Plaidophile

i am tired

Arrived at the airport a couple hours early. Drank at the airport bar until I felt wobbly (which was just one "pint" where apparently this place thinks that pint is the same thing as a quart, not that I'm complaining since holy hell that was a lot of Hefeweisen for $5). Had a quick early dinner when there was half an hour before original boarding time. Finished early dinner, found out the flight's delayed an hour. I would just go back to the bar but I won't hear delay updates from there. Sigh.

Oh yeah, today for the first time ever while waiting for The Church of Beethoven's weekly show to start, I finally saw something in the wild:

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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.

• Going to great lengths to reuse plastic luggage tags through three different home addresses
• In order to do this, using a piece of an envelope from a bill rather than provide my own paper
• Adding further identification to my luggage by using a purple ribbon. Which came from a party favor from my cousin's wedding four years ago.
• Knowing exactly where this ribbon came from, and clearly remembering saving it thinking, "Hey, this might come in handy."

It turned out it was full, after all, and a good 30% of the passengers were children. Lots of screaming and crying and seat-kicking. Urgh. (And the adults on the flight weren't any better. It seemed like a bunch of people were using it as their private conference room or something. There's only so much my noise-canceling headphones can do!)

Also, if I believed in Hell, I'd like to reserve a special place in it for the following:

• People who block everyone else from deplaning by needing to go back in the plane to pick up their carryon luggage (instead of just waiting for the aisles to clear)
• People who scoff at the carryon restrictions to begin with, causing the previous issue
• Flight crew who don't actually enforce the carryon restrictions, causing people to get away with the previous issue
• People who jam up the BART turnstiles because they can't figure out how to map the picture of putting a card into a slot to the act of putting a card into a slot
• Parents who don't tell their kids to STOP KICKING THE GODDAMN SEATS. When I was a fidgety kid, if I kicked the seat in front of me, my mom would slap my hand and tell me to stop. And I'd stop.
• People who turn on their cellphones at the earliest possible opportunity (i.e. the instant the wheels touch the ground) so that they can immediately start gab-gab-gabbing about every little thing.

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.)

I'll be in Chicago (well, Wilmette, actually) from July 5 thru the 12th. In case anyone in the area wants to meet up and do something. I definitely need to have some positive activities scheduled for while I'm there.

Okay, so, nobody else ever got around to posting a full version of the Spokane experience. I was just reminded of this, and so I figure I'd might as well write it up.

As much as I rant about this place and how much more I liked Seattle, I can't help but realize that while I was gone I missed it here. I guess San Francisco really is home now.

So I'm waiting at the Portland airport for my flight back to San Francisco, and I have a few minutes before boarding begins, so I'd might as well say what I've been up to for the last few days.

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.