Have you ever noticed how, the better you get at delivering code, the more people want you to spend your time on airplanes instead? It's not like managers and administrators have any illusions about the commercial airplane as a work environment. They take lots of trips so they can look more important and collect frequent-flyer miles. The most they have to complete enroute is a trip expense sheet or yet another organizational chart. I think they send us on trips to limit our productivity — they have that much less stuff to manage.

Your basic manager needs a color laptop so s/he can tell the hearts from the spades while playing solitaire. When the battery runs down there's always those in-flight catalogues to buy useless gadgets from. You schlep around a gray-scale jobber with an extra battery pack, for that extra hour or three of serious work time. And your last battery still runs down right in the middle of a critical stretch of interactive code development.

Sure, the frequent-flyer miles are great — when you can take the time to spend them on a real vacation. Most of the time, however, I'd trade my mileage bonus for a 50-watt power outlet next to my tray table. Not to mention a bigger tray table. (The shaver outlets in the bathrooms don't cut it, not enough wattage. And don't try any others you might find — 400 Hz power is not good for your laptop power converter.) I'd even give something for a few more convenient recharging points in departure lounges.

Laptop designers are part of the conspiracy, along with the airlines and all those managers. Every time the chip designers lower the power demands of a chipset, or the battery folk pack in another few milliamp-hours, the designers pack in more goodies. Somehow, they always manage to quote a battery life of three hours — even if they have to run a 486 as a glorified 286 to get it. For those of us who cross oceans with tiresome regularity, two times three hours does not a productive trip make.

Yet somehow we endure. I like the trips out of Boston or Silicon Valley. The machines come out in droves as soon as the flight deck lifts their blackout. You can trade survival lore with all sorts of fellow techies, and see a sprinkling of the latest hardware actually being put to use. However widespread the conspiracy, we'll keep plugging away. At least until the person in front shoves a seat back into our screen. Their operatives are everywhere, you know.

P.J. Plauger

pjp@plauger.com