It's the white space, stupid!

Or, how bad typography made me miss my goddamn flight.

So, last week was Thanksgiving and on Thanksgiving Day, I took a flight to Seattle. As you can see from this itinerary (sent by Expedia and viewed in my Mobile Me account), I was scheduled to arrive in Seattle at 11:52 am, giving me plenty of time to enjoy Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. Right? Wrong.

Instead of being in Seattle at 11:52 a.m., guess where I was? I was en route to Houston. TEXAS, FOR GOD'S SAKE. That fucking red state we all love to hate. And why, pray tell, was I on my way to the land of dog fighting and idiot presidents? Because whoever formatted this stupid itinerary email knew absolutely nothing about good typography. NADA. ZIP. ZILCH.

Do you see that first line up there, after "Fllght: Baltimore to Seattle". Yeah, that's it. Now, see where it lists the time? Right. What time jumps out at you? I don't know about you, but the first thing I see is the date and then "7:09 am". And so, like any other sleep deprived human being getting up before even the most ambitious of roosters to catch a stupid flight, I was like, okay, cool. My flight leaves at 7:09 am. Which means groovy, I have to leave the house by no later than 5:30 am to get to the airport.Which is like, cool. I can "sleep in" until 4:45 am.

When the alarm goes off, I sleepwalk for half an hour, skipping a shower all together because I'm afraid I'll be late. Will and I get in the car (MARC doesn't run on holidays) and as I'm sitting there looking at the itinerary on my iPhone:

I realize, due to the better use of white space on the iPhone layout, that SHIT. MY FLIGHT LEAVES AT 6:05. Which totally sucked because by this point, it was about 5:45 and we were still about 10 minutes from BWI.

So anyway, I missed my flight and had to take a later one that routed me through Houston instead of New Jersey. And got me to Seattle seven hours later.