Entries from July 2007 ↓

Okay, I’ve just about had it up to here (author indicates a plane which passes through a point somewhere on his spacious forehead) with airlines, their silly neo-caste system of frequent-flyer reward levels, their overbooking of flights, and their attitude in general. I’m completely finished with one particular airline, and I don’t mind mentioning the name at all: US Airways. That’s right. US Airways, US Airways, US Airways. Got that, Google? Good.

Yesterday, work required me to fly from Atlanta to Washington, DC and back. A week in advance of this, I’d bought the ticket on the web site of US Airways. Beginning the day the flight was booked, I tried to assign myself a seat, as the wonderfully sophisticated airline web sites now allow a passenger to do. It wouldn’t let me. In retrospect, this should have been a sign of huge troubles looming ahead, but this had happened once before with the triangle-shaped airline and there’d been no problem; they’d had a decent seat for me. The Lincoln sedan airline, the together airline, and even the 180 degrees from northeast airline had managed to treat me decently when it came to seating, so I didn’t worry. And yes, since this is a very negative story, I’m consciously avoiding mentioning any airline I don’t intend to take to task. Google sees all.

When I arrived at the US Airways kiosk to check in, the machine refused once again to allow me to assign a seat. Unwilling to gamble at the gate, I waited 15 minutes at the ticket counter to speak with a human agent. The agent looked up my ticket, verified for me that I was a paid, confirmed passenger on the flight, and none too politely refused to assign me a seat. She instead referred me to the gate agent who would apparently just love to seat me.

When I arrived at the gate, I was greeted by US Airways gate agent “Lynn B.,” who brusquely brushed me aside, telling me she’d be “releasing seats” in just a few moments. Boarding was to begin in thirty minutes.

Twenty-five minutes later, Lynn B. announced that the flight was oversold. That is to say that they had sold a number of tickets larger than the number of physical seats on the airplane, something that would be damned illegal if they weren’t an airline. After all, I’m not allowed to sell things I don’t have, and if I tried to, it would be called fraud or worse. If you’re an airline, though, you actually have the law of the United States behind you, permitting you to sell as many nonexistent seats as you want! This allows the airlines’ rich executives to command their well-paid pilots to fly their usuriously expensive flights without so much as a single empty seat, even if several people cancel their tickets. Everyone knows that if an airliner flies with even one seat empty, the US economy collapses, civilization ceases to exist, and life as we know it is forever lost. Or, perhaps some wealthy US Airways executive has one less pair of $400 shoes. Either way, it’s bad.

Anyway, after she announced that the flight was oversold, she asked for one volunteer with flexible travel plans who wouldn’t mind being squeezed like a sardine onto the next US Airways flight to Washington rather than this one. A young lady with long, curly brown hair bounded up to the desk and practically salivated all over the free round-trip ticket she would get as a reward for her cooperation in keeping the airline solvent and civilization safe (or the big man stylishly shod.) The airline now had exactly as many bodies as seats, and the crisis was averted, I thought.

I walked over and stood near (but not at) the gate desk again, anticipating being called. Lynn B. regarded me with an icy stare and dismissively said, “I’ll have a seat for you in JUST a few minutes, sir.” I thanked her (boy, talk about conversational conventions!) and continued to wait (somewhat less patiently) while the boarding agent began allowing the first-class passengers to board the US Airways flight.

Lynn then set about a number of important tasks. US Airways boarding passes just collected needed to be carefully shuffled and re-shuffled, then put into a bin. A phone call needed to be made to secure a wheelchair for a passenger boarding a flight departing the same gate two hours from now. A man needed to know what other Washington flights were available that day. More boarding cards needed to be shuffled and stacked several times, since most of the passengers were now aboard.

Many minutes later, I found myself standing more or less alone, except for Lynn B., her boarding agent, and a few passengers waiting for later flights in the US Airways gate lounge. I cast a questioning look in Lynn B.’s direction, and she pointedly ignored me. Finally, I simply walked up to the desk and stood there until she eventually acknowledged me. The boarding agent was tallying the head count and closing the door when I was finally handed a boarding pass, and I thanked Lynn B. very little (but by name) and rushed down the jetway. Before my posterior parts met the flatulence-impregnated cushion of seat 10C, the aircraft door was closed.

