Since I got the new phone, I’ve been using a “yes we can” audio clip as my default ringtone. (You can hear the part I use from the latter part of this video.) I got the idea from reading about South American electoral campaigns, in which I gather it is common for campaigns to produce ringtones and for supporters to use them. If nothing else, “yes we can” got a lot of knowing laughs.

But in my mind that was always a pre-election ringtone. Now I need something more permanent, or at least different. Ideally, I’d like something mixing the optimistic and the cautious, probably political, but more appropriate for the next months, a period in which the poetry of campaigning ripens into to the prose of governance. The ideal song would not be too obnoxious to others, and would sound nice to me, lend itself to excerpting, and no doubt meet many other criteria I’m too tired today to formulate.

Got any suggestions?

Note: I have never ever liked the sound of Happy Days Are Here Again. That is Not An Option. I also rejected these stanzas from Talking Heads’ Don’t Worry About the Government because, much as I like the song, it’s too jangly for a ringtone I’ll hear over and over.

That song, incidentally, has always meant “Rosslyn, Va” to me for no obvious reason except it seems to fit….

We only have one car because we live near enough to campus to walk to work. But as the kids get older there are more and more occasions where they need to be schlepped in two different directions at the same time. So I think the idea of a car sharing service is wonderful and I’m delighted that it’s finally come to Miami.

Except that it sort of hasn’t.

In towns where Zipcar is really present, they have multiple locations — sometimes a plethora of locations. If your close location is out of cars, you go a bit further.

Will a car be available when I want one?

It’s natural for new members to worry that cars won’t be available when they want them. About half of all reservations are made the same day. We monitor utilization very closely, adding more cars as usage rises, keeping availability high. But the beauty of the system is that Zipcar members are entitled to use any of the cars in our fleet. So even if the Zipcar right around the corner isn’t available, you’ll still be able reserve one located only a few blocks away.

But in Miami, as far as I can tell, at present there’s only one location. Yes, it’s on the campus, and yes, it’s near my house, maybe 10-15 minutes walk and almost as long to drive there, as the relevant entrance is on the far side of the campus. But still.

As far as I can tell from the occasional online spot check, they have a grand total of … two cars. So far, they do seem to be available most of the time. But if neither of those two cars is available…I think the next closest car is in Gainesville! Where, incidentally, they have a lot more locations.

We’ll just have to see how it goes.

Delta put us in business class for the transatlantic portion of the journey, which was something. They also gave us a voucher to sit in the Air France Lounge while waiting for the flight, but when we got there the AF lady said it was only good for one person, so that rubbed a bit more salt in the wound and we went back out to the terminal.

We had plenty of time to sit in the terminal as our flight left about an hour and half late.

Fortunately, we had a long connection, so we still landed with plenty of time to make it.

Unfortunately, our second flight left about an hour late too, so it was even longer.

The bags were almost the last ones out, leading to some gallows humor for a while, but they made it.

We got home at about 11pm, after a door-to-door journey of just under 33 44 hours [posting while jetlagged I got the sign wrong on the time zone correction of 5 hours….]. Our neighbor was outside his house, welcomed us back, and said he’d hidden the newspapers (which restarted on the day we had planned to be home) for us, which was very nice of him. I’d been worried about the burglar invitation card. We have nice neighbors.

And he told me what Delta stands for: “Don’t Expect to Leave The Airport.”

We, family of four, arrived at Manchester Airport a good two and a half hours before our flight, which was due to depart at 11:55. There was a considerable queue even then, but it was making steady progress, and during the half hour or so it took us to get to the front of it, we endured being asked first basic security questions, then having our carry-on bags individually tagged with security flimsies, then having the usual pointless questions about who packed our bags, whether they ever escaped, and a command recitation of all our electrical gear. This concluded with ‘Mike’ the security guy taking our passports away and tapping stuff on a laptop for a long time. Then he, as he had promised, brought them back.

