched #2 plow through three slices of pizza, a ridiculously gargantuan slice of cake, and a bowl of dipping dots, all while playing a bunch of really shitty games at Chuck-E-Cheese where kids are lucky to get maybe 15 seconds of game time before the credits expire and I can’t imagine paying actual money for gaming time with such absurdly unfavorable math, and I felt fortunate to be on a timed party free-play.

Needless to say, with the kids down, instead of relaxing, I found myself playing catch-up on things that I didn’t get to do on a typical Saturday, which meant hopping on the treadmill to get some exercise, while simultaneously doing my daily Duolingo that I typically prefer to do early in the morning before everyone else is really up.  And then I decided to go run some errands while some stores were still open, all for the sake of not having to them during Sunday, when I would inevitably have to have a kid in tow while trying to do them, and by the time I’m sitting here it’s past ten, and I don’t feel like I have adequate time to really watch something from my endless list of crap that I want to watch, so I bring myself to sit here to write in my brog that nobody knows exists.

But hey, at least I got to go be on top of the drop of Vince Gilligan’s Pluribus, and watched the first two episodes on Friday night, and the show was as good as I would have hoped it would be, so that’s something remotely positive amidst feeling buried by life and looking out the metaphorical window of the world to see the United States completely at peace with itself forcibly starving its own citizens but this post wasn’t meant to be political as much as I just wanted to take that dig in lieu of making a dedicated post about how fucked America is.

However, getting to the point of this post, the biggest occurrence to happen over this weekend was undoubtedly the fact that #1 lost her first tooth, and I’m just not ready for this at all.  Because when it comes to teeth, most everyone knows that the vernacular for them are baby teeth, and when they fall out, they’re supplanted by your adult teeth, and I am so not fucking ready to hear the word “adult” at all, associated with my five-year old child.

It’s crazy, it was just like a few weeks ago in which #1 pointed out to mythical wife and I that she had a wiggly tooth, and we were both having the same reaction about how, wtf has all this time flown by to where our kid is now having her baby teeth starting to fall out.  A cursory internet search confirms that five is a fairly common age for the first teeth to begin falling out, and I have memories of my own childhood of when I had my first loose tooth, where my dad tied a piece of floss around it before yanking it out, and the vague memory of feeling like I’d been punched in the mouth, with a similar result of there being a lot of blood.

But as unfortunate as it was that I couldn’t be there when it happened, there wasn’t really much blood when #1’s first tooth came out.  I had literally just taken her to the dentist just says prior, and I saw the X-rays showing the adult teeth rapidly growing underneath and how to anticipate the first tooth to come out soon, and it was still a harrowing moment seeing those photographs of all these adult teeth starting to grow beneath the baby ones, and again I’m struggling to hear the word adult at all when it comes to my kid, because she’s still just five freaking years old.

Inevitably, like the Korean blood in her body demands, questions about the Tooth Fairy and the whole concept of getting money for teeth came up pretty immediately, and now I’ve got to start ponying up cash to put under her pillow and hope to not wake her along the way.  Plus there’s the whole question of just how much money to give for a tooth; when I was a kid, it was $2 a tooth, but my parents quashed the whole mythos of the Tooth Fairy real quick and just gave me cashmoney on the spot after an extraction.

It’s going to be a tricky next few years, given the fact that I have two kids of close age who will be inevitably be periodically dropping teef throughout the next 8-9 years, and me having to keep up with needing adequate cash to fund all these damn teef and keep up with inflation.

But heaven help me that there are anything at all in my little girls’ bodies that are considered adult, even if they’re pretty much right on schedule when it comes to the first teeth falling out.  They’re always going to be babies to me.

Real talk: my head hurts

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t know why I feel like I should write about this, especially since it’s coming from a place of fear and apprehension of the worst, but I guess that if things do go tits up in regards to this, there’s a part of me that I guess wants to chronicle it for the sake of chronicling all of the things in my life that might be a big deal, whether or not they’re bad or good.

But for the last few days, I’ve had a pain in my head, and not the metaphorical kind that comes from a lifestyle of being stressed all the time, compounded with varying degrees of depression and anxiety.  Like an actual dull rolling ache that pulses along the back left part of my skull.  It’s not the worst pain in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but because it kind of throbs and rolls through when it happens, it sometimes catches me off guard and causes me to really wince or if I’m in the midst of doing something, causing an interruption.

It kind of hurts to the touch, but only the first time, and subsequent rubbings of the area don’t really hurt, so I’m not entirely sure if it’s a topical thing or if it’s something going on underneath the skin.

