Of course, this story’s been about twenty-eight years in the making. It starts with a two year old in Redding. This was back in the bad old days before airline deregulation, which meant that a couple airlines actually found it profitable to run jets into Redding.

Now, my dad worked at the airport, so I practically grew up there, conning travelers into buying me candy from the vending machines as soon as I could talk. And because I was always there, the airport employees adopted me and gave me free run of the place.

Maybe I was destined to work with computers, because a story that’s often told about me is that I once brought an airline’s computer down when I was barely two. I had found the keyboard open and decided to smash around on the keyboard, much like a two year old does. My mother tried to get me away from it, but the airline employees dissuaded her, saying they had locked the computer and I couldn’t do anything to hurt it.

And so they let me be until a customer came, and they found their computer unresponsive. It took a reboot to get things running again. Nobody was quite sure how I’d done it, but it had happened, just as if I had decided to show them just what I could do. I like to think it was because I was destined to work with the things for a living.

Of course, you might ask what this has to do with the flight tonight, although I’m sure the more shrewd of you has guessed.

The airline all those many years ago is the one I’m flying to Denver tonight — Frontier Airlines.

You bet I’m amused.