Plaidophile

So today, stuff happened outside of SWA's control, in that a flight was delayed and that completely messed up connections. Most airlines would simply disclaim any liability for it and make it seem like they were doing me a favor in putting me on standby for some crappy flight 6 hours later, but SWA actually went out of their way to find me a replacement flight as soon as they could — and they were ready for it because as soon as they knew that my first flight was delayed, they had looked to see which passengers would be affected by the delay. And, the replacement flight only pushed me back by about an hour and a half, and there was absolutely no trouble with my checked luggage either (in fact my bag was one of the first off the carousel at my final destination!).

So, thank you, Southwest Airlines, for keeping a crappy situation from being something difficult.

I think the only thing I can complain about SWA-wise is that when I did arrive at my new connection, the next flight had already boarded, because they just decided, "Hey, the flight isn't full, no sense making people wait around until 20 minutes before the flight in the name of crowd control." So I didn't get as good of a seat as I could have. Oh darn. It's pretty hard to get upset at something which generally improved things for everyone.

I am way overdue for a checkup and need to renew my albuterol prescription. There are a lot of doctors in my neighborhood. However, finding one which is accepting new patients and accepts my insurance is difficult. (It's mostly the fault of my insurance provider; while they provide national coverage, they only really focus on ones in the NYC metro area, because the particular division of the company I work for is headquartered in NYC and New Yorkers seem to have this notion that there isn't anything outside of NYC. But at least there's national coverage — when I actually worked in NYC my coverage only covered the tri-state area, meaning when I got sick while visiting my grandpa I was pretty much SOL. There seems to be something odd about New York's insurance laws which make this happen.)

So anyway, I can get a provider list for doctors near my apartment with no problem, but the phone numbers they provide seem to be incorrect or home phone numbers or something (for example, taking a few random doctors' numbers and popping them into Google's phonebook search finds residential numbers with completely different names), and when I look on their various hospital affiliations' sites, I can't find any mention of these doctors at all, telling me that their national database is extremely outdated, to say the least.

Basically, my insurance sucks.

I'm tempted to just order the albuterol from a gray-market New Zealand pharmacy since it'd cost the same as my prescription copay anyway...

There have been many very good rants about so-called "two-factor authentication" which are really not actually two-factor, where they ask you to answer certain questions which are basically just secondary/tertiary questions. Of course, most of those wish-it-were-two-factor authentication schemes at least give questions with immutable and memorable questions, unlike these two from AT&T Wireless:

So, normally when you try canceling an account with a phone company, they send you over to customer retention, but T-Mobile gives you a much easier way. The magic words: "I'd like to convert my account to pay-as-you-go." They're more than happy to do that, and after that you can easily just port your number or, if you're also changing numbers at the same time (like I am), you can just have the old number forward to your new number until the minutes expire.

(Also, I might just mess around with making circuits or something. It'd be fun to try making my intercom dial my cellphone, for example.)

So, compared to most of my customer experience entries, I must say that the whole @comcastcares thing is pretty awesome. And the guy (or maybe it's a team?) even tracks weblog entries. Comcast's website can be pretty terrible when it comes to information about things which aren't their highest-tier services, so having someone who is actually willing to answer every little question about what they offer is excellent.

So, this morning, between signing for the condo and going back to work, I stopped at an AT&T store to pick up a SIM for the iPhone. There was a short line ahead of me. One person in front of me was on the phone, talking in a very dramatic way to a regional manager about some terrible customer experience he suffered at the hands of something or other. I couldn't help but listen in (seeing as how he was loud enough to be heard throughout the whole store) and it was plainly obvious that he was ranting about his experience buying an iPhone 3G on Friday.

What I heard from his story is that he was in line for 4 hours when the Apple store first opened, and was turned away because of the activation issues. The woman in line next to him was "in tears" because of her inability to buy an iPhone (what). He was ranting and raving about how Apple and AT&T need to "get their act together" and how they should have gotten news about the activation failures into "all the papers" ("for the people who don't have Internet") so that people wouldn't have to wait in line for four hours to not be able to buy an iPhone. Furthermore, he refuses to go into an Apple store after his bad experience and was aghast that the AT&T stores were out of phones.