I’m aware that this could be many different things, many of which are no real big deal at all, but me being me, my mind tends to go towards the worst possible scenarios, and given what my family has been through over the last few years as far as people having to deal with different things, I have to ask myself, and hope that it’s not my turn for something bad to happen to.

Needless to say, old single childless me would have just continued to gut it out longer and waited for it to get worse before acting on it, but the married dad me of today doesn’t want to run the risk of it being something that could’ve been prevented from getting worse if it’s something that I can get in front of.  It’s only been a few days, where I had just hoped it was maybe daylight savings-related old man body adjusting to the time change, or just the elevated level of stress in which I’ve been running on, on account of the issues I’m dealing with, with my own dad, as well as a high workload at work, on top of being an active and hands-on dad dealing with my own kids on the regular. 

Unfortunately, the occurrences of the occasional pulsing aches has not really subsided, so I reached out to my doctor for their opinion, and we’ll go from there.  What I’m hoping is that I’m just dealing with excessive stress, compounded with likely blood pressure elevation that I’ve learned runs in my family, and that I just need to chill the fuck out more often than I do, and that it’s not like some aneurism or blood clot or tumor risk I’m running and that I need immediate surgery and utilization of shitty American health care insurance to fuck my family over for the next few years.

However, the point remains that it does have me a little nervous about what it could be, and I’m eagerly awaiting response from my doctor, so I can have some piece of mind of what needs to come next.  It’s the waiting and the unknowns that truly are the killers, but in spite of it all, I do pat myself on the back for breaking old habits and mentalities and just trying to gut things out and hope they go away.  Having one’s own family definitely helps with that, and understanding that my life isn’t just my life, so much as it belongs to others whom I wish to be around for as long as I can.

Daylight Savings blows, 2025 edition

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

At around 5:20 am, I heard #1 outside my bedroom door, panicking in the dark about how she couldn’t find her sister.  The fact that my child was out of her room in the pitch black of the morning was enough to get me to pop out of my bed, but upon hearing that my other child was allegedly missing immediately put me into a state of panic myself.

Worse off, for some reason there was a light on in my sunroom, which I knew wasn’t the case when I went to bed because I’m neurotic and always make sure all lights are off prior to going upstairs; I would later discover that there was a power surge during the night, and since that room’s lights are controlled via remote control, it light switch is usually in the on position permanently, and stuff like power surges or outages usually result in lights coming on upon reconnection.  However, I didn’t know this, and it immediately put the fear of god into me that #2 was in some sort of danger.

I walked #1 back into their (we let them sleep in the same room on weekends sometimes, on the unfolded futon) room to have her wait for me while I would investigate downstairs, but upon entering the room, there’s #2 snuggled up like a little taquito on the futon already, still sleeping.  Relieved, I set #1 back onto the futon as well, covered her, gave her a kiss on the head, reminded her that it was the middle of the night and hope she bought it, and implored her to go back to sleep; she didn’t need to know her circadian rhythm was correct at thinking it should be 6:20 am, when she’s normally up for school on weekdays, because obviously I really wanted to get some more fucking sleep.

Nope, by 5:30 am, I can hear activity on the baby monitor, both girls are now awake, and it’s only a matter of seconds before I hear doors opening and shutting, and #1 is marching back into my bedroom, with moments later, #2 freaking out in the darkness of the hallway, wondering where everyone is.  I bring them both into the master, and get them into our bed, in between mama and dada, hoping they might actually go the fuck back to sleep for a little bit longer.

Naturally, that doesn’t happen, and by 5:40, I give up, get out of bed, usher the kids downstairs, and concede that the day is now beginning.

The thing is, I actually had a tentative plan about this morning, because I figured there would be some monkey business with the time change, and the chances of me having breakfast ready for awakening kids wasn’t going to be high, which was that we were definitely, going to go to Waffle House because who doesn’t love Waffle House?

It’s just I was not anticipating them to be getting up within the 5 o’clock hour, but here we were.

It actually wasn’t that terrible, I got them dressed and we were at Waffle House by like 6:30 adjusted time, and I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that we were not the only customers there.  They were definitely the only kids there, and a part of me was hoping to have seen some other parents under similar circumstances having the same plan that I did, but alas, it was just me who was carting my kids out at this ungodly bullshit adjusted time.

