First they tell you to swipe your credit card.
Then they tell you to push cancel.
Then they tell you to push credit.
I wish they’d make up their mind.
Archive for the ‘Poutpourri for 200 Alex’ Category
First they tell you to swipe your credit card…
Friday, August 20th, 2010Who’s really behind Steven Slater’s spectacular resignation from Jet Blue?
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010
Once you get past the viral thrill of rehashing Steven Slater’s “bailout” from a career as a flight attendant that he could no longer stand to hold, the debate – to the degree that any debate is required at all – quickly gets to the question of who was more wrong?
Was it Slater, who cursed at his passengers, deployed the emergency slide on the Jet Blue plane to which he was assigned, and (worst) stole two cans of beer before escaping?
Or was it a still-unnamed woman passenger, whom he accuses of berating him and hitting him in the head with either the door of an overhead compartment or one of the bags in that compartment?
How about this third option: It’s the airlines.
They have to accept responsibility for helping to turn passengers into snarling beasts with overbooked flights, endlessly punitive fees, optimized fares that make no sense to consumers, and a practice of setting flight schedules that they can’t possibly maintain. Then they exacerbate the effect of all these insults by bombarding us with irreconcilable advertising campaigns to convince us how much we’re going to love the experience.
Further, they have to accept responsibility for their role turning flight attendants and other customer-facing personnel into recalcitrant and uncaring bureaucrats. The tools? Serial layoffs, confrontational union negotiations, low pay and a general disregard for their value. (When stranded near Chicago O’Hare during the 9/11 crisis, I met a dozen flight attendants from a handful of airlines – all of whom told me the hotel and meals were on their own dime during the unscheduled grounding.)
I’ve flown enough to know the truth of the matter. Some passengers, maybe even many, are simply boors who shouldn’t be out in public. And some flight attendants should probably find another line of work before they give their next safety briefing.
But for the rest of us, the airlines need to shape up. I can only imagine how complex and difficult it is to operate in this industry. Executives throughout the industry make incremental decisions that help the bottom line, and they are skilled at justifying why these decisions are in the long-term best interest of the customers.
But it’s simply not the case; there is no justification for selling a ticket and then notifying the passenger a day later that the flight is overbooked and an extra $25 will guarantee he isn’t bumped (this has happened to me a handful of times).
It’s simple really: Each airline needs to figure out a way to make money while treating passengers and employees like something other than refugees and wardens, respectively.
Vuvuzela: The story behind the buzz
Tuesday, June 15th, 2010Those irritating vuvuzela horns that South Africans (and now everyone else, it seems) like to blow from the first minute to the last of a soccer match seem to have taken much of the world by surprise.
Vuvuzela or stadium horn?
But they are, and always have been, readily available in the United States. They’re sold as school-spirit items (School spirit stadium horn), novelty items (Windy City Novelties), stadium contraband (May be banned in a stadium near you!), and curiously even as magic accessories – with a collapsible option, perhaps for sneaking them into stadiums under your game-day jersey (Madhatter Magic Shop). Nobody seems to wholesale them for much more than $2.35 apiece.
Wikipedia’s history of the vuvuzela traces them from Mexico to Brazil and, only in the last decade, to South Africa. Not mentioned in that history is their longstanding use, as I heard on a radio call-in show yesterday, in stadiums of the Canadian Football League.
And am I the only person in the United States who remembers being able to buy them at baseball and football games in the United States in the 1970s and, perhaps, early ’80s? At some point, they were regulated out of existence here – apparently for the same reason that many 2010 World Cup spectators want them banned: They’re really loud and really annoying. But I clearly remember my dad buying me a stadium horn one time; I think he shelled out $3.50 for it in the days before the blessedly quiet and equally ridiculous giant foam finger became the must-have for loyal fans in Anywhere USA.
The zazu
The manufacturer of the “authentic” vuvuzela (www.vuvuzela.com) offers them in their original form, or sheathed in a removable fabric sock of your favorite World Cup team’s colors (the sockzela). You can get them with a beaded sheath, in a miniature size (for an easy getaway when you blow it in the ear of the wrong football hooligan), or in a curved antelope-horn shape, called the zazu and looking suspeiciously like a shofar.
The shofar
Vuvuzelas reportedly sell at World Cup venues for about $3, which seems about the right price for creating a worldwide phenomenon capable of driving television sound technicians to an early grave. But if your only exposure to the vuvuzela is what you see and hear during this short blast of World Cup coverage, then you’re missing a little bit of a treat. Perhaps as a gesture of international goodwill, the folks who run the official vuvuzela website have provided us with this intriguing video of a zaza choir.
It’s got that Paul Simon/Rhythm of the Saints feel you expect from South Africa, and it’s good enough to make you take those giant foam fingers out of your ears – if only for a couple minutes.
The zaza as you’ll never hear it at a soccer match
Identity theft pitch of the week
Tuesday, April 27th, 2010This effort to scare me into giving up the goods got caught in the spam filter this week. Except for removal of the phishing link, it’s published here exactly as it appeared:
Hello Visa Card Client ,
Your Bank Card is suspended, becaus we have noted a problem on your Card.
We have determine that someone has maybe using your card without your permission. For your protection, we have suspended your credit card. To exercise this suspention, Click Here follow the procedure, and specify for Update your Credit Card.
