Steve – Page 24 – Steve's Blog

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies : Part 3

Well they processed the refund sometime in the past couple of weeks. It appeared on the Credit Card statement we got the other day.

I still have heard nothing from them, not a sausage, not a peep, not a word. OK so they processed the refund : its only take them 5 months. I guess actually expecting the lazy tossers to actually contact me and tell me they were doing it is too much to ask. As for apologising to me for being fucking incompetent and saying they are sorry….. ha ha ha.

Not the sort of Customer Service an Airline should have – makes them look like a bunch of cowboys!

A good time was had by all

Despite the weather (which actually was remarkably good) we had an excellent time at the 3rd Annual Cheltenham Beer Festival which was raising money for the Cheltenham Branch of The Samaritans.

Last years event raised £6000 which is pretty impressive and helps keep The Samaritans running providing a service that really does help save peoples lives.

Jon, Neil, Nick and I walked from Prestbury/Oakley and we got there just about at Noon.

I had a good chat with Sara (who I knew from my days in Parasoc) who does work for the Samaritans and she recommended a couple of beers that she said were well worth trying.

We grabbed a small gazebo and some chairs and headed to the bar. The range was pretty impressive and I even tried the Battledown Brewery’s “4 Kings” – which has an ABV of a mere 7.1%. Oddly enough even though it smelt very much like a barley wine it was remarkably thin.

The food was, as ever, good: good solid beef burgers, a pig roast and of course sausages in a bun (“Get em whilst their hot, inna bun with Onions!”)

Michael, Simon, Paul and Richard joined us a bit later – Richard had just flown back from Turkey that morning and was looking forward to drinking some proper beer.

We left mid evening – the beer was running out and we were all feeling a bit hungry. So we walked back into town, grabbed a pint at The Bell and then headed to Maheks for a curry. Maheks is usually very good but the service on Saturday night was extremely slow. The place wasn’t busy but it took nearly 2 hours for 7 of us to have starters and a main course (and even when the main course arrived it took over 5 minutes for them to get the last of our naan breads onto the table).

So we’re all looking forward to next summers event and they may even be planning one for the middle of winter!!

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies : Part Two

Early in June after battering my head against the wall over the fiasco with United Airlines and their inability to refund money they took from us I found that their refunds department now had an email address rather than a fax number( which they didn’t want to let people have). You CANNOT phone the refunds department… oh no, that would be too easy. So I sent them an email explaining everything and giving details so that they could process the refund properly and give us our sodding money back.

They never replied, hell they never even acknowledged that they had received the email.

So I sat and waited.

It’s now July 10th and they haven’t done a thing.

I notice that their refunds department now no longer has an email address on the website. So they now CANNOT be contacted by any other way than snail mail. I think this says a lot about them – their refunds department is not contactable easily or in any dynamic way at all.

So I’ve now written a long letter to their Customer Services department. Not that I expect them to do anything.

Next step is the president of the company : Glenn F. Tilton. I bet he doesn’t have an email address either, or maybe I should try Graham W. Atkinson who is “Executive Vice President and Chief Customer Officer”

United Airlines have basically committed fraud against us – they have stolen money from us and refuse to return it.

Life, and stuff

Well this weekend is the Friends of Cheltenham Samaritans beer festival. This is their third annual beer festival and if the other two were anything to go by then this too will be a great day out and with a very worthy cause. I’ve never needed the Samaritans myself because I’ve had people I’ve been able to talk to but its got close a couple of times.

So we will be there just after noon on Saturday and we will, what ever the weather throws at us, have a great time drinking good beer in good company.

I’ve still not uploaded any photos from Maine to my Flickr account. I guess I need to upgrade to pro as I’m still on the free account and I need to do some serious re-organisation and categorisation of my photos.

Kathy got a phone call on Monday night saying that Jen had been in a car accident. The news made the Kennebec Journal They flew her to Bangor as Augusta doesn’t have facilities to land a helecopter. In the UK the Air ambulance doesn’t care about landing pads – they’ll use car parks and playing fields as temporary landing pads. She had exploratory surgery on Tuesday as she said she had pelvic pain and her pelvis is cracked in two places. She is in a lot a pain and we’re waiting to hear if they will be able to move her nearer to home as Bangor is quite a way from Waterville (where she lives) and Augusta where her grandmother lives.