I fumed for most of the 1 hour and 47 minutes of the flight. I had paid a substantial amount of money for a ticket on that flight, and I had been a confirmed passenger. US Airways had treated me like a damned STANDBY, and had made no apology for doing so. It’s just the way they do business, it seems. It definitely seems to be the way Lynn B. does business, and I only wish I knew her full name so that I could repeat it several times as well. She’d never see it, of course. She’s VERY busy.

Triangle-shaped airline, US Airways has won back a customer for you. See you soon.

Here, presented as an experiment to determine whether I have in fact forgotten how to blog, are a few random thoughts and observations I’ve been collecting over the past few days and weeks.

Random Thought 1: Nintendo’s Business Ethics (or lack thereof.)

To hear Nintendo tell it, they’re simply unfortunate victims of their own product’s popularity.

The video game giant released its new and highly innovative console product, the Wii, in November of 2006. At a list price of $249, the Wii cost half as much as its nearest competitor (Sony’s PlayStation 3) and promised to revolutionize video game technology with its unique wireless controller which senses position and motion.

Nintendo has been through product releases before, as have all game manufacturers. The November release, ahead of the year’s busiest shopping season, was well timed and not at all surprising. The usual rush to find a Christmas Wii was reminiscent of other such shortages: Tickle Me Elmo, Furby, and the original Sony PlayStation spring to mind.

I recently had occasion to go out in search of a Wii and anticipated no problems finding one. After all, it’s been a full seven months since the product’s launch. I was wrong. In fact, no matter how many retailers I visited, the story was the same. Stores as large as Wal-Mart, Target, and Best Buy were receiving, they said, about three units per week, all of which were sold the day they arrived. They were not allowed to announce or reveal the day these units were to arrive, and they were not allowed to let customers reserve units yet to arrive. These restrictions came, they said, not from the retailers’ distribution centers or corporate offices, but from Nintendo itself.

Having a shortage of a popular product is a great way to generate publicity. Nothing boosts the demand for a video game console more than news footage of people camped outside big box stores at 6:00 AM to secure a place in line. I did a bit of reading online, and found that other people were indeed thinking what I was thinking.

Nintendo knew well before the release date how popular this console was going to be. They knew what manufacturing capacity they were going to need, and how many items they would be likely to sell. Corporations love forecasting and make a science of it. No one was caught off-guard here — the bean counters clearly knew what awaited. Nintendo also knew how beneficial a carefully engineered shortage of product could be to their product’s popularity, though, and knew they’d probably sell the same number of units–perhaps more!–if they spaced the shipments out over a year. I have no doubt that there are manufacturing lines at several locations churning out huge quantities of product, that there are warehouses full of consoles, and that a meticulously crafted master plan is in place to trickle that product slowly out into stores to keep the fever alive.

I really hate that I just bought Nintendo’s product, but it wasn’t for me and it made a gamer really happy. I wrote a letter instead, just for my conscience’s sake.

Random Thought 2: “-ence” vs. “-ency”

Did anyone ever wonder about this? In our wonderfully logical language, we have two word endings that have essentially the same functional meaning. With some words, it’s traditional to use one, and with other words it’s traditional to use the other, but there seems to be no simple rule or obvious indication for either.

We speak of independence even though our country’s fathers wrote of independency. We never strive for efficience, but effiiciency is as important as confidence. Could it be that letter “d” preceding the ending which specifies “-ence” over “-ency”? Probably not, since we hear often of both dependence and dependency. In fact, Google finds about 33 million occurrences of the former and 82 million of the latter.

I’m having a really hard time with this sort of inconsistence.

Random Thought 3: A Funeral for the N-word

It’s not a stunt performed by renegade radio shock jocks Opie & Anthony, although it’s certainly provided them with some wonderful new excuses to lampoon Don Imus.

No, this idiotic stunt was performed by what is arguably the oldest civil rights organization in the country, the NAACP. In a park in Detroit, hundreds gathered to attend the burial service for the dreaded N-word, along with Detroit’s Mayor, Michigan’s Governor, and probably more than a few amused onlookers.

George Carlin had it right, folks. There are no bad words. There are bad thoughts, bad intentions–and words. He once made hilarious fun of a language that has 400,000 words, and only seven that you can’t say on broadcast television. It’s not just comedy; it’s a statement about how tragically hung up we are, as a people, on the power that we ourselves give a series of letters strung together to form a word.

The word itself carries no power. To say otherwise is tantamount to idolatry.

