Delta Airlines and the Trip From Hell

On Monday night we left for Canada. The flights were:

Monday   6/24
4.53 pm  Delta 7300 to LaGuardia  -- delayed due to weather
7.00 pm Delta 6217 to Montreal -- cancelled

Tuesday 6/25
8:40am Delta 6202 to Montreal -- delayed due to maintenance issue

Returning Wednesday   6/26
7.05am Delta 3907 to Detroit  -- delayed due to maintenance issue
10.20am Delta 3653 to Norfolk -- missed because 3907 was delayed

When we landed at LaGuardia, there was a theoretical possibility that our second flight might also have been delayed and we could still catch it. However, there were no gates available, so we (and other planes) sat on the taxiway for over an hour. It literally took us less time to fly from Norfolk to New York, than to get from the LaGuardia runway to the terminal. We would definitely have missed the second flight, if it hadn't been cancelled instead.

All the hotels around LaGuardia were full, so for dinner we went to a sports bar in the airport, where Josh said "I could microwave better burgers than these." Around 1am, the LaGuardia staff started setting out cots; they were under bright fluorescent lights but they were more comfortable than hard plastic chairs and, unlike Philadelphia's airport, they didn't have an ad blaring every ten minutes on why the city is so great and you should really spend a lot of money there. Josh still didn't get any sleep, but I managed a couple of hours.

Sleeping in the airport and waking up at 5am made it easy to catch our 8:40am flight, which left the gate on time, made it almost to the runway, and then went back to a maintenance area. The crew told us that they didn't know how long it would take, and they might be putting us on a shuttle to go back to the terminal. It was looking like we might miss Mum's funeral entirely, and I was considering just chucking the trip and going back to Virginia Beach. But, an hour late, we got airborne, and landed at Montreal at 11:30. Josh and I had our suits with us, so we decided to forego picking up our checked luggage; we raced through the airport, found the Customs and Immigration hall miraculously empty and blitzed through, and got a cab directly to the church, arriving about 12:10, just before the limo with the rest of the family arrived. We had just enough time before the service to find a washroom and change into our suits, before taking our places.

The next morning, we got up at 4am and headed to the airport at 5:00 to catch the 7.05 flight. Needless to say, that one was delayed also. A passenger seat had been broken the night before, and the clean up crew hadn't fixed or reported it. The flight left about an hour late, long enough to make us miss our 10:20 flight and leave us sitting in Detroit until 2:10. Delta gave us $6 meal vouchers, which isn't enough to buy a meal in an airport; but at least the Detroit airport has free WiFi, unlike LAX or LaGuardia. Instead of getting home at noon as we should have--which would have let Josh get to work at his usual 1pm--we landed a little after 4pm and made it home at 5:15.

I wrote a letter to Delta to say: "The front line people were almost all at least okay, some were good, some went above and beyond. They just weren't the people responsible for getting the planes from A to B on time. "Getting from A to B" is the reason for spending $1500 on a pair of plane tickets in the first place. So, you were polite while completely failing in the whole point of your business.

Josh arrives

Josh arrived at Dulles on Sunday evening. The main thing of note--aside from "Yay, Josh is back!"--is that there's no good place at Dulles airport to wait for arrivals. People can be coming through any one of several different doors and you can't watch all of them. Apparently the designer had never wanted to meet anyone at an airport, and no one had ever wanted to meet him.

Car

Today we picked up the new car, a 2011 Honda CRV, officially "green" although I'd have called it bluish green, or perhaps grue. The purchase process at the dealership seems unnecessarily inefficient and lengthy, and--given how big a business auto sales is, and how many studies must have been made on the car-buying experience--I have to assume that is deliberate. Presumably the intent is to get you so fatigued and exasperated that the average guy is saying "Yes, I'll buy that overpriced warranty, yes, I'll sign that contract, yes, yes, anything, just please let me get the keys and go!" I tend to respond by saying "No, I don't care how sensible it seems, I'm done buying anything, at all, period", but it was still fatiguing and exasperating.
Fortunately, though, we seem to be keeping cars for 17 years after the model year, so we won't have to go through this again until 2028.

Well behaved women

One of my neighbors has a bumper sticker: "Well behaved women don't make history."

That's because most people don't make history. Behaving badly doesn't mean you'll make history. Unless you're counting the police blotter as "history".