Note: If this isn’t complete 15 May 2010, we will be forced to suspend your indfiniment card, because it can be used for fraudulent
Thank you for your cooperation in this folder.
Thank You,
Customer service support.
The new worst line in which to find yourself standing
Friday, April 23rd, 2010
Worse than the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, the post office or the car rental counter in a tropical location…
…is waiting in line at the Red Box.
In praise of the external combustion engine
Saturday, March 27th, 2010The Tata Nano is billed as the world’s cheapest car. But not, apparently, when you 
consider the cost per mile to operate it. In the photo at left, a Nano finds a spectacular way to say “Ta-ta” to its owner: bursting into flames on the way home from the dealership where it had just been purchased.
As seen in this article from OneIndia.in, the Indian press is taking it seriously – this being at least the third reported incident of the Tata’s external combustion engine.
Back in the USA, there’s a lot to learn from the issue. For instance, here’s how it could appear in standardized testing:
Tata is to Toyota as:
- the Cleveland Browns are to the Cleveland Indians;
- Jesse James is to Tiger Woods;
- Tiger Woods is to David Letterman;
- “Hey look, a blimp” is to “What did you do with my investments, Mr. Madoff?”
Lost cat, Jan 2, 2010
Saturday, January 2nd, 2010We found this sweet, inquisitive cat shivering in the parking lot behind Shaker Square in Cleveland on Jan 2, 2010. We hope to find the owner. Please pass this along to as many people as possible. To identify this cat, call 216-321-2846.
Fun with spam, Lesson #113
Saturday, November 28th, 2009Content generators – we used to call them writers and reporters – are having a tough couple years. But they can rest easy on this evidence that, of the many indignities they may suffer, offshoring their jobs isn’t likely to be one of them anytime soon:
__________________
Sender: ydasyl@aol.com
Subject: We transform one dollar into one thousand!
Date: November 28, 2009 3:10:53 PM EST
Do you dream to have a rest with family this summer, but there is no money for this purpose? We shall prompt you the decision of this problem. Everything, that is required from you, it to register at the site of our online-casino, fill up the balance for ANY sum, which is suitable for you, and to start enjoying the gambling. You needn’t to be the master of board games to win huge money here. It is checked up by time!
Some inside dope on ‘New Moon’
Friday, November 20th, 2009There’s a new movie out today that seems to be of special interest to girls between the ages of 11 and 16. I’m not sure if you’ve heard about it, but it’s called New Moon. If it doesn’t ring a bell, here’s a short clip that’s been running on TV. (I just can’t see this too many times.)
There haven’t been so many young girls screaming so loud and so long at the same time since the historic day Justin Timberlake went solo.
Am I just grumpy, or has their screaming gotten shriller since the days of The Beatles? I’m anticipating that by the time the third movie of the Twilight series comes out, their youthful larynxes will combine with my aging eardrums to reach the effective pitch of a dog whistle.
And what’s there to say about the 50-year-old women who stand in with them and scream in solidarity for the bare-chested hunky young actors? They have more in common with John Leguizamo in To Wong Foo With Love Julie Newmar than Ann-Margret in Bye Bye Birdie. Other than that, and the fact that I’m glad they aren’t hanging out near my son’s school, I’m pretty much speechless.
The cast has about 9,000 young, attractive people in it. So as the pre-opening hype machine was working, you could tune into any talk show – morning, afternoon, evening or late-night – and be assured of seeing a different cast member with his own, personal shrieking harem. (In fact, if Turkish sultans had elicited this kind of audible reaction from young women, the word ‘harem’ would have a very different meaning today.) With every last cast member apparently booked onto every one of these shows, there hasn’t been a minute of spare airtime in the last two months for other important stuff like John and Kate’s divorce, Afghanistan war policy, or Lindsay Lohan’s VD.
At least the movie has started its run now, bringing the inevitable decline to the 9-and-a-half weeks of hysteria (until the Blu-Ray comes out – I’m guessing just in time for Valentine’s Day).
Finally, something really important that you may not have realized about this unheralded movie: Its release coincided exactly (give or take 36 hours) with the actual new moon in the lunar cycle.
Coincidence? Or proof that President Obama is a disciple of Satan?
News: Not dead, but being reborn
Thursday, November 19th, 2009This article, on the effort by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to start a local news service in Honolulu, validates my postion that journalism and the news business are not dead or dying. They are being taken up by a new generation of media outsiders – people who value news and aren’t so burdened by years of “training” in the industry, that they can see new possibilities that may exist. It also helps that they aren’t burdened by an infrastructure built over decades to support old business models.
The article doesn’t say much about Omidyar’s business model – but he intends the service to be for-profit and to generate new contet.
A couple things about this jump out at me – in addition to the obvious fact that it’s at least one more person who’s not willing to give up on the news.
- New news businesses tend to be local – where there is less competition to provide information, and where the advertising crisis has had the least impact.
- The goals of new news businesses are modest; the ones I’m hearing about tend to seek primacy in a small area, to have a good impact on a relatively small number of people, and make a little money in the process.
Which strikes me as a pretty good way to rebuild an industry that is in historic transition.
Years from now, there will be big players again, who have figured out how to consolidate the many small for-profit news operations that are popping up. Some of those big players will be the same names that are familiar in media circles today. Others will be new.
And the news business will look very different from the way it does right now.
But it will be a business and an industry.
Somehow.