Eventually we made it to check-in. And this is where the real trouble started. I never like it when the ticket clerks stop looking bored and start looking like they are concentrating, and this fellow was definitely concentrating. For some reason, all the luggage tags were coming up in my son’s name, and only one boarding pass would print. He checked the printer. He did a tappety-tap routine on the keyboard. He consulted with the silver-haired gentleman on the left, and then the young lady on the right. The codes just were not right on the tickets and he didn’t know how to fix it. Sorry, he said at last, but you’ll have to go over there to the ticket desk.

It’s now about two hours before flight time, there’s no queue at the ticket desk, I’m holding a little piece of paper that Delta printed out for me during our outbound kerfuffle which shows our four return tickets as “Confirmed”. What can go wrong?

Lots.

The lady at the ticket counter was not wearing a name tag, just an Air France pin, so I cannot alas report her name, but she wasted little time in getting to the point: we didn’t have tickets. Or, rather, my 14 year old son had a ticket, but the other three e-tickets we were relying on to fly home with had been refunded. They were gone. And the plane was full anyway. It was clear from her manner that she was entirely open to the possibility that we had somehow tried to do something underhanded (pocket the money?) and then put one over Delta Airlines. We explained the saga of our outbound flight, and she put in a call to some office somewhere who were, she asserted, the only people who could figure out what had happened (she didn’t say ‘and make it right’). No one in the airport had the authority to do anything. So she called Fares. Long wait. No joy. She called Global Assistance. There was another long round of holding during which she told me to just wait. We were told that the flight would close an hour before departure, and the minutes continued to tick by while the anonymous lady, secure in her disempowerment, displayed no sign of urgency or even concern about our predicament. Our request to see a supervisor were at first not even acknowledged, then we were told there was none, only a manager, and he was off at the gate doing operations and thus unavailable. Take that, worm. (No she didn’t say it – in words.)

The hour came and went. Eventually – after it was too late to do us any good – the matter was kicked upstairs to “Jen” who apparently actually works for Delta instead of for whoever it is who runs the front line that Delta relies on to deal with customers. By the time matters got to Jen, it seemed to have dawned on Delta as a corporate entity that we had not in fact engaged in a scheme to embezzle, nor sold our tickets for a side jaunt to Fiji while abandoning a child to fly as an unaccompanied minor to a city where there would be no one to collect him. Jen was in fact very sympathetic. But at that point there was little she could do. Not only was it too late to get us on our original flight, but there were basically no other flights out of Manchester which would get us to Miami today. And even if there were such a flight, they did not as yet have whatever it was they needed to actually issue us a ticket. Jen went off to the back to make phone calls in the hope of resurrecting our tickets, a process that consumed more than another hour.

Meanwhile, I’m standing at the counter, resisting offers to go sit at the corner as there is no longer anyone waiting to be helped (no more flights, remember?). Every so often another member of staff comes out from the back with a progress report which consists of “she’s still on the phone.”

Eventually Jen is off the phone. It’s now going on to about 12:30. They are prepared to rebook us on a new flight once they have recreated our tickets. Alas, they haven’t yet actually succeeded in producing tickets for us, and the only flight left today would be from Paris at 5pm. And even if they could get us to Paris by 5, there are no seats on the flight. So we’re stuck. Bonus day in Manchester (with our bags, but without much in the way of clean laundry), they’ll provide a hotel, just hold on while they check if there are rooms…

Half an hour later there are rooms, comped meals, but as yet no tickets. I’m prepared to stay there until we get them or Hell freezes over, whichever comes first, but “Declan F.” the supervisor is now to hand, full of beautiful promises of tickets in the morning presented in an Irish accent, even an invocation of the Deity, and Caroline decides to believe him. So we check into the airport hotel, endure some more confusion (our names have become quite garbled in the transition), and have to be back at the ticket counter at 9am tomorrow.

… we are told that if we run like crazy to BA, two terminals over, we can catch a flight to London and connect from there to MAN. I’m given an itinerary, on which is scrawled “talk to Andrea” — she’s the person at BA who will know all about us.

We run, having to exit the security zone to get to the BA ticket counter. We make it. But there’s no Andrea. She’s going to be on our flight and is changing. Not that it matters. It seems that when charming Delta lady #2 gave me our new itinerary, she neglected to include a “FIM”, which is something you have to have if you have an e-ticket and are being moved to another airline; apparently paper ticket holders, that vanishing breed, don’t need them. No “FIM”, no ride.