Okay, clearly there is a huge traveling recession right now (I was the only passenger on the airport shuttle both ways, and neither flight was even close to full, and the airport is pretty deserted), BUT Midway has perhaps the best TSA process ever. There are three lines at the beginning for beginner, casual, and expert traveler. I took the "expert" line, and I was the only one in it, until a family of three (which technically didn't fit the "expert" guideilnes since they had more than one carryon each) came up behind me and I let them get in front of me since I was caught by surprise at having basically no time to get my laptop out of my backpack and my shoes off. Huh.

Oh, and the TSA screeners in the expert line were friendly and talkative. It really changed the dynamic, since they knew they they were in for a quick screening. (Also, the pre-screening guy who checked my boarding pass was poring over my boarding pass for every little detail since, again, there was nobody else so he could actually do a proper job. Not that that's really advantageous in this case though.)

(Also, note the timestamp at the bottom.)

So, it looks like there was a class-action lawsuit regarding the iBook power adapter which finally got a settlement. So, great, I could theoretically get $79 back for the power adapter I had to buy for my iBook back in grad school, because said adapter failed after just a few months due to its shitty design.

Of course, in order to file a claim, one must have:

• The computer's serial number (which I haven't had for, what, 5 years now?)
• The receipt for purchasing the power adapter (yep, I'm going to hang on to a receipt for 7 years!)
• A document from Apple indicating that I attempted to get it serviced under warranty and was denied (nope, like an idiot I went to the shop where I bought the iBook and they said, "Sorry, Apple considers that customer abuse," and it never got documented at all)

Which is closer to San Francisco, CA: Sacramento CA, or Reno, NV?

So, United's check-in kiosk (yes, I know I said I'd never fly United ever again, just like I had said before the previous time I flew United) has gotten even more confusing, just so that they can up-sell seats. On the first upsell screen it asks if I want to upgrade to first class, with a whole bunch of confusing options plus one using 500 frequent flier miles. I figure, sure, it's not like I'm ever going to use my United miles anyway, so I pressed the button, and it asked me which kind of upgrade I wanted to do. There were four options which made no sense, and each with various numbers which I couldn't tell if that was the amount I'd have to pay to actually use i. So I canceled the upgrade.

A couple screens later, after a bunch of 'continue' clickthroughs all on the bottom-right corner of the screen, it asked if I wanted to upgrade my seat again, this time for $29.90, and of course the 'accept' button was where I had been pressing 'continue.' I guess it's good to keep people on their toes when they're just clicking through repeatedly but the fact it's good to do that is only because the interface is so complicated (especially the baggage checking screen, which asks you how many of several different types of luggage you have!) and full of needless upsale things.

A much better checkin workflow would be:

1. Find the reservation
2. Clearly display all the (simplified) upsale options (upgrade to first class for $whatever, upgrade to first class for some-number-of-miles, upgrade to business class for $29.90) up-front
3. Ask if you're checking baggage, with 'yes' and 'no' buttons in the middle of the screen
4. If checking baggage, ask if any items are oversize; if so, go to the complex selection screen, otherwise, go to a simple screen with just 'number of bags'
5. Print boarding documents and whatever baggage check instructions there are, and thank the customer

Tricking the customer into going into extra steps they have to back out of is a bit silly, and only makes your checkin line longer and more frustrating for everyone.

The TSA screeners at PDX are surprisingly pleasant. They act like humans and treat the people they're screening as humans too, and actually talking to the people in line like something other than cattle.

On the plus side, hotels.com has a rather nice phone-optimized site for finding and booking hotels. On the minus side, the "booking" part doesn't actually work. When I tried booking a hotel in Portland, after giving it all my payment and contact information, it just redirected me back to the main page. No error message or anything else. If I tried accessing a page in my browser history, it would similarly poot me back on the main page. Not useful!

So, my apartment has contracts with a number of service providers for things like telephone service, satellite television, and so on. Lately I've been considering getting some sort of regular cleaning service, so I checked the apartment's service provider directory. For cleaning services, they linked to a company called Service Magic. So, I filled out their form (on the apartment's site) asking for a quote for regular (bi-weekly) cleaning.

Within minutes I got a phone call from Service Magic, which is based in LA. Rather than actually being a cleaning service themselves, they are a "contracting clearinghouse" which exists as a referral service between clients and actual contractors. Okay, fine. I explained what my (very simple) needs were, and the guy said he'd get back to me with a list of contractors.