Here are some photos of her car. We all think that two cracks in her pelvis is a very lucky escape. The maroon car is the car that hit hers.

So its been rather a stressful week for Kathy who has spent most of her evenings on the phone talking to people and keeping people up to date with what is going on.

Typical!

I said I’d write more about Maine when i got home.

That was a month ago. I’ve not even gone through the 600+ photos I took and worked out which ones to upload to Flickr so I can include them in here.

So what have I been up to?

Well I’ve upgraded WPMU that this site uses and debugged someones WPMU plugin to get it to work with subdirectories.

I’ve also been recoding the Canalplan tagging code so that it works properly as a plug in without having to edit core WPMU files. Also I had to recode some of it to cope with the Global Tags plugin because it lost track of the blog it should have been pulling the information from. This means that Global Tags that pull back mapped / logged entries actually work and display the summary information and / or the map rather than blank spaces.

It was my birthday yesterday… 42! Good God. It hardly feels like yesterday when we were doing the Gloucester Road Pub crawl for my 30th birthday and I remember half the people wanting to watch England crash out of the Euro competition… which they did!

Back at Home

Well we got back home on Friday. Had a couple of minor problems with luggage but its sorted now.

I will be writing up some posts about the rest of the time in Maine when I’ve got some time… like next week at work!

And I’ll get some photos uploaded onto Flickr too

The Wedding

Well all the preparation is done, the chapel is decorated, as is the venue for the party afterwards. Its been a couple of crazy days for Kathy with late nights and early mornings.

Not so much for me as I’ve got my wrist in a splint having taken a fall early in the week. Nothing broken but it hurts like hell.

So wedding today, tidy up tomorrow and then on Monday if the weather is good we’re off out somewhere. Don’t know where yet but we are.

Will post some pics of the wedding when I get round to it!

Busy doing nothing

Well its Sunday, Mothers Day, mothering Sunday, or whatever. Well it is over here in the USA.

Kathy took Jen down to Portland for a makeover before her wedding (which is next weekend) and then Jen is taking her out for lunch.

So I’m back here in Hallowell busy doing nothing. Its a sunny day so I may get my book (The Naming of the Dead) and go and sit outside and soak up some of those rays.

The weather has actually been better than they forecast – it was supposed to be much more overcast and cooler for most of the week. We’re hoping that next week the weather will hold so we can get out and do a few things – like getting to the coast or up to Bar Harbor – I kind of want to go up Cadillac mountain and watch the world go by!

Cinco de Mayo

“Over 100 years ago, France started a war with Mexico. In the Mexican city of Puebla, two forts blocked the advance of the French troops. There were about 6,000 French and 2,000 Mexican soldiers. The Mexicans were under the command of General Ignacio Zaragoza.

On May 5, 1862, the French attacked the two forts. Before the day was over, one of the forts was destroyed and more than 1,000 French soldiers were killed. The Mexicans had won the battle. This battle is known as the Battle of Puebla.”

So what has that got to do with me and Maine?

Simple – we had a day out yesterday and as part of the thank you for driving us down to New Hampshire Kathy and I treated our friends to supper at “On the Border” – a Mexican restaurant.

Me, being a simple Englishman had no idea that May 5th was a special day, and I’d been confused in the morning when I’d heard the DJ on the radio ( 102.5 – The Peak ) in the morning saying it was Cinco de Mayo.

Maine, of course, has almost no Mexican population but I guess any excuse to drink and eat too much!!

It was actually quite enjoyable.

Maine – here we come again

Well we’re off to Maine for nearly 3 weeks. We’ve got my step-daughters wedding to go to (I’m doing the photographs) and we want to spend time with Kathy’s mum and we want to go sightseeing. Kathy wants to go down to Pemmaquid and sit by the ocean for a bit.

MapLibre

We know that its not going to be easy going back. Because of the weather Kathy’s dad hasn’t actually been buried yet so there hasn’t been any real closure and we know that there are going to a lot of tears during the three weeks we are there.

Kathy wants to know if there is anywhere I’d like to go and there are a few places but it depends on which car we have and how we all feel. I’ll have to think it through and see how we all feel.