But the point remains, daylight savings remains the antichrist, and it’s abundantly clear that the people in the BC years who came up with the idea were a bunch of selfish fucks who either did not have children, or had the privilege or were bad parents enough to not take into consideration the effects of the time change on parents who did have children.  And I hate them for all eternity and hope their descendants are wholly unimpressive pleebs who have nagging gastrointestinal issues.

I like to imagine that if the originators of daylight savings actually had any children, that they were obligated to actually care for, ranging from ages 0-7 years of age, they would think twice about the whole concept of rolling clocks back and fucking with their circadian rhythms and suddenly having to deal with them at ridiculously early AM hours, while people under most other circumstances would still be getting to sleep, regardless of what hour it actually was.

And as I’ve said before, I didn’t care much for it prior to children, but now that I do have kids, I fucking loathe it, and I like to think I’m pretty serious about sticking to my claim that I’d vote for absolutely anyone who prioritized the abolishment of this bullshit antiquated concept, including, those Somali pirates.

The complaining will likely happen yearly, until either this bullshit program is killed off, or my kids get to the age where they want to sleep in, and therefore my entire house can actually benefit from the rollback instead of bemoaning it.  Not going to bet on the former, though.

I can’t ever be mad about Freddie Freeman

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Trust me, bro: Freddie Freeman becomes the only player in MLB history to have more than one walk-off homerun in the World Series.  That’s it.

When the day is over, I couldn’t give two shits over who wins the World Series.  Obviously, I would prefer it to be the Blue Jays, but as I’ve said before, the Dodgers are inevitable, and prior to the start of the series, I had flippantly predicted that it would be the Dodgers in five, and so far, my prediction is still in play.

Yoshinobu Yamamoto is pitching like a man possessed, with two straight complete games, playing like a man who was worth a $330M contract, and the golden boy Shohei Ohtani seems to have figured out playoff baseball, and over his last few games, has been hitting home runs in every single one and OPSing like 5.000 or so it feels.

Oh and make no mistake, the MLB media machine and all of its stage-six clingers are absolutely all the fuck over this Japanese invasion, and it’s getting to a point where I feel like I’m going to resent MLB so much I’d swear it off, by just how much weeb-worship they’re jizzing all over the internet like they’re watering a garden with a hose.  I get it, Yamamoto and Ohtani are playing phenomenally right now, but it’s not like nobody else in the history of Major League Baseball has ever caught fire in the midst of the playoffs and carried their teams to some hot streaks.

But MLB media has become more weeby than 76 anime conventions put together and they just can’t help themselves with how much spooging they’re doing over every little thing a Japanese player does, and there’s no length too great to stretch out in order to make all sorts of convoluted stats or combination of stats to fit the narrative that only Shohei Ohtani is the only person in history to accomplish, so they can cliché-ly end with “that’s it.”

Thankfully, last night was a reminder that there are stalwart baseball players in existence that aren’t from glorious Nippon, and that the Dodgers true captain is the one who bailed them out of an 18-inning purgatory with once again, calling game in the most dramatic of fashions, the walk-off home run.

Freddie Freeman became the ONLY PLAYER in MLB HISTORY to have multiple walk-off home runs in the World Series, now having done it in 2025 a year removed from when he walked off the Yankees last year. 

That’s it.

And I know that I’m rooting against the Dodgers just like the the vast majority of the world outside of Los Angeles and entire country of Japan, but there is no part of me that is capable of hating Freddie Freeman, even if he is on the team.  I am happy for his second walk-off homer in the World Series, and I’m happy for his family to have been able to witness him once again bail the entire team out and be Mr. Hero, the only one genuinely worthy of such, on a roster full of guys that MLB really wants to be Mr. Hero instead.

Despite the fact that he plays for the Dodgers, an act of heroism by Freddie Freeman, at least to me, is still kind of a big middle finger to MLB, their media machine and all Dodgers fans that overlook his own greatness because they’re all too busy drooling over Ohtani or Yamamoto or even Roki for no other reason than that they’re shiny Japanese imports.

Lest everyone forgets, Freddie, and Mookie Betts, were guys who had their own championship rings before last year, and knew how to win without a $1B payroll and malleable management to make a cultural shift to cater to players, and it’s not a far stretch to say that without their leadership and guidance, they wouldn’t have won last year, where Ohtani had to be carried across the finish line by Freddie Freeman who went gangbusters in mauling the Yankees all series long.

I still want the Dodgers to lose in the end, which doesn’t really seem like a likely possibility, but I’m at peace if Freddie Freeman snaps out of his general postseason underperformance, and it subsequently helps the Dodgers win, because like I said, it’s impossible for me to be mad about anything that Freddie Freeman does, because he’s just that good of a human being that even him playing on the most reviled of teams doesn’t change my appreciation of him one bit.

