David S. Atkinson's Blog, page 184

Facebook Goes Down And I Don’t Notice

Apparently Facebook went down the other day. Some people panicked, though most seemed to just have fun with it and pretended it meant something much more significant like the end of days. Personally, I didn’t even notice.

Mind you, I keep a decent eye on Facebook. However, not constant. It seemed like I’d checked fairly recently, but I brought up the app at one point and people were talking about it having been down. I’d have never known at all if I hadn’t seen those messages. I would have been totally oblivious.

Does the fact I didn’t notice mean I’m not too dependent on social media? I doubt it. I wouldn’t give myself that much credit. The outage just happened to coincide with a period of time in which I didn’t check Facebook. That’s all.

Some people got worked up though, as someone always does when there is an outage of any kind or any duration. It reminded me of an earthquake I was present for in Seattle one time. It was only something like an upper 4 or a really lower 5, but people went on and on a bunch about it (particularly the news). Me? I hadn’t noticed it at all. I happened to be at a bookstore at the time, standing up from looking at a lower shelf as it occurred. Made it so I didn’t feel a thing, confused when the people I was with came running up to me to talk about how an earthquake had just happened.

I can miss a lot.

Just Wait Until Frontier Makes Customer Service A 1-900 Number

How bad do things have to be for an airline before they cut the toll free number for customer service? Well, however bad things are for Frontier Airlines. It’s now a toll call for them (Strangely for a Denver, Colorado based company, a Salt Lake City, Utah number that’s long distance for anyone not in that area), and you probably still have to wait 40 minutes or more to get a hold of someone.

How far can you cut costs before things just don’t even work anymore? This is a pretty standard thing to need to offer. Customers need customer service, particularly in the airline industry. Airlines have some of the worst customer service anyway. Can it be cut any further without totally flummoxing the works?

I know many people use cell phones these days, where minutes matter as opposed to local/long distance distinctions. I know that this will also save the company money and they’re looking to save money anywhere they can. Is this too far though? I don’t even want to fly Frontier because I’m already scared of how the company is run. I need to be sure I can get somewhere when I book a ticket, at least reasonably close to the time promised. I’m just to uncertain that will happen with Frontier, or that the experience won’t be a nightmare. The money saved is just not enough for the risks I perceive. A cheaper ticket isn’t cheaper if I can’t be sure it gets anywhere. That results in an expenditure of some kind for nothing.

I only fly them when the other choice is Spirit. That’s the only one that seems worse, and more and more it feels like a toss up.

It seems like I’d rather just shoot myself out of a homemade catapult and hope for the best.

Oddly, apparently Frontier hasn’t taken much flack about this yet, or so they say. Just wait for stage two of their plan though, 1-900 number customer service. $3.99 for the first minute and $1.99 for each minute thereafter.

Good luck.

The Pope’s Visit Keeps Making This Run Through My Mind:

The Pope’s visit keeps having this run though my mind:

http://www.popscreen.com/v/3q12/The-Popeas-Visit

Anybody else?

Trying To Decide How Upset At Expedia I Still Am

I’m trying to figure out how upset at Expedia I still am. They’ve at least somewhat fixed their error, but it was still a huge hassle and I’m left still feeling uncertain about whether or not something else might go wrong. Even fixed, it was still an unpleasant experience.

Let me explain.

The wife and I booked a package trip on Expedia to go out of the country. The package was to cover a set of dates and include flights, shuttle, and a stay at an all inclusive resort. If the problem was evident in anything while booking, we certainly didn’t see it. It definitely wasn’t in the confirmation emails they sent. However, my wife luckily viewed the booked trip on the mobile app. That’s when we saw that the flights they’d booked us didn’t match the hotel stay.

They had us checking into our hotel a day after we arrived in the foreign country.

As it turned out, the Expedia site had a glitch. When it pulled together a package, it erroneously pulled it together with a hotel portion that was one day short. This caused it to be cheaper than it should be, and certainly caused problems. When we called about the problem, Expedia explained the error. They told us we needed to pay $441 more for the additional night to fix the package to what we had originally been offered. Otherwise, they told us we could cancel and rebook, which would also be more expensive because flights and hotels had gone up.

Now, I know the glitch resulted in a price that was cheaper than it should have been, but they offered us the package for a particular price. Regardless if that was cheaper because of a glitch, it’s what they offered. If the glitch was their fault, it was on their shoulders to fix.

We demanded to speak to a supervisor. The supervisor was already familiar with the situation. Clearly, other people had called. She said she could fix this by charging us for the extra night and refunding it. That was cool, it fixed the error.

However, I still have to wait for the refund to show. The way credit cards work, authorizations are immediate and refunds can take a while. Also, we had to deal with the unpleasantness of this happening at all. That doesn’t even get into the fact that Expedia was aware of this error and never contacted us. Nothing in the emails they sent revealed the problem and they waited for us to notice on our own. What if we hadn’t gone onto the app and seen the problem before we arrived in the foreign country?