Borders Books closing

The local Borders is being liquidated. The store was plastered with signs saying EVERYTHING IN THE STORE 40% OFF !! (some items excepted).  I asked where the Self Help section was, but the clerk said that telling me would defeat the purpose, so I looked around the store. The "some items" which were excepted included Science Fiction (10%), Horror (10%), Writing Instruction (10%), History (10%), Travel (10%), Children's (10%), Adult Games (by which they mean Cataan and Risk and that sort of thing) 10%. There was quite a line at the cash register, but I can tell the difference between 40% off and 10% off, so I didn't join the line to buy anything.

Open Office spellcheck fail, again

I noticed Open Office wasn't spellchecking, so I pulled up the Troubleshooting Thread and went through the steps. All on its own, Open Office had decided to change Stylist > Default > Modify > Fonts > Language to "none", and Tools > Options Language Settings > Languages (Western) to German.


Ach du lieber!  


Once I fixed those, it was fine...but I keep feeling that I shouldn't have to...

Science Fiction

  A friend pointed me to a blog post :"Science fiction is a rip off. I want the future I was promised, dammit! Where are the jet packs and teleportation devices?" The post doesn't have anything particularly original, profound, or clever, but it's a complaint I hear every now and again. "It's the 21st century now, so where's all the cool stuff?"
  We launch stuff into orbit so routinely that nobody notices. The Navy is testing battle lasers. Cellphones look like Star Trek communicators but do much more than the show's writers ever imagined. We have discovered planets around other stars. Anyone with a computer and a network connection can video chat with someone on the other side of the world. We're creating nano-machines and genetically modified organisms. Direct neural interface devices are being developed to restore sight to the blind. We have this thing called the Internet. And on and on. The future is all around you!

Larry Correia's Happy Tax Day

Larry Correia is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Monster Hunter International and Monster Hunter Vendetta, plus four other books to be released this year. And he's an accounting type, as you might have guessed from reading MHI. He has a beautiful rant on Tax Day which you should read now, and at every election.

I do not want civil discourse « Don Surber

I do not want civil discourse « Don Surber

If you let them set the rules, you've already lost. A rant worth reading.

Open Office spellcheck fail

I'm using Open Office for my word processor and spreadsheet, and it it mysteriously decided to give up spellchecking. It turns out you can't just specify "I want to use US English" as a default when you load the program; and when you discover that it's not working, you can't get anything useful from what they laughingly refer to as a "Help" file. What you have to do is search the web for "Open Office spellcheck problem", go down the list until you find the [Troubleshooting] Spell check thread, and carry out the eight steps listed.

Why the developers thought you ought to go through this search and manual fix, instead of dealing with it during set up, I couldn't guess.

But I have successfully extracted the arcane knowledge, and now my spell check works (at least until I close this document). Except  some of what is marked as misspelled, isn't, and I'm having to add words to the dictionary. I understand them not having "Lynnhaven" and "werepiranha" in their default standard dictionary, but how could they have left out "shoggoth"?

Bumper Sticker

I saw this one: "God Bless The Whole World--No Exceptions".
Really? Bless the ones who are lazy and willfully ignorant? The ones who see any position of power as an opportunity for graft? The ones who enslave their women? The ones who feel that killing off the next tribe over is a fine sport? Bless them just as much?

Camera

Back around Christmastime, we ordered a camera from OpticsPlanet.com at $199. Didn't get it for a week or so, called for an update, "out of stock." A couple of weeks later, it's in stock but we owe more money--which we didn't. Then it's out of stock again, no idea when it'll come in (normally I'd have cancelled the order at that point, but we had reasons not to, so we hung in there). Then it's in stock, we can get it to you before Josh leaves for Australia--except they didn't. Then it's out of stock. Then they can ship it now, once we pay the balance.--they're claiming the price is $249, and they don't have any record of what the price was back when I ordered it. Suuuure.

Best Buy had it in the store at $199, so this afternoon we picked up a Canon Powershot SX120.

Flash cookies

In addition to normal cookies, it turns out your computer probably also has Flash cookies. Allegedly you can avoid them by using Adobe's Flash Settings page, but it may not work. I put my settings on "ask me every time", then went to half a dozen video sites like Metacafe and Youtube. I got half a dozen cookies and no queries.

Hat tip to Barbra for pointing out this problem.

Serenity

I saw Serenity again on DVD. It's a fun film, and if you're a science fiction fan who somehow missed the movie, it's worth watching. However, there's one scene which makes me want to reach back through time and smack the writer. That scene is the one where Book says to Mal, "I don't care what you believe, but you need to believe in something." 

