I love my new MacBook Air, but yesterday I discovered a design flaw: it is just too small. I left it in the seat-back pocket on the plane I took from Denver to San Francisco. Brad blogged about this yesterday and kindly kept my identity (and absentmindedness) out of his post, but I felt compelled to blog about it today because United actually recovered the missing laptop for me.

I made Jason get up early and drive with me from the Hotel Vitale to SFO (we had meetings on the peninsula) so I could check with United’s lost items desk. Amazingly, they had recovered the laptop and even checked my mail client to figure out my identity — they had narrowed it down the owner to one of two people, either me or Jason, so it was good he was with me. Since I often gripe about United in my tweets and blog posts, I thought I’d give them credit where credit is due. Thanks United, you guys saved the day! I certainly thought my Mac was gone forever.

As an aside, I told this story to someone I met yesterday, and he said I was the third MacBook Air owner he’d heard of who had lost his machine. One other person also left it on a plane, but the third guy had his Air in a stack of magazines and newspapers, and his wife put it out with the recycling! The thing is so small and light, I think it might be getting lost more than the average laptop.