No, I appreciate that I managed to get the trip cheaper than I should have (at the price they originally offered despite their mistake). I appreciate that they fixed it. I don’t appreciate having to watch my credit card to be sure the refund posts. I don’t appreciate having to have a half hour to hour phone call in order to have this fixed. I don’t appreciate them not telling me and waiting for me to notice. I don’t appreciate how uncertain this makes me feel about whether or not something else might go wrong with the arrangements. I don’t appreciate the nasty feel this leaves over the whole vacation, even if it might all work out fine.

I just would have appreciated it if buying a trip package through them had been less problematic. I’m not as mad as if they hadn’t fixed the problem, but I’m still upset that something happened at all. I want to be able to trust them that something like this won’t ever happen. It makes me nervous to use their service.

Now You Can Start Celebrating Fall

Okay, you can probably start celebrating fall now. It’s starts tomorrow.

I posted about this a little while ago because so many people were already acting like it was fall the moment we got into September. Most of September is still summer though, and I have no need to advance any faster towards my mortality. Pumpkin spice lattes could wait. It’s probably time though, no need to ask you to wait any more.

Be carful not to go ahead and jump right into winter though. That doesn’t begin in the western hemisphere until December 21. I know it might get cold before then, but save winter for the winter and worry about fall today instead.

Wondering About Animated Gifs Again: “Good Times”

I’ve mentioned before that I occasionally get an odd thought in my head wondering if I can find an animated gif related to a particular thing. Usually, I hop on over to Google images and do a quick search to see what I come up with. Sometimes I don’t find anything, but most times I do. I did again today.

Today? Good Times animated gif:

No More Apocalypse Predictions!

No! We’re done! No more apocalypse predictions! It’s over, finished, caput, done. Mormon Apocalypse 2015? What the heck is going on here?

Y2K, the rapture, the Mayans, imminent asteroid strikes, it just keeps going. How many apocalypse predictions do we have to stomach? We barely get by one (of course) and another one rolls right up. It’s insane! How can people take these seriously? How many apocalypse predictions do we have to have before people stop believing so easily in apocalypse predictions?

Could the world end at some point? Sure, it has to eventually. Humanity probably long before the planet itself. But these predictions? How ridiculous do these have to be?

It’s the end of the world as we know it…and it’s starting to give me a headache.

ENOUGH WITH THE APOCALYPSES!!!!!

 

Wouldn’t It Be Nice If We Could Just Share One Image Of A Teacher?

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just have one photo of a teacher to like and/or share to teach students about internet safety?

I’m sure you’ve seen this one before, or one of the thousands like it. You know the drill, a teacher posts a picture and wants it to be liked and/or shared because his/her/whatever students don’t necessarily understand how quickly and/or far things can spread on the internet and he/she/whatever wants to illustrate this to them. Millions of shares. Millions of likes. Some more than others, but still.

You almost can’t go a day without seeing one. Perhaps more than one per day.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just have one of these teachers could point for illustration purposes instead of having to each share their own? There are over 3.1 million public school teachers in the United States (according to here). That’s a lot of potential photos to like and/or share. I know it’s more convincing if it’s one personal to a particular class, but this is overwhelming. Do we even respond to these the way we do to other images anymore? Personally, I’ve started screening them out. Not completely though. Not enough that it doesn’t seem to clog up my social media feeds.

I suppose there probably isn’t anything to do about this. They theoretically serve a good purpose and all. Still, I just wish we could have less of these…and many other things clogging up my social media feeds (I’m looking at you, Ray-Ban, whose products I won’t even consider buying anymore because I’ve permanently associated them with spam).

Unexplained Disappearances Solved!

I’ve managed to puzzle out several unexplained disappearances. I’ve solved them! All it took was a little detective work. Check it out:

Lyman‘s last appearance in Garfield:

The last time Coco was ever seen on The Golden Girls:

Chuck Cunningham‘s last words on Happy Days:

The penultimate moments before Charlotte Braun disappeared from Peanuts forever:

See? It all adds up, all so clear now. It was THE ILLUMINATI!!!!

Other Things That Texas Teacher Mistook For A Bomb

Ahmed Mohamed is big news. The kid made a homemade clock and brought it to school to impress his engineering teacher. However, another teacher mistook it for a bomb and Ahmed Mohamed was arrested.

Now, the absurdity of this is causing a lot of us to twitch unpleasantly, but it makes a little more sense when you place it in context (not really, I’m joking). In the other teacher’s defense, here are several other things that she has previously mistaken for a bomb:

A goldfish:

Ramen noodles:

Her own hat:

The Stay Puft Marshmallow Man:

Kansas City, Missouri:

Ernest Borgnine:

See? It wasn’t that the teacher was unjustly suspicious because Ahmed Mohamed is Muslim. It’s just that she has some issues. Deep issues.