Grrr!

That's about the most idiotic thing that it's possible to say. "I don't care what you believe." Okay, how about the Operative's belief that murder in the service of the state is acceptable? Or how about a belief that some ethnic group is subhuman and can should be enslaved or exterminated? How about if I believe it would be a good idea to choke you right now?

I can see Jayne saying it--and everyone else turning and giving him a "you idiot" look--but I can't see Book saying it.

"I support the troops, but..."

Once again today I saw someone say "I support the troops, I want them to come home". I wouldn't complain if he'd said "I wish we hadn't gotten into this war, but since we're in it, I want to win"; but what he was saying was "I want to quit now".

No, you don't support the troops. Our troops are all, every single one of them without exception, volunteers. They signed up knowing that their job was risky, and that they were offering to carry out the lawful orders of our government despite that risk. That is what they are doing. Undoubtedly, they all want to come home--but the honorable ones want to come home after they finish their job. If they come home before they finish their job, well, the word for that is "defeat". If you are advocating defeat, you are not supporting the troops.

Best Western

On February 4 I made a reservation at the Best Western in Park City UT for a Feb 15 stay; I called the hotel directly rather than through the 800 line. I called back just now to cancel it and they said that, for a cancellation less than 30 days in advance, I would forfeit payment for one night plus taxes. Interesting, in that I made the reservation only 10 days in advance; also, no one mentioned that to me when I made the reservation.
I said "If you charge me, I'll call Visa and dispute the charge". The girl put me on hold for a minute, came back and said rather huffily "All right, sir, we won't charge you", and hung up.

Murphy's of Virginia Beach

We went there for brunch after church this morning. The price was reasonable, but that's about all I can say for it. You have to go through the smoking section to get to the non-smoking section or the restrooms; the haze was thick enough that I had to change clothes as soon as I got home. The morning's special was a rubbery ham and cheese quiche, dry biscuits, and lukewarm fried potatoes. I don't need a waitress hovering at my shoulder every minute, but it would have been nice if she'd come back once or twice to see if we needed anything. I eventually asked another waitress for a coffee refill, but I never got it. And they charged us an extra line item for something which was supposed to be included in the breakfast--nothing major and I'm sure it was an honest mistake, but not endearing. Not recommended.

Rant: US AIR (Update: and their reponse)

We took a trip to Portugal on TAP airline, a partner of USAir; USAir promises to give mileage credit for partner flights. However, when you actually try to get credit, it has to be done by snail mail, and what you get back is:

we require both the original boarding passes and a copy of your partner ticket
receipt. Travel agent itineraries andcredit card statements are not
acceptable. The receipt must contain thepassenger name, flight numbers,
city pairs, dates, class of service and ticket number. Since we are unable
to research yourtravel on partner flights through our system, no further action
can be taken

My reply:

You are being fundamentally dishonest by offering mile credit and then
failing to make good on your offer. I provided a boarding pass stub and the
itinerary which included the ticket number and flights. I do not have a receipt
directly from TAP, because I purchased the tickets through a travel agent. If
you are unable to verify with TAP that the tickets were paid for, then you
should fire whoever is responsible for airline partnerships since they have
clearly not provided for the most basic and obvious required amount of
integration.

EDIT: And their reponse, about 1hr 45m later:

We have received your correspondence requesting mileage credit for one of our airline partners. Your request has been submitted to the airline for verification. Airlines usually respond in 7-10 days. Once a response has been received from the partner airline, you will be able toview it online in your account. If the activity is eligible, the applicable miles for the activity will be posted. If for some reason, the airline does not permit credit for specific flight(s), the reason will be documented in your account. We did this as a one time courtesy, we need original boarding passes when traveling on Star Alliance Partners, we have no other way of verifying flights on other airline carriers. For future reference please keep all boarding passes and receipts when traveling on our partners. Thank you.

EDIT: I did get the mileage credit.

I'm annoyed that I had to write a nastygram to get them to take care of it, but at least they are (or say they are) taking care of it, and they responded quickly. When I had an issue with Continental last year, it took Continental six weeks to say (paraphrased) "We won't do anything about the problem. We look forward to your flying with us again!"

Rant: Motorola

Why does Motorola charge $35 for their Phone Tools software? Well, yes, because they want to scrape every dollar out of you that they can; but what I mean is, if you buy an electronic device, wouldn't you expect the software to be included?