Airlines Are Not My Friend

If you've read the news over the past two days one of the leading stories is that American Airlines has cancled 1,000 flights.  Unfortunately I have been snagged in this travel nightmare today.  I had a quick two night business trip that was to conclude with an evening flight home today.  Of couse my flight was one of those that were cut.

 

I learned of the problems around mid-morning when a coworker jumped on the web during a break in our meetings.  I remembered that I had been scheduled to fly on an S-80 for my return trip so I immediately logged into my frequent flier account to check my status.  The remarkable thing was that the airline's website barely even mentioned the issues.  A plain link to a quick PR blurb was all of the information given.

 

Next I pulled up my intinerary and was happy to find that my flight was still listed for departure at its original time.  Satisfied that things were looking fine I went back to work.  Unfortunately, right before lunch I again logged in to print my boarding pass.  That effort was met with a website error and the suggested remedy was to "speak with ticketing agent at the terminal."  That message is NEVER a good sign.  Still my itinerary showed that I had a flight and that it was on time.  Something was up.

 

My next move was to get on the phone with AA customer service.  I was pretty suprised that the phone call was met with a message, "All representatives are busy.  Please try your call again."  What?  They wouldn't even put me on hold?  That is a REALLY bad sign.  I tried calling a dozen more times and kept getting the same message.  The system would not let me talk to a real person, and the automated prompt said that my itinerary was still valid and on time.  Lies! 

 

In a last ditch effort I followed the voice prompts to dig through the automated system until I was prompted to say "Agent" if I had a special need.  A little weak I know, but that seemed to be the only way to talk to a real person.  At that point I advanced to actually being on hold, which I considered progress.  I then spent over 90 minutes on hold.  During which time I drove across town (speaker phone rocks), ordered food, ate, and had plenty of leasurely water cooler talk.  My cell phone battery died shortly thereafter, without me ever talking to a real person.

 

I had already checked out of my hotel and my rental car needed to be returned.  It looked like I was about to get stranded at the airport.  I called the car rental company and they were kind enough to let me know that if I were to return my car, I would be unable to rent another.  All of the cars were booked so if I gave up my car I'd be without wheels.  My solution was to immediately drive to the airport to talk to a ticket agent, but in order to keep my car I left it in hourly parking.  The rep on the phone said it would be $75 if I were to ditch the car in the parking garage.  If I could get a flight I'd pay $75 but if not I'd still have a car.  It would be totally worth it either way.

 

After about an hour in line at the airport I was finally able to talk to a real person.  I finally caught a break when they were able to find a commuter jet that had an open seat tomorrow morning bright and early.  I immediately set to work getting my hotel to hold a room for tonight and extending my car rental.  I caught another break when I was able to secure a room (places had booked up quickly) and even got them to match the prior night's rate despite the fact that they doubled the rate overnight.  You've got to love a company that charges everyone double due to this sudden scarcity.  Capitalism at its best.

 

So now I have returned to my hotel.  I've spent the whole afternoon and evening working to get myself home, but now I've gotten as far as the hotel where I started the day by the time I was scheduled to arrive home.  Today has been a-hell-of-a-day.  Thankfully A little experience let me keep my rental car and some bargaining and quick action let my hotel room at a semi-reasonable rate.  I have a boarding pass in hand that will get me home only 15 hours late.  I managed to work the system well enough that it didn't turn into the total nightmare it easily could have been. 

 

Today I learned that the airlines are not even close to prepared for this type of problem.  They don't have enough phone lines or the ability to scale up their customer service numbers.  They also are completely unable to give any useful information on the internet or by phone.  In this day-and-age it is rediculous to expect someone to be face to face at the terminal to get a flight rebooked.  I hope that this experience is a wake up call for all of the airlines (I'm sure none of the others would have done any better than AA) for their maintainance programs and their customer service departments. 

 

I love to travel but these days it is becoming more and more of a bitter experience if I have to give up my fate to the airline industry.  Come on guys, lets get our acts together. 

