United Airlines has apparently issued a directive to flight crews to increase their preflight "banter" in the hopes of creating feelings of warmth and lightheartedness in their customers. On the way to D.C. we were told that the flight attendant was the hula-hoop champion of Wyoming; on the way to Chicago we were told that the pilot had just won a weightlifting tournament. What reads as a good-natured breach of decorum on the flight there is revealed on the way back as merely the wheels of the corporate PR machine.