My parents recently upgraded their phones. They didn't want to pay a lot for them, so they opted to just get some Nokias (the 5300, I think) which were $50 with a contract extension. So I was showing off Google Maps to my dad on my W580i, and he wondered if he could run it on his Nokia. I figured he could, so I put my SIM into his phone so I could download Google Maps Mobile, which downloaded and installed just fine.

However, the phone doesn't allow applications to do network stuff by default; you have to grant access to an application for that purpose. Unfortunately, T-Mobile has disabled the option to grant network access to applications. Clearly T-Mobile just wants to restrict people to only using the craptacular network stuff they deem appropriate for mobile use, rather than allowing them to actually make use of their network access.

I have a feeling when my contract is up I will be switching to a pay-as-you-go service. Unfortunately, T-Mobile is the only one with PAYG rates which make sense, and no useful data service whatsoever (you can only access T-Zones, which is little more than a ringtone purchase portal at this point). AT&T supposedly has data service on PAYG but they're completely unclear on the details, and their PAYG voice rates are confusing and byzantine.

1:57 PM I found unbranding instructions which should make it so that you can run any Java app without restrictions.

My parents have been visiting for the past week, and yesterday I used ZipCar to drive up to Marin county (after only, what, 6 months of having a membership? Clearly, selling my car was the right decision). It was a quite easy experience, once I figured out which of two cars I had actually rented (I didn't realize that the cars had names, and there were two of the same type in the lot). Towards the end I wasn't sure if I was going to make the drop-off in time so I called to extend the reservation by half an hour, which was an extremely trivial and easy process. (I ended up returning right on time for the original dropoff time, but it was close enough that I'm glad I extended it, since paying $4 for half an hour early is better than paying $50 for one minute late.)

My only "complaint" about the experience is that the car was a bit of a walk from my apartment (about 3/4 of a mile) but that's just because of the last-minute nature of the reservation. If we'd had some advance warning I'd probably have been able to get a car that was only a block away. So really the complaint is more a praise for the sheer number of cars within walking distance of my apartment.

As of 02-16 03:07 PM, 5 Whenever minutes used. Bill Close: 02/24

(and, for the record, I've used 68 of my ∞ weekend minutes)

So, recently I ordered a bunch of stuff from Musician's Friend. Given that it was over $100, shipping was free. Some of the items were backordered and would ship at a later date. I was fine with this.

The first shipment arrived several days ago, and contained the two items which weren't backordered. This seemed fine.

The second shipment arrived today. It was a fairly large box. Inside this box was the following:

1. One 10' instrument cable, blue
2. Packing material

So, there was one item, which could have easily been shipped in a regular padded envelope, assuming it even made sense to ship it alone at all (which it didn't). It's not like I'm in dire need of rush delivery of a single instrument cable. The other two cables I ordered (one red, one green) are still listed on my order status page as "backordered," along with the pedalboard case (which I actually do want to get as soon as possible). Will each of those cables also ship individually in a large, environmentally-unfriendly box, wasting fuel too?

Why doesn't Musician's Friend use a bit of common sense when they decide what to pack together? Do they just look at the orders generated by the computer and laugh when they see that someone's (apparently) ordered a single $6 instrument cable?

On a related note, why do they constantly send out so many catalogs and mailings which are pretty much impossible to get off of? Why do many of their "special offers" require calling a salesperson on the phone rather than making a web-based order (which would ostensibly be cheaper for them, and certainly makes me as a customer feel more confident that I'll receive the right item)? I think they need to rethink a few of their strategies, here.

So, in order to be more "fair" and in order to avoid a mad rush to the gate, Southwest Airlines has tried yet another boarding procedure. This one gives everyone a group (A, B or C) and a number (1-60). Each group is then further split from 1-30 and 31-60. Then the first two A groups are lined up in numerical order, then each group is called to board, in order, then after one group finishes boarding the next group starts boarding and the group after that lines up.

It sounds confusing, because it is confusing. Passengers don't know where to go, the lines are always too close to the wall so half of the groups have to trip on everyone else in order to line up, and people have a hard time keeping track of the separate group and number and so when A31-60 is trying to board, invariably a bunch of people from C45 try to as well. Eventually the gatekeeper just starts calling up groups of 5.

Well, the reason for the AT&T issues is pretty obvious now... apparently, since my apartment complex (Avalon Yerba Buena) submitted the work order on my behalf, my telephone account is now in the name "Avalon Y Buena."

FAIL.

(Oh well, the CSR I spoke to was very nice and actually pleasant so okay at least they get that going for them.)