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Rural Living Headaches

When I bought a house back in May '07 I didn't really think of the location as rural. I am only 8 miles from work and 2 miles from the nearest convenience store. It takes about 10 minutes to get to the main commercial district with a Wal Mart, Target, Best Buy and all the usual big box stores. The same 10 minute drive can put you at the door of at least 30 eateries which cover most of the major world cuisines and every chain restaurant in the book. Our neighborhood is just outside the city limits so we are blessed with slightly lower property taxes, but still close civilization. However, I have found a few problems with our out of town location.

The first snag is that our water and sewer bill is higher than it is for city dwellers because we do not get these utilities from the municipal source. Instead we are a part of a community water coop. The rates are not exorbitant but they are about 40% higher, which makes for an extra $18 per month expense. I have also found that a monthly visit from the pest control service has been a necessary expense. In the city I never paid to have the exterminator on call, but just a little outside the city limits the regular visits from a large mouse, mole, snake, and bug population reminds us regularly of the not-too-distant history of our property as a cotton field. This amounts to an extra $35 per month bill that I failed to plan for when considering the costs of the new house.

The final, and most painful, added cost of our semi-rural dwelling is the complexity of digital services. Cable TV, internet, and telephone service are years behind what was available at all of my previous homes. The only phone service is old fashion land line from Ma Bell (at $40 per month with Caller ID and Call Waiting). The only television options come from the two satellite providers: DirectTV and EchoStar (Dish Network). We had been promised by the builder that the neighborhood would be wired for cable TV (with one provider available), but that has yet to materialize. I spent the first two months we lived in the new house making daily calls to the local cable installers to find out when service could be installed. Each day I got a different answer so I decided they did not truly want my business and picked the Dish ($81 per month including HD Service and Sports Package).

Next on the list is internet service. It is such a huge mess that could be its an entire post on its own. To make a long story short, AT&T does not offer DSL at the moment. The cable company will one day offer service, but for now it suffers from the same problem as cable TV service so all I get is the runaround. The satellite companies do not offer a very compelling product at the moment. Finally, a local company, sensing this market opening, offered a 900 mHz wireless solution.

I decided to give the local company a shot with wireless and was able to negotiate a reasonable price of $40 (plus tax) all inclusive. Normally there are high start up costs to buy equipment or an equipment rental fee for this type of product, but I worked my way up the chain and got them waived. After installing equipment in the attic and running a new piece of cable through the wall I was all set to surf the web.

Now I have telephone, TV, and internet from three different vendors; each sending me a monthly bill. If you add all of those costs up, I spend $165.00 each month for my technology needs. That is more than any of my other utilities (except natural gas during the winter). At my apartment I spent $99 a month for more channels, more bandwidth, and more features. Ugh.

Now, to make matters worse, since Dec 31 my internet connection has been down about 85% of the time. My wireless internet company had a series of equipment failures and network interruptions that has made it a complete crap shoot as to whether the internet would work or not. This is the reason I'd never go into the ISP business. Reliability is important for these services and so far my provider has gotten a failing grade. This month I've often had to scurry off to the library to try and manage my eBay auctions and post to Aspire 2 Wealth.

This poor quality of service has doubled my turn around time for shipping eBay items (which may result in the dreaded negative feedback) and forced me to cut back on my blogging too. Who knows, there may have even been a few loyal readers who got bored waiting for a new blog post and dropped me from their RSS feed. I can't imagine living, much less running a business, in the third world where I may or may not have electricity from day to day, and reliable internet connections are rare (if they exist at all). I didn't think I would have this type of experience only a stone throw away from the city limits. The whole thing has been maddening!

I'm sorry the posts have been less frequent lately, but in this case there is also a useful reminder about the consequences of rural services. Learn from my mistake and look into these types of things a little better than taking the word of a developer that, "of course the neighborhood will have cable and high speed" when you are in the market from a new home.