Praise for NXT Halloween Havoc

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Over the last few year and change, there’s been a lot of hullabaloo surrounding the state of the WWE following the company’s sale and eventual restructuring into being an arm of their new parent company TKO.  Questionable decision making as far as staffing, personnel and eventual booking choices, but more primarily how they’re killing the WWE with their flagrant price gauging, cost increases across the board on tickets, merch, and various other microtransactions, masterfully finding each and every nickel and dime to bilk out of wrestling fans.

I often said to my friends that I didn’t really feel impacted by much of it, because I had little interest in going to any live events; I’d been to Wrestlemania twice now, and numerous other ppvs when they were still called ppvs, and at the prices of tickets these days, I would way rather just watch from the comfort of my own home.  Over the summer, I went to NXT’s Great American Bash, solely based on the fact that it was at my favorite venue (Center Stage), but after paying $130 for almost literally the last row of the venue, only to be seated next to 1.75x of humanity, I almost want to swear off going to WWE shows outright, fearing a similar fate the next time I plunk down grown up money just to be in attendance.

Additionally, I would say to my friends that as long as TKO doesn’t fuck around with my viewing experience, then I don’t really have many qualms with how they’re operating the company.  But over the last few months, WWE PLEs have all been shifted over to ESPN++ to some new tier that I can’t get access too without actually having to pay money for it, so I’ve missed the last two major events.  NXT remains on CW which I don’t have access to in a streaming capacity, and I haven’t seen an episode of Smackdown in years because I don’t have the means to watch whatever channel they’re on now.  RAW on Netflix is still available to me, but the production of the show is really wonky and weird, and it’s hard to stay engaged when they’re being so flagrant with performing at 60% so that they can save their ammo for the next PLE.

In other words, TKO has been fucking around with the viewing experience, and it definitely sucks as a fan.  Not knowing what shows are on what platform, if I can even watch them or not, and if and when I can, there being paywalls in order to see things as simply as storyline promo packages and performer entrances.  Obviously, I’m not going to swear off wrestling by any stretch of the imagination, but I am entitled to air out my grievances about the state of the WWE when I find their operational conduct to be annoying.

All that said, I wanted to chirp a little bit about how much of a breath of fresh air NXT’s Halloween Havoc felt like, because it definitely felt like a positive reprieve from the suffocating corporate cloud that the main roster WWE has been feeling like over the last year.

It was on Peacock, which had the occasional commercial break here and there, but the show as a whole had a banger of main song that they spammed throughout the evening, and the replay showed all the promo packages, which helped a viewer like me who can’t actually watch NXT to the minute, to catch up with what to expect in the show.  The show itself was at a smaller venue in a part of Arizona that I’d never even heard of, but it looked like the type of show that I’d have definitely been interested in going to, because it wasn’t a mega arena, and it wasn’t in a clusterfuck of a place like Atlanta, and looked like a fun place to watch wrestling.

And of course, the matches were all pretty entertaining.  Call me crazy, but sometimes some matches don’t really have to have a convoluted storyline behind them, and you can really just take a bunch of entertaining workers and throw them in a match together to great effect, and that’s how I felt with the opening match of Je’Von Evans and Leon Slater vs. La Parka* and Mr. Iguana.  No real story, just an NXT guy teamed with a TNA guy against two AAA guys, and they tore the house down to open the show.

*What’s funny is that on this exact date, there was a Lucha show in Atlanta that advertised La Parka on the card, so I’m amused by the fact that one of these shows got the actual current La Parka, while the other got an imposter, or they’re up to like La Parka IV or V at this point, like the Villanos, but whomever NXT had that night was wayyyy too talented of a La Parka than what fans of his from WCW might have remembered.  Motherfucker was doing picture perfect Asai moonsaults out of the ring and press slams into gutbusters, a far cry from the dumpy fat luchador in WCW that swung a chair and strutted his way to the bank.

Mariah May Blake Monroe got to flex a little bit of her actual wrestling skill in her win against Zaria for the women’s North American title, and I’m pleased that she’s allowed to do some of the work that elevated her so much in AEW, and I really enjoyed Ethan Page’s match against El Hijo de Dr. Wagner, and despite being the heel, Vic Joseph’s commentary about how much of a fighting champion Page has been, it’s hard to not respect the work the man puts into the business.  But the match had some really brutal spots, and it was enjoyable from start to finish.

