The Daily Feather — Reason for Delay: “Mechanical”

Visit nine cities in 29 days and you’re bound to be greeted with “Mechanical Delays.” What now has come to cease to amaze me is the stupidity of what qualifies as “mechanical.” From the perspective of a passenger who wants to get from Point A to Point B, badly, there are innumerable transgressions that could be readily forgiven. On my recent DFW-LAX leg, the PA system was down. Any Italian worth her salt knows the human voice easily carries the length of a Boeing 737. And no running water in a lavatory sink? As long as the toilet’s working, we’ve got leftover hand sanitizer. A quick perusal of chatrooms produced some genuinely idiotic runners-up – a broken trash can cover in the flight attendant’s staging area, a rubber duckie stuck in a seat and a detached magazine pocket cover. Perhaps not so easily forgiven comes from a fellow road warrior on a recently delayed flight who said he’d shown up for another flight and the plane’s seats had no cushions. Had the airline not noticed that minor detail when it parked the bird at the gate?

Will one Jerome Hayden Powell notice there are no seats in the plane known as the U.S. labor market. The Chair of the Federal Reserve will, after all, have the January jobs data in hand when he hits the podium in two days’ time. Being a pragmatist, he knows exactly what he’s up against in trying to maintain Higher for Longer. Powell knows how long the U.S. economy has been a drag on the Fed’s second employment mandate and that inflation continues to come down at too fast a pace.