Hopefully, my next diary entry will not be whining. It's just that while there are many nice things in my life, they aren't all that newsworthy.
As a marginally geeknewsworthy nonwhining item, I'll point out that it's nice that it's relatively easy to find unused electrical outlets in the Atlanta airport, and beyond that there are even laptop mini-office-with-T1 facilities for rent (at $36/hour).
Now, back to the regularly scheduled whining.
The ordinary level of US airline service mediocrity extends to getting you into the system's hub so late that your connecting flight has already departed, then telling you to wait on standby for the last flight of the night so that you can listen to the attendants turning away volunteers willing to stay overnight. That way, when the attendants finally deign to tell you that yes, you are involuntarily stranded overnight, you can more fully appreciate your position in the great scheme of things.
Delta Airlines, however, goes above and beyond. They methodically check their planeloads of stranded passengers into a motel far enough from the airport that the shuttle to the airport has a 25 minute cycle time, and they are serenely untroubled by the way that their chosen motel uses a single 8-passenger van to operate its shuttle service. (After I was one of more than 10 passengers left behind by the first van visit, I took a cab. The driver tried to charge me $22 dollars for the $10 trip. Welcome to Atlanta.:-)
I can offer a heartfelt recommendation for Delta Airlines if you enjoy the kind of warm fuzzy feeling you get from this kind of thing. (And after my Atlanta double whammy, it may be a while before I can drink Coca Cola without an ominous feeling of impending disaster.)