The Hardy Boyz vs. Darkstate was an entertaining disaster, even if I don’t believe in all at the long-term viability of Darkstate.  They’re like a Temu-grade Shield, with less charisma, but given the fact that the Hardyz are still TNA guys, it seemed likely that they were going to have give those NXT blets back sooner rather than later.

Honestly, it’s not that the Ricky Saints vs. Trick Williams match was necessarily bad, it’s just that other matches on the card were more entertaining and compelling, that theirs just kind of didn’t stand out in comparison.  Both are talented workers, but in the context of the evening their fairly vanilla wrestling match just wasn’t as exciting as all of the matches that preceded it.  Plus, the finish seemed really wonky and almost rushed, and when it was over, I was just kind of like, that’s it?

But let’s really talk about Tatum Paxley’s ascension to the top of the mountain, beating Jacy Jayne for the NXT Women’s championship.  Firstly, I do want to give my flowers to Jayne for a respectable run with the top prize; I know her win was a surprise, considering she beat the aura-filled Stephanie Vaquer, but I didn’t hate it, because she was a solid hand that was easily the most talented worker of Toxic Attraction, and I always like seeing hard workers get rewarded with solid pushes.

However that being said, the same could very easily be said about Tatum Paxley, whom I get some Liv Morgan-like, love of the game vibes from, and like Jayne, her hard work has been noticeable and palpable over the course of the last 12+ months, and I’m pleased to see her get this honor of getting to be the women’s champion.  I think she’s more athletic than Liv ever has been and works pretty cleanly in spite of her general level of experience, but her character work and portrayal of the weird but talented goth girl seems to have captured the audience, and I’d be lying if I didn’t stop and let the look linger on her; she’s cute as hell.

But when she won the title, I definitely got those similar vibes to her championship that I felt when Liv won the women’s title for the first time, or when Iyo won the World championship the last time; it was a sense of satisfaction that a hard worker was getting their justly reward.

Overall, Halloween Havoc was a breath of fresh air of how good the WWE is capable of operating in a manner that I wish were the norm all throughout the company, and not just in NXT.  It kind of reminds me of that period between 2016-2017 where NXT was just firing on all cylinders so well that it was clear that they were the best brand in the company.  Look forward to the next NXT event, that is until they’re spontaneously sold off to start showing on like Tubi or Fubo or some other rando platform.

Dad Brog (#157): the shittiest morning possible

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Full disclosure, I don’t write this with any sort of anger or festering rage about the morning that I had, but more with astonishment that such a morning could have been had that I have no other option than to write about it, primarily to one day be able to recall this to embarrass the ever-living snot out of my child.

But long story short, one of my kids absolutely pooped all over themselves this morning while sleeping, and naturally it was me who discovered it, me who had to deal with it, and me who had to clean everything up.

For real though, I wasn’t mad about it at all, because something like this happening, the first question was, and should be, is everything okay?  The answer was quickly discovered to be yes, but it was rather a child who was too afraid of monsters in the dark to get out of bed to take care of their bowels, probably compounded on top of being in a state of deep sleep, and instead just soiled their bed and slept in it.

Regardless, given the fact that on any given morning, cleaning up a ton of poop isn’t typically a part of the routine, I had to pivot and quickly resign myself to the fact that the morning was going to be delayed, and that the recovery of my child was priority.  I took them into my walk-in shower to use the flexible showerhead to give them a nice warm cleansing, got them dressed and started with breakfast before I had to go back upstairs to really survey the damage and get to work.

White people, would be quick to declare the sheets and comforter a complete loss at this point, but me, not being white, and knowing that I can rescue these things on account of the fact that I’m not a pussy and afraid to get children’s poop on my hands, took the soiled sheets also into the walk-in shower and gave them some good scrubs, and pretty much salvaged them.  I still need to give them a through spin through the washing machine, but by the day’s end, they should be ready to be back on my kid’s bed as if there was no Armageddon in the first place.

I coached my child that they should never be afraid to call out for me on the monitor in the middle of the night if they have to go potty, and that under no circumstances will I ever be mad at them for waking me up in the middle of the night to take care of business.  Quite the contrary, I would be super stoked and happy, and I mimicked the groggy, but rejoiceful reaction I would give them should they ever take my up on the offer, and hopefully they will in the future to avoid such similar mornings.

But good lord almighty, what a nightmare scenario of a morning to encounter.  I still feel like I can smell it in my brain to this very moment.  Truly a literal, top-3 shittiest mornings of all-time in my parenting career; and honestly I’m hard pressed to even recall two other poop nightmare mornings to round out a top-3, which means this might really have been the shittiest morning of all time, by default.

