Talk:3192: Planetary Alignment

Remember to buckle your seatbelts! King Pando (talk) 05:20, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Inferior loaner items

I have personally been the victim of a much-inferior mobile phone as a loaner. I owned a Nokia phone (probably a Nokia 239) that was on the United States AMPS analog network around 1997, and broke the LCD display. I brought it in for service, and while they worked on it, they issued me a Motorola MicroTAC type phone, which was only slightly better than the original "brick phone" design. Due to delays in repair and distance from the shop itself, I probably used the loaner phone for longer than the phone which I had nominally purchased. Elizium23 (talk) 06:10, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Not necessarily "inferior", but the last time I had a car in the shop I got a car very different from what I'm used to. I normally drive a sedan (Camrys and Accords for several decades), but the loaner was an SUV, which took some getting used to (I'm a short person, getting into the driver's seat felt like climbing into a truck). Barmar (talk) 15:21, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Relevant XKCD

Seems related to 3059, same clipboard and everything. 64.114.211.116 08:46, 10 January 2026 (UTC)

Also related to 3037. These three comics seem to form an arc.

I wonder if “Planetary Alignment” refers to the astrological notion of “the planets are in alignment…”?

It's not just astrological, astronomers also call a group of planets close together in the sky an alignment, although the more technical term is syzygy. That's what I expected the comic to be a pun on. Barmar (talk) 15:21, 10 January 2026 (UTC)