Please be sure to check out the archives and check out the rest of what Aspire 2 Wealth has to offer during this time of intermittent posting. Thanks for reading; wish me luck.

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Dentist Update

I had my dentist appointment today. As expected it wasn't the smoothest experience, but it wasn't a total disaster either. The office has a standard practice of collecting the copay or any balance due upfront before you are even allowed to sign in. This is the first dentist I've ever gone to that had this type of policy. I assume this is because they have an extremely difficult time collecting from their clients due to the type of client they serve. Don't that that the wrong way, when a dentist provides bottom of the barrel service (but lower prices) in a frankly poor neighborhood, they get clients with limited financial means or a lack of options. If my insurance covered ANY other dentist within 50 miles I would go somewhere else and based on conversations I've had with other clients they agree.

Paying up front would not be too much of a problem except that I firmly believe this visit should be "on the house." I talked to two different people in the dental field and a crown that shatters after 6 months is almost certainly defective from the start. When I had the crown installed the first time I left worried about the quality of the workmanship and really really MAD. Here is the story, my appointment to have the permanent crown fitted was at 1:00pm. I left the dentist's office at 7:00pm. I literally spent 6 hours at the dentist to have a 15 minute (again based on my experts) procedure done. They cracked 3 crowns trying to do the installation. See, the dentist just got a new machine to fabricate their own permanent crowns in house rather than having to send a mold off to the lab and wait. The problem is that the crowns they were making did not fit my mouth! They would try to force the crown on and low and behold it would snap because it was made too thin on the top surface. So anyway, on the 4th attempt they managed to get one that fit into my mouth. 6 months later it broke too.

I was not about to pay a single cent to have them fix what they did wrong before. I very nicely explained this to the receptionist. She said, "Ok let me look into this." She called me back up 10 minutes later and gave a slip of paper that had $55 written on it. She told me that was my balance and that I had to pay it. I told her nicely that was incorrect because the last time I came I paid via check over $1500 and there was no balance. She frowned and went back behind the counter. Again 10 minutes later she called me back up and gave me a slip of paper with $24 written on it. I very nicely explain that I know for a fact that I do not have a balance and I would be happy to fax her an invoice that stated my balance was $0 later that day. She said I was wrong because the $24 was for services rendered TODAY. I was confused because I had just explained to her how my visit today was a follow up for a past procedure and so on. This time she told me to sit down and someone would be out to explain it to me in a minute. This means that she is calling in the heavy artillery, because 5 minutes later a large frowning woman comes out glares at me and says, "You know you have to pay to see the doctor. If you aren't going to pay there is nothing I can do." I don't think I hid my anger very well but I manged to not raise my voice and said, "Can you please go tell the doctor that I am here because she screwed up my crown 6 months ago and I am here to get it fixed." The response, "We'll see what she says." My next move was to drop the law suit bomb but thankfully I didn't have to because a different secretary came out and told me that the doctor would be happy to see me free of charge. Finally.

30 minutes later I was escorted to a chair. 30 more minutes later someone came by to clean my teeth. Of course I wasn't there to get my teeth cleaned so I said that. The young lady looked confused and asked me if I was Mr. Such-and-such. Well that wasn't me so she left again. A little while later a gentleman took an x-ray of the afflicted tooth. He said he would be back when it was developed. 30 more minutes later the doctor showed up (a total of 2 hours after my appointment time) to tell me that indeed they would replace the crown free of charge, but I'd have to come back Dec 18th to get it done. In the mean time they stuck some goo on my tooth to keep my tongue from rubbing on the sharp edges of the broken crown and sent me on my way.

So again I had a terrible encounter with the dentist and the worlds worst customer service. The upside is that I don't have to take them to court to get my crown fixed. In a perfect world I'd just get a refund and go somewhere else but I can't image what a fight that would entail. There is also the problem of having no other providers in my dental network anywhere nearby. Sigh.

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