flight balance
some things are certain in life: death, taxes, and american eagle overbooking your flight. when we arrived at the check in desk for our flight from chicago to traverse city they were calling for 4 /more/ volunteers to accept overnight accomodations and $250 in travel vouchers. double for frequent fliers. that would be $2,000 for the four of us. now if the offer had gone to $500... anywho, we got on the plane and it was half empty. apparently, they were transporting some heavy (presumably profitable) baggage. they didn't explain what. we could only wonder what heavy things needed to be moved to the middle of nowhere so urgently. anyway, with all this heavy cargo in the only baggage compartment in the back of the plane the flight crew had to balance the plane by moving the largest passengers to the front of the plane, the smallest to the middle, and emptying the back. i was thinking maybe we should have taken the vouchers.