“Let us write this series of glyphs on the cave wall. Let us then be careful to never speak them, never inscribe them on any public cave wall, never include them in our writings, and never otherwise acknowledge them, for they are evil and will bring great woe upon our people.”

Cracka, please.

Face facts. The world is still well populated by bigots, racists, and practitioners of prejudice and hatred in all their forms. They are not in the majority, but they walk among us largely unrecognized except when they burn crosses on lawns, wear white bed sheets as fashion accessories, or make incendiary remarks on nationally syndicated radio.

You can bury a word, for all the symbolic satisfaction it gives you, but you can’t try to bury decades of racial tension by having a fake funeral on a river bank in Detroit and expect it to actually change anything. Take the word out of the language if you want. Strike it from the dictionaries, forbid it to be spoken, and make it illegal if you really want to pretend that the power is in the word. You’re wasting your time. The power is in the feelings that give the word a voice. The power is in the minds of those who judge people (to paraphrase Dr. King) by the color of their skin rather than the content of their character.

Conducting a funeral for a word simply focuses the minds of those who would advocate for change in entirely the wrong direction. Time, effort, and energy that could be spent on the sisyphean task of eliminating prejudice as a viable belief system is instead being spent telling people what they should and should not write or say. We’re trying to eliminate the bad words and letting the bad feelings persist.

The FCC believes it has buried those seven dirty words and will never again allow them to be heard on the terrestrial broadcast airwaves. Ever heard a word that was uttered as an expletive, carefully bleeped except for its closing consonant “t,” and wondered what that word could possibly have been? Neither has your child. The simple fact is that whether I call it by that name, or feces, or excrement, I’m still talking about something that stinks. It’s not going to smell any better if I choose to bury one or even all three of those words. It’s more practical and a better use of my resources to bury the offending substance and get on with my life.

Likewise, the N-word’s hate-filled meaning can be conveyed using half a dozen similarly distasteful words, most of which Opie and Anthony not inaptly referred to this morning as the deceased’s oldest friends. We could bury them all and bigots would simply find another word to divert to their purpose. The word has no life. It has no meaning beyond what we give it. It is but a symptom of a larger problem. We must treat that problem, that underlying cause, to have any hope of permanently resolving that symptom.

Random Thought 4: Carbonite Lies on National Radio

I heard an ad on XM Satellite Radio this morning from an online data backup provider called Carbonite. The ad featured a man and woman having a conversation about backing up music downloaded from iTunes or Napster. The woman commented that even if her computer crashed, her music was backed up on her iPod. The man replied, in an ominous, frightening voice, that it wasn’t true. “iPods are one-way devices. You can’t copy music from your iPod back to your computer. If your computer crashes, you can never get that music back!”

This is not simply misleading. It’s a lie. It’s true that iTunes (until very recently) did not provide a mechanism for copying music from iPod to computer, but since the appearance of the very first iPods, there have been third-party (and FREE) software solutions to this problem. I routinely copy the entire music library from my iPod to my office desktop using a freeware application I chose from a group of nearly a dozen such applications I evaluated. I had no trouble finding the answer to that problem over a year ago, so Carbonite’s attempt to frighten people into using their product by lying through their teeth is deplorable to me. Please don’t give these people your business. There are plenty of reputable, honest online backup providers who will appreciate your custom.

[UPDATE: 19 July 2007]

I actually had a pleasant e-mail exchange with David Friend, CEO of Carbonite. In the course of that exchange, it came to light that he was honestly not aware of his spokesman making such a specific statement, and that he was also not up to date on recent changes to Apple’s iTunes software that allow restoring protected content to the computer. He didn’t know of the large number of open-source and freeware applications that exist to perform this sort of restoration. He said that he would pass my e-mail along to the spokesman who does “ad-hoc” ads on XM so that he could be clearer on this issue in the future, and thanked me for writing, even soliciting further information from me as to the methods for restoring music from an iPod.

It also turns out that this is the same David Friend who started a musical instrument company called Arp. Somewhere in my archives, I still have an Arp Odyssey, a very fine analog synthesizer designed by Friend himself. Small world.

Mr. Friend’s response was the opposite of what I expected, and exactly what I hoped for. I therefore retract my recommendation to steer clear of Carbonite. The fault lay with a misinformed spokesman and not with Carbonite as a company, and they are (contrary to my hasty statements) worthy of your custom.