So, leaving the family to hold the fort, I run back to the Delta counters, two terminals away (at least I don’t have to re-enter security). I find the last man standing. Between gasps, I tell our story. He vanishes to find a supervisor. In time he returns, and fills out a FIM, a ticket-sized little form that comes in quadruplicate, in a laborious manner that suggests he has never seen one before and is a bit suspicious about the use of ink-based writing implements. At last he is done.

Jen and Declan say that they think that the lady who first booked us on BA tried to rebook our e-ticket using some e-ticket related tie-up between Delta and BA. If she’d done it right, I would not have needed the fabulous FIM. But perhaps she didn’t do it quite right, and as a result the BA people couldn’t see the ticket, leading them to demand the paper FIM. The Delta guy who created the FIM worked off a record that had already been modified, so even if he knew what he was doing it might all have been doomed by then, and he may well not have known what he was doing either. In any case, their guess is that at some point along the way, our return tickets (well, three out of four anyway) were paid over to BA as well as our outgoing tickets. That was wrong, and Delta’s fault rather than ours. Certainly Occam’s razor suggests that the screwup happened in MIA when we were re-routed. But if you ask me, the system did not fail well.

Did I mention that tomorrow’s plane was 10 people over booked before the nice folks in Manchester added the four of us to the passenger list?

I have a lifetime gold card on American Airlines. They’re not perfect, but they have never canceled a ticket of mine with no warning or reason.. Delta was noticeably cheaper for this flight than American, and four times noticeably adds up to appreciably. But I think I’ll be willing to pay a significant premium to fly AA next time.

And I really have no idea what is going to happen tomorrow morning. (But hey, Delta, if you’re reading, how about business class?)

I just had a travel experience too, but it was not quite as nice. We are heading back to the US today, so perhaps this is a good time to tell the story of our outbound journey.

Our saga begins in Miami last week, on Tuesday afternoon. The four of us are waiting for the 4:15 pm Delta flight to Atlanta, which will connect us to our flight to Manchester, UK.

Gate staff announce that we have problems. Two of them. The first is that the radar is not working. The second is that the weather is bad in Atlanta, and there may be air traffic control issues. But not to worry, the necessary part is on its way on the next flight from Atlanta, and is expected to arrive at 5:30. Meanwhile, we are instructed to sit tight, there’s no need to rebook anything.

Being long-legged, travel-experienced, and able to do simple arithmetic, I am third in line to the counter as I figure our connection is doomed.

The very nice lady at the counter makes what seem to be Herculean efforts to rebook us. After much typing and phone calling (most of which involves trying to figure out the numbers for other airlines as all the numbers on her list appear to be out of date), she finds us an Air France option. What about our luggage, I ask? She obligingly begins the process to get our checked bags (family travel, ten days…) off the plane.

But Wait! The pilot himself comes out and announces that the radar is repaired. All is well. Except that it isn’t. The bad weather has now ripened into ATC delays and we can’t go anywhere for an hour. My connection seems utterly doomed.

The flight delay now being ATC rather than mechanical, the status of our flight has changed, and our new tickets — only one or two keypresses away from finality — are no longer possible since Delta won’t rebook us on a different carrier for delays which are not their fault.

Gloom. Doom. But Wait! After only a few minutes, the weather report has shifted again, and it’s ok to board for immediate departure. If we leave fast enough, we might — might — just make it. We board. Delta does a much better job than American of enforcing boarding order on Miami crowds, who are generally among the most unruly in the world, and boarding proceeds fairly well. Cabin crew explain that local mechanics were able to fix the old part, and all is well.

Except that once we are all in the plane, there’s a new problem. There’s a man wandering around in the aisles holding a boarding pass, but he doesn’t seem to have a seat. In due course we hear that what happened is that a family booked two kids in one seat, but that they’re too old to share; a “non-revenue” passenger is thus booted off the plane (a mother with a tiny baby, and then her husband), and the family in question re-seated. We’re now too late barring some sort of air-speed miracle.

