Gadgets to go

People love their gadgets. But business travelers love them even more. Perhaps too much. So when the gadgets don’t love us back, things can get ugly.

Once, a colleague’s iPod battery life ended hours before our flight did, and he reacted with such emotion that I wished someone made “Sorry for your battery loss” sympathy cards.

Another time, a professionally dressed woman dove headfirst into an airport restaurant’s garbage searching for her lost BlackBerry through half-eaten sandwiches and Kung Pao chicken.

I’ve also seen a grown-man-tantrum in the middle of a busy street because his cellphone was in one of the countless yellow cabs driving away from him.

Our gadgets are our lives. But do airlines get it?

It all depends on the airline. On a recent flight from Minneapolis to Denver, I noticed a man across the aisle working feverishly on his laptop. Now, this was not the behavior of someone simply being productive. His fingers were a blur across the keyboard. This guy was driven.

“Water, please,” Mr. Type A asked the beverage-wielding flight attendant, lifting neither head nor hands from his task.

It dawned on me that my productive time was being spent watching another guy being productive, and that I needed to get back to work. But as I did, I noticed the silence. The finger frenzy had ceased. I looked over just as the man was lifting his water to his mouth.

And then it happened.

A slip. A bobble. A dropped cup.

The man’s face changed instantly from focused urgency to outright panic as he watched the water splashing down onto his keyboard. He let out a string of unprintable expletives.

It was all the flight attendant needed to spring into action.

“Are you saved?” she asked the man. I wondered why she was bringing up religion at a time like this.

“What?” He looked up at her, horrified.

“Your document. Have you saved recently?”

“Yes —- ”

And with that, in one swift movement, she snatched up his laptop, opened it flat and flipped it upside down. She carried it to the galley in the front of the plane. The man’s eyes followed her as if she had just taken his firstborn child.

She opened and closed cabinets, pulling out coffee filters, silverware and other unidentified objects. It was like that scene in the film “Apollo 13″ in which the NASA guys had to figure out how to make a new air filter for the lunar lander using only a pile of trash, a stick of gum and a toaster oven.

Moments later, she walked back down the aisle with laptop in hand.

And then, the moment of truth: the telltale start-up chord rang through the cabin. Polite applause from neighboring passengers followed, as did a collective sigh of relief. Crisis averted. He was up and typing again.

As the flight attendant walked away, I could have sworn that I saw a slight grin on her face. A grin that said: “Don’t bother thanking me. I do this all the time.”

Pat Fallon, a founding partner of the advertising agency Fallon Worldwide, is the co-author of a new business book, “Juicing the Orange.”

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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