I was pleased and surprised a few months ago when booking plane tickets for our 2006 family holiday visitation rites. The three-legged New York, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh loop was only $350 per passenger! Our families were happy, too, as they knew we were prepared to wish them the best from our cozy new couch if air travel didn’t work out.

While I was finding this ticket on Orbitz, MrLittlePants was looking up prices for one-way tickets on Air Tran, Jet Blue, and Air Appalachians (or whatever). The totals were about the same, and I argued that it was better to have a single ticket instead of three, that there was less room for error on our part. (As if one’s own mistakes were the ones to be worried about with air travel.)

So we went with the Delta + US Air itinerary despite our well-founded dislike for both airlines. I’d even been avoiding Orbitz since experiencing their appalling ability to not answer the phone in times of crisis a few years back.

With no cancelled flights and no delays of over an hour, our holiday travel sob story is not going to make the local news. But here it is anyway: we were simply not permitted to sit together on any of our three flights.

Excepting “security” shoe removal, this is the most unnecessary of travel indignities. There are seats on a plane. There is a system for reserving these seats. When we purchased our tickets most of the seats were unclaimed. Yet somehow I ended up alone, in the dreaded middle seat, for each miserable leg of the journey.

Don’t tell me I don’t know how to use the Orbitz Web site, or how to reserve seats. I know that shit. Our Delta seat requests were repeatedly rejected, but not immediately and each time with no e-mail notification from Orbitz. Our US Air requests did go through; we were to be in 13E and F like two peas in a pod, and were still listed there on the morning of the flight. But at the Pittsburgh airport our seats were gone without a trace (and any explanation). We had to “select” the last two middle seats on the airplane, and deal with the typical over-the-top awful attitude from the check-in staff. (“Nothing is in writing! Seats are not guaranteed! … [to other employee] I already told them that ‘nothing is in writing!’” Bitch.)

I am done with these barely flying relics that have been propped up by government subsidies long after the regulations that made them profitable were repealed. Old airlines must die. As for their employees, who for the most part have shown nothing but contempt for travelling middle-class Americans, they do not deserve their famous union benefits any more than the rest of us. What the hell is a “pension” anyway, in two thousand freaking seven?

Happy new year. Fly new airlines.