And off we go to Atlanta. Did I say “to” Atlanta? Maybe “towards” Atlanta would be better. About 20 minutes into the flight, the Captain comes on the PA and says, in best Chuck Yeager right-stuff voice, that the radar has failed again, and we’re going to divert to Tampa. No, wait, he’s on the PA again a minute later, the company says we’re going back to Miami, because it is fractionally closer.

So we’re back in Miami. Cabin crew tell us that anyone who wishes to leave the plane here may do so, but if we leave we may not be allowed back on. The captain explains that the offending part is easy to replace, it’s just like a circuit board - you snap it in, test it, and then he’s fully confident in flying the plane. One Swedish couple leaves, saying they don’t trust the plane any more. There’s a trickle of departures. One person returns with coffee from Starbucks, and now we all want off. Cabin crew relent — we can get off, but the plane is going to Atlanta eventually, so we should take our stuff if we do in case we aren’t there when its ready.

We get off — our connection is history, and I’d like to know our options. And after all, it’s clearly mechanical now. Back in line, and in time we are told that if we run like crazy to BA, two terminals over, we can catch a flight to London and connect from there to MAN. I’m given an itinerary, on which is scrawled “talk to Andrea” — she’s the person at BA who will know all about us.

We run, having to exit the security zone to get to the BA ticket counter. We make it. But there’s no Andrea. She’s going to be on our flight and is changing. Not that it matters. It seems that when charming Delta lady #2 gave me our new itinerary, she neglected to include a “FIM”, which is something you have to have if you have an e-ticket and are being moved to another airline; apparently paper ticket holders, that vanishing breed, don’t need them. No “FIM”, no ride.

So, leaving the family to hold the fort, I run back to the Delta counters, two terminals away (at least I don’t have to re-enter security). I find the last man standing. Between gasps, I tell our story. He vanishes to find a supervisor. In time he returns, and fills out a FIM, a ticket-sized little form that comes in quadruplicate, in a laborious manner that suggests he has never seen one before and is a bit suspicious about the use of ink-based writing implements. At last he is done.

I begin to lumber off at speed back towards BA (the flight is leaving soon). “SIR! SIR!” the last man shouts, chasing me down the concourse. “Wait! I need my copy!” It seems one of the four copies is his. Unfortunately, he has no idea which one of the four is his, and decides after much scrutiny that he wants the original. I’m suspicious. What if BA want that one? Why doesn’t he take the last one, the accounting copy? But no, he insists, and I haven’t the heart to grab it from his hands. “Just come back if they want this one he says.” Right - the plane will be long gone by that point.

Lumber, lumber, wheeze.

It seems BA are happy with the three copies. It’s late by now and the queue at security is mercifully light. We make the plane. We make the connection in London.

Of course, the luggage doesn’t make it.

We arrive in Manchester and make our way to the luggage counter. The man there is very cheerful. Everything is going to be fine. Our bags have been spotted in London, they will put them on one of the may London-Manchester flights, and then deliver them to us forthwith. Just fill out these customs declaration forms, here’s a folder with a number to call and a web address to monitor their progress.

We stagger out towards our destination.

Time passes. Bags do not arrive.

That Wednesday evening I check the web site. According to it, our bags are not located.

I call BA. The central call center doesn’t know any more than the website.

I call the local Delta baggage number that I’ve pulled off the web. The line is busy for an hour, but when I finally get through, they’re nice too. Their guess — which is what I suspected — is that the bags went to Atlanta when our original flight finally departed. Once in Atlanta, having missed the original flight to MAN, they would sit there until the next flight; as there’s only one per day, that means Thursday.

Fair enough.

Thursday rolls around. The BA website’s information has not changed. I call them. They don’t know anything, but are very sure that my bags will turn up any moment. They do tell me that unaccompanied bags can take up to seven hours to clear customs, so I shouldn’t worry if my bags are not out early in the day. I call Delta. They agree to send someone round to the baggage area to look for the bags, and to call if they find them. No one calls.

I call again in the evening. It’s been more than seven hours since the Manchester landed, but no one has seen our bags.

