Market’s plunge unsettling to many, but how do Microsoft investors feel?

I’m not sure it’s safe to go out of town anymore.

For the past two weekends, I’ve traveled to Washington state and then to a business meeting in Chicago. And since I was flying on both Fridays, I could only catch bits and pieces of the stock market’s free-fall on CNN during airport connections.

In the five days between my two trips, U.S. stocks lost $2 trillion in value. My stomach was especially queasy as I read the business pages of the Sunday Seattle Times on one flight home and the Chicago Sun-Times the following Sunday and stared at weekly percentage drops…