2003-05-25 - 8:40 p.m.
CREATIVITY
Creativity is not always a good thing. A few (very few) of my clients are remarkably creative in how they commit their crimes. Their crimes are crimes just the same. Some prosecutors are creative in charging crimes, such as the prosecutor who charged as separate crimes the theft of the steering wheel, the seats, the wheels, the hubcaps, the transmission, and the body of an automobile. Their creativity generally warps justice. After Friday, however, it appears United Airlines is getting creative�and their creativity is not good either.
The adventure began innocently enough. I received notice that the airline had made a schedule change that affected our flight reservations to Phoenix. Receiving notice of a change, while annoying, is not unusual when the reservations are made several months in advance. I glanced at the changes, expecting to be annoyed. What I saw flabbergasted me.
As was true originally, our new itinerary required us to change planes. Changing planes did not phase me. The tickets were cheaper because we were going from Madison and changing planes. But this itinerary added a new twist. We now were arriving in Chicago after our second flight left Chicago. My job occasionally has asked that I be in two courtrooms at the same time but never before have I been asked to leave somewhere before I arrived.
So I called customer service at the Internet site that issued the tickets. Clearly, this problem was beyond the resources of the website itself to solve. Clearly, this problem required a person, not a computer, to solve it. After all, if the computer were thinking logically, there would be no problem.
The first call sent me into personless hell. When the lovely mechanical computer voice asked me whether my problem involved an existing reservation or making new reservations, I foolishly annunciated �existing reservations.� I then told it my trip identification number and it told me that my reservations were confirmed and, without noting any problem at all, recited the new reservations. I sighed and hung up because I was getting nowhere.
The next time, I told the lovely mechanical computer voice that I wanted to make a new reservation. While I don�t worry as much about lying to machines as to people, I did not worry at all. I did want to make a new reservation. The old one was not working for me or the rest of my family. After some time on hold with trashy music playing in my ear, I reached a real, live person.
I explained my problem. He told me that my problem should not happen and that the computers prevented it from happening. I told him that it happened and double-dared him to look at the situation on his screen. (I wasn�t a kid once for nothing. No young man I ever knew could easily resist a double-dare.) He looked. He laughed. He agreed I had a problem.
We then debated the solution. He wanted to put me on a later flight out of Chicago. My position was that I liked the flight from Chicago, could make it by driving from my house, and could see no reason to change that flight. He then proposed a flight through Denver that was acceptable to him and to me but not to the computer. Finally, he convinced the computer to give us an earlier flight out of Madison and to do it without charging us a fee for changing the flight.
There is now a month between today and the trip to Tucson (via Phoenix) for my parents 50th wedding anniversary. Here�s hoping that the airline does not get creative again. For all I know, next time the airline will decide that we should travel with the luggage�and you know what the odds of getting there then would be.
LAST YEAR: Making the Best of a Mistake
Laundering Money
Ashes, Ashes, All Fall Down
The Perfect Gift
Being Scarce
Adventures in Prisonland
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Copyright 2006 by Ellen |