Friday morning — we’re about to go out and buy a new wardrobe — I call Delta again. The Atlanta flight has just landed, and they propose to send someone round to look for our bags. They’ll call us if they find them. And, miracle of miracles, in about an hour they do call back and say they’ve located them all. The first delivery van won’t leave until noon, so we can’t expect the bags before early afternoon.

In fact, it’s quite late in the afternoon before we see them, but only three days or so after checking them, we have our bags again.

We get to use them for almost a week, and now we’re going to check them again…

A version of Friday’s McCain item is queued up in case I’m trapped in some airport motel somewhere.

Drive to Sanford, FL, today, then take the Auto Train overnight to Lorton, VA, then tomorrow morning drive to Chevy Chase, MD.

The end today for graduating students is really just a beginning of something bigger and longer and likely more important, which is why we call that ceremony coming up “Commencement”. The end today for me is just a turning of a wheel: I expect to do it all again next year.

But for one of my colleagues today, it was the final turn of this particular wheel. After 56 years on our faculty, here since September, 1951, Minnette Massey taught her last class today. It is very hard for me to imagine our University of Miami School of Law without this indomitable, outspoken, adorable, sometimes irascible, deeply decent, icon and pioneer of the Florida bar—one of the first women to do innumerable things in the Florida legal world. Minnette was Acting Dean for three years in the ’60s; I have to suspect sexism kept her from ever being appointed as ‘Dean’. She was a mentor to two generations of state legal luminaries, and the go-to person for local federal judges who needed special masters in complex cases, particularly before they had Magistrate Judges to do some of those jobs. Among Minnette’s many achievements is decades of work to fully integrate the bar, not least by mentoring students and young professionals. She’s not young, but no one who knows her thinks she had to retire. Minnette made it clear, however, that she didn’t want to be one of those people who waited until she had to be forced out: her leave-taking, like so much else in her life, would be her own decision on her own time on her own rules.

Everyone has a Minnette story or three. Here’s one of my earliest: back when I was in my first year of law teaching, with a full three months under my belt, I attended the AALS winter conference for the first time. I was teaching Civ Pro I in those days, so of course I went the to the meeting of the Civil Procedure Section, which happened to be a joint section meeting with the Admiralty section that year — the big case was Carnival Cruise Line, which was about the enforcement of forum selection clauses on cruise tickets. On the way into the room, I bumped into Minnette. I had planned to lurk in the back. Minnette steered me to the front row, greeting everyone in the room on the way, which left us craning our necks up at a panel on a raised dias. The talk began. The admiralty speaker was, from a civil procedure standpoint, somewhat obvious. And he was not brief. I was thinking how much better off I would have been in the back, but here I was in the front, with a senior colleague I didn’t know very well, she had said hello to everyone, we were very visible, there was no escape, we’d just have to look interested. “ISN’T THIS BORING?” Minnette said to me in a stage whisper loud enough to be heard next door. (I later learned that was her regular voice.) I wanted to crawl under my seat. But no one else seemed to mind. I suspect that everyone in the room just knew she was being herself: you always know where you stand with Minnette — she doesn’t play games, and no, she won’t suffer fools in silence, but you cannot be around her long without seeing how much she cares about people and about justice. Minnette doesn’t brag (much), so it takes somewhat longer to learn just how much she has given to others and to our law school. I will miss Minnette enormously — unless we are lucky and she again blazes a new trail, this time in retirement, and makes Emeritus status something that involves greater involvement in the law school community than has commonly been the case in the past.

Several of us snuck in at the end of her class this afternoon to join the standing ovation in Room 109, and formed an impromptu receiving line in the aisle as she left the room. When she came to Charlton Copeland, currently our most junior faculty member, she said, “It’s up to you now.”

(automated post set to go up at sundown…)

But the past is another country. And besides…

PS. If you were at that party, and by some miracle you happen to read this, get in touch.

If you need to reach me urgently…use the phone.

Or, there’s always my backup email address of myfirstname.mylastname@gmail.com, but I don’t check that as obsessively as I do the usual account.

Update (12/21): It’s working now.