Funny/Interesting Happenings From My Trip…

If you follow me on Twitter or catch my occasional status updates on Facebook, you may have heard the live play-by-play of these incidents. But in case you missed them, here were a few interesting/funny stories that happened on my trip to Phoenix over the weekend.

Cops On A Plane – We land in Phoenix, get parked at the gate, and the captain announces this: “stay in your seats while our officials come on board and solve a delicate matter.”

Awesome. I love delicate matters in small confined places like an airplane!

Next thing we know, multiple cops come on board. I travel enough to know that cops don’t normally greet the arriving passengers…unless of course it is a “delicate matter”. A few cops stay towards the front and one goes to the back. Some lady gets up and walks out and then the cop starts “escorting” some guy in 20s off. As they are passing me, the guy asks the cop what this is all about, and the cop replies: “keep your mouth shut until we get out in the terminal.”

Apparently, this guy didn’t win the “best passenger of the flight” award. Sounds like he was going to get a spanking. Or a time-out for a few days in a small room with some dude named Vinny.

Obviously, the entire plane is intrigued by this “delicate matter”. As I’m walking off the plane, I see the captain and a stewardess talking, so I switch into “eavesdropping-regarding-delicate-matters” mode. As I walk by them, the stewardess finishes a sentence (I didn’t hear it), and the captain responds, “So at that moment it became a physical assault.”

Interesting.

Out in the terminal, there is some official talking to the lady (I knew he was official because he carried a walkie-talkie and his jacket said “official”). Then there were four cops surrounding the guy talking to him.

Honestly, I wanted to stick around and watch this unfold. Actually what I really wanted to do was take a picture, but I thought taking a picture of four cops with guns handling a “delicate matter” wasn’t such a smart idea.

I guess we’ll never know what happened with the “worst passenger of the flight”. Say hi to Vinny for us.

Twitter Backfired On Me – I was sitting in one of the general sessions at the conference with a couple of friends. There was another guy at the table we didn’t know who had his back to us but was fiddling with his iPhone most of the session. No big deal, except for the fact that he didn’t mute his phone off of clicking mode, so anytime he typed anything, it was loud and annoying.

So I post the following on Twitter: “Sitting in the AM session at #nsa09. Guy at our table is typing on his iPhone but apparently doesn’t know how to mute the clicking…wow”.

The mistake I made was to include the “#nsa09″ also known as a hash-tag in Twitter world. You use hash-tags to identify a category for your tweet. People at the conference all use the same hash-tag so you can easily search and read what others are saying about the event.

Of course, I didn’t really think this guy would stumble across my tweet. (You see where this is going don’t you?!)

Not five minutes go by before said iPhone guy turns around and says, “I turned off the clicking.”

OMG.

Well that was awkward.

At that moment I found myself in a pickle. What is the proper protocol for technology-based situations like this?! What do you say to a guy you’ve never met, who is sitting five feet from you, yet you offended via technology? Do you apologize in the medium in which the offense took place (via Twitter) or do you take the incident from virtual to real since he is sitting right there?

What did I do?

I decided to tell you about it on my blog.