I was thrilled by this story in this evening's Marketplace.
The nut is that there are (finally!) a couple of companies filling the niche of “really, fuck the TSA, having to zip lock up mini-toiletries, endure security on baggage, and so on”. There are a few details different, but the basic idea is that these are services that will ship your luggage for you, arriving at your hotel at the destination the same time you do.
Flylite's better for business travelers. They depot your clothing and toiletries in one of several major cities (pick the one you travel to most frequently) in a climate-controlled closet built in storage space they own. You login to their web site, pick whatever and however many pieces you want for a given trip, tell them when you're arriving at the hotel, and then it shows up the same time you do (with nothing but your carry-on with the laptop), then gets picked up the same day you check out. They'll do dry-cleaning too (for an added fee, of course).
Luggage Forward is more general: they don't depot things for you. They don't, as near as I can tell, do anything one couldn't do for oneself with FedEx, UPS, et cetera, but they specialize in moving suitcases outside of passenger aircraft, but matching your schedule, and they're more general on destinations, so they're good for vacations. The customer base is, apparently, more on the affluent-and-retired end of things, who travel regularly, but don't want to schlep the bags around, deal with checking baggage, so forth. And, actually, I may try their service sooner, since I'm going to Chicago for a wedding on the first and then San Francisco for fun on the second weekend of September.
But Flylite is potentially very exciting to me: there's a decent chance that my next job will involve a lot of travel (working for a company based in another city, and spending a lot of my time at client sites in various others), and the idea of needing to take nothing but the shoulder bag with my laptop when I head to the airport, but have proper attire for the office atmosphere in question and season of the year is great. Never mind saving on closet space at home: if I'm essentially either working from home or out in front of clients, I'd rather not have to bother with the business casual or full suit stuff even being at home (what I wear to dress up to go out is not the same thing as I would wear for work to make a good impression on a client).
But the real reason I think so highly of this is that it means that hacker mentality and the real world are merging functionally, finally. It's been more than a few years since John Gilmore's prescient assertion that “the Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it,” but what we have here is web 2.0 applications treating (arguably necessary) security limitations in very physical air travel as damage and routing, in meatspace, around them.
I still don't have a flying car, but it's starting to feel like it might actualy be the future. Not the shiny, rounded-edges, Star Trek future, but the much more gritty, layers on layers, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson future. That's the future I always liked better anyhow.
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