Reflections on an Odd Life

Early Adopting

I’m flying to Austin this week for a story and to go to two net/politics conferences. Since I love Continental and am on it back to IAH today, I thought I’d experiment with their paperless boarding pass. You can get a super-special barcode emailed to your PDA instead of printing a boarding pass. This morning I ran into two problems with it at DCA: First, the barcode wouldn’t load on my Blackberry, which meant I couldn’t get through security; then when it did load, security couldn’t find the special scanner they need to use to read the barcode. All-in-all, it held me up at security about ten minutes. Right now, the TSA guy said, they’re only seeing one or two paperless passengers a day so there’s not a high demand. My advice for now: Keep printing those boarding passes.