My flight is delayed. I’m in the Plaza Premium Lounge at Mactan-Cebu International Airport, Terminal 2, corner window seat, claimed the moment I walked in. Windrose is blasting in my ears: “Diggy Diggy Hole,” if you’re curious. There’s a gin and tonic on the armrest. Through the floor-to-ceiling glass, an Eva Air A330 in full Sanrio livery sits directly in front of me, pastels and cartoon characters in the equatorial light. The Hello Kitty section is hidden behind a jetway. Beside me, a DHL Air Hong Kong A330, its tail an almost absurd yellow.
I’ve been in the Philippines for three weeks, and the wifi has been, without exaggeration, the worst I’ve encountered in recent memory.
I’m not complaining. I’m noting it as a fact that shaped the whole trip. Tethered to my phone most of the time. A coffee shop I liked that throttled connections to 2mbps: fine for most things, not fine for anything involving a file. My engineering standups with Equivalent are with a mostly east coast US team, which puts them at 10pm local. All-hands, once a month, at 11pm. I joined those with video off, presentations sent ahead for someone else to share, voice only, phone held at a specific angle to maintain signal.
But I should say first: the Philippines is wonderful. Warm, generous people. Genuinely good food. A history that is layered and surprising: this is a country with a distillery that has been producing European-style spirits since 1834, and that’s only one of the things you don’t expect until you’re here. Three weeks wasn’t enough.
The connectivity situation reminded me of running a startup in the 1990s, not nostalgically, but structurally. When bandwidth is a constraint, communication becomes asynchronous by necessity. You write things down. You think before you send. You trust people to work without you watching. The meetings that survive feel more deliberate because they had to earn their place.
This is, in a sense, familiar territory. My first company, in the mid-nineties, was an entirely remote workforce, not by philosophy but by circumstance. We were distributed before distributed was a concept anyone was writing articles about. My second company was almost entirely remote as well. We ended up selling VoIP services partly because we’d built the infrastructure for ourselves: SIP, IAX, and Jabber integrated into custom clients, switchboard-capable hard phones for everyone. If we needed it, probably others did too. When I had a stretch of work in Arusha, Tanzania, in my early twenties, I had my gear shipped ahead on a container. The work was uninterrupted.
There’s an anecdote from around that time that I think about occasionally. My company operated free wifi in the condo building where I lived on Snoqualmie Pass. When I was eventually leaving, the HOA held a vote on whether to take it over. Someone stood up at the meeting and argued they should buy it, because (and he said this as a point in its favor) I had answered tech support tickets for him from Africa. He meant it as a testament to reliability. It’s also just a description of how I’ve always worked.
Here at the airport, the wifi is fast. I’ve spent the last hour checking in, in real depth, on Equivalent and on Plotthing, a personal project I’ve been watching from a distance for three weeks. It feels good. It also feels exactly like what airports have always felt like to me.
I’ve loved airports since I was a teenager, moving through Schiphol on the way to or from Tanzania, where my parents ran medical clinics and I grew up traveling to and from East Africa. There’s a quality of attention an airport demands that I’ve always found clarifying. You’re between things. The normal rhythms don’t apply. Time belongs to you in a way it usually doesn’t.
Flying deepened this. In 2001, Cessna had a program: roughly four thousand dollars for your certificate and a plane at once. I ended up with a 2001 172SP and a freshly minted pilot certificate. I had a brief and memorable time with Avitus Aviation around the same period, part of what was a genuinely absorbed chapter of being in aviation as more than a hobby.
The flight I think about most is ferrying the 172 back from Wichita. I flew through the remnants of a tropical storm crossing California. The barometer dropped over two inches when we hit LA Center airspace. Somewhere over Southern California, around 2am, in the rain, I called ATC and made what I can only describe as a somewhat concerningly worded report that I was unable to maintain my assigned altitude.
What was happening: firewalled throttle, trimmed for maximum climb rate, dropping over 1500 feet per minute anyway. The controller’s response, roughly, was that there was nobody else around, and that going 3,000 feet above and below my assigned altitude was just fine for tonight.
I eventually landed somewhere in the desert: parallel runways, a tower, dark but clear. After twelve-plus hours of flying I wasn’t entirely certain which runway to line up on. The tower turned the lights up to full power and turned on the rabbit, the flashing approach lights that lead you in. After everything that night, that sequence of lights in the darkness was one of the more beautiful things I’ve seen from a cockpit.
I’ve thought a lot about air traffic controllers lately, especially with everything in the news. What they do is extraordinary. On a night when things are going badly, a calm voice telling you nobody else is around, you’re fine, here’s your runway is something that matters in ways that are hard to articulate afterward. I try to find people like that in my work and my life: someone to turn to when you just need to know someone else is there and has your back.
These details are 25 years old now. I hold them loosely. The feeling, though, I remember clearly: fear, total absorption, and the quiet that came after.
I still owned the Skyhawk when I got married, nearly a decade later. There was a period where I couldn’t get a medical certificate, which meant it sat. I heard about this, with some regularity, for the first five years of our marriage.
The Sanrio plane has just left. I watched it push back and taxi out, and the Hello Kitty section finally came clear of the jetway. Worth the wait. The Cathay Pacific widebody out front has been replaced by two Cebu Pacific A320 Neos. Small planes, but this is Southeast Asia, where the distances are genuinely short. Everything is closer together than it looks on a map from the outside.
The gin and tonic is almost gone. The work is going well. In a few hours I’ll be in Kuala Lumpur, an unplanned stop I’m looking forward to.
I love these quiet moments in places I enjoy, doing things I enjoy. There’s a particular kind of life that makes this available, one that mixes movement and work and corner window seats in airport lounges, and I’m aware of being fortunate to be living it.
The delay helped.