I look forward to this post circling back eventually on my On This Day plug-in, so I can troll remind them of the bullshit they put me through when they were but literal babies when they’re older, so they can really appreciate the kind of dad that I’m trying to be.

I’m sure this is going to go over well not

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

SFGate: Southwest Airlines unveils new boarding policy, where passengers board in order of window seats first, middle seats, and aisle seats last

At this point, I really should start implementing a tag on my brog for Southwest, because they keep doing things that I keep finding brog-worthy and then I actually write about them, as if I’m chronicling their gradual downward spiral.  They just can’t keep doing questionable things, and I feel like that at the corporate level, there’s some obnoxious visionary who is trying way too hard to put their stamp on the company by making all these questionable choices for really no other reason than the sake of making them, and probably gets off on words like “disrupting” and “aviation space.”

But circling back to this new boarding process, where windows get on first, and aisles get on last, I just feel like this is something that seems destined to fail, on account of people just not adhering to the rule, and the amount of outcry it’s inevitably going to cause because it’s just not working the way SWA corporate envisioned it working.

It doesn’t matter what airline it is, in the hierarchy of passengers, middle seat is supposed to be the very bottom of the pecking order.  Even in old Southwest internal lexicon such a notion was commonplace, where flight attendants would even make tongue-in-cheek jokes about the old boarding process, where Group A stood for Anywhere, as in you can sit anywhere you want, Group B stood for Back of the plane, because that’s where all the remaining good seats are, and Group C stood for Center seat, because that’s all that’s going to be left for you bottom feeders.

Deliberately creating a policy where the positions are forcefully switched is not going to go over well at all, because not only are passengers who prefer aisles not going to handle being considered bottom-tier very well, imagine the people who hate window seats but like getting on the aircrafts as soon as possible having to deal with this new Sophie’s Choice; status vs. preference vs. potential cost differences.  And middle seats still lose, because although their tier might be considered elevated over aisle-seat losers, when the flight takes off, they’re still parked in the middle seat, most likely squished between two fat fucks because Americans are always going to be a bunch of fat fucks.

My favorite part about this whole announcement was this quote:

If queuing isn’t good, boarding isn’t good,” Lisa Hingson, managing director of innovation, told the Wall Street Journal. “So we spent a lot of time studying queuing.”

Studying queueing, lmao.  There’s nothing to study when it comes to queueing, because a study doesn’t account for the infinite variable that is there are a few billion asshole airline passengers in the world, and there’s no finite way to factor for some flights having none of them on any given flight, or some having many of them.

Sure, there are plenty of people that will be willing to adhere and give the system a chance, but then there are always, always going to be just a few of them that have zero intention of sticking to the plan, and nothing short of the gate agent enforcing the queue and stopping any and all violators from boarding too early, this is going to fail 100% of the time.  Those gate agents probably don’t get paid enough nor do they give enough fucks to even try to stop asshole passengers from jumping in whenever they want and ruining the process for the entire flight, and departure times and delays are inevitably going to get wrecked by this, and in the grand spectrum calculus of airline operations, it’s only a matter of time before this shitty idea is quietly scrapped and they return to more traditional, fall-in-line boarding process.

Somewhere else in this whole thing, I have to be curious on how this is going to impact the whole, large passenger policy that Southwest used to be applauded for in having, where large passengers had the possibility of getting a free adjacent seat if the flight had availability.  If there are going to be price tiers in accordance to boarding priority, surely there will be new ways for people to try and game the system in order to save a few bucks, and I have to wonder if SWA people thought this through enough to merge with existing policies in place, unless said policies were on the chopping block for restructure in order to not lose money on these new potential pricing tiers.

Either way, I can’t imagine that this is going to end well.  I like to imagine that when this shit rolls out, it won’t take more than the first flight, before passengers, by virtue of being selfish dicks or just plain ignorance, queues up out of order, isn’t stopped at the gate, and boards when they shouldn’t have.  They sit down in an aisle, take up overhead space with their carry-on, and later on in the boarding, someone who’s a middle seat passenger is denied overhead space, and/or is jilted over having to wait for the prior aisle-seat dick to get out of the way so they can board, and already the flight experience is stained.

Before we know it, a fight breaks out, and 12 people record it on their phones from differing angles, and Southwest is back in the news again for another passenger fight, and absolutely nothing has changed at all.

gg Southwest, look forward to the next bonehead disruptor idea y’all come up with next.