Author: Steve

United Airlines – Fly the Unfriendly Skies

I’m not in a happy mood at all.

At about 6am on Thursday February 28th we got a telephone call from Kathy’s sister telling us that her dad had died unexpectedly.

It was obvious that Kathy, at least, needed to get back to Maine as soon as possible.

To try to make things as easy as we could we wanted a flight that took her directly to Portland, Maine, rather than leaving her at Boston and having to take the Concord Trailways bus.

United Airlines seemed to do this so we decided to book with them. Rather than use the internet Kathy phoned them. United then took lots of details, such as her fathers full name, the funeral home he had been taken to and the name of the director of the funeral home. We assumed that this meant she would get some decent treatment from United or a decent air fair.

How wrong we were. The ticket was £499 (more than it was if we’d bought it on line).

We should have realised then, as previous experience of United had shown, that it was all down hill from there.

They promised us the E-ticket would be in the email soon. Nope.. after hassling them several times it actually turned up at 2pm on Friday 29th

So Saturday morning we drive over to Heathrow. We get there and United say they need the credit card that was used to buy the ticket (i.e. MY credit card) to confirm the ticket. So Kathy gives it to them.

She goes through security and I go home.

By the time I get home which is 5 minutes after the plane has taken off the United Airlines website shows that it will be landing 30 minutes late in Washington due to “operational reasons” at Dulles. On the plane they tell Kathy that it will all be fine. A couple hours out from Washington they admit they will be late but it is OK as the connecting flight to Portland is also delayed

So Kathy gets off at Washington and gets through immigration and customs and makes it to the gate to find the flight has closed and she cannot get on.

So she has to try to get on the next flight. Which she manages to do.

That flight is then delayed.

She arrives at her parents’  in Augusta at 03:30am EST –  a mere 26 hours after leaving Cheltenham.

So we think the crap has ended there.

No…

Mid March we get our credit card bill:

4 March : United Air US Ticket Mailed 15.00 US Dollars 29 Feb
4 March : United Air US E-TKT 871.42 US Dollars 29 Feb
5 March : United Air UK Heathrow 499.30 29 Feb

Only the 3rd transaction is the ticket we got emailed to us. The other two are phantom transactions invented by United Airlines. I mean who the hell would buy a ticket on 28/29th Feb for a flight on March 1st and ask for it to be posted – and how the hell do you post an E-Ticket?

So I phone them. They try to blame it on us booking on line. I explain that we phoned them so its all down to them. They agree a refund.

We keep an eye on the credit card… no refund comes through. They usually come through in a few days.

I phone them on Monday and I’m assured that they did process it on March 22nd but it could take “two billing cycles to come through”.

Wednesday evening it appears on our credit card.. a refund from United Airlines – for £218.30 . Now I knew the dollar was weak but how the hell can $886.42 turn into £218.30.

So yesterday I phone them … you just phone their customer line and ignore all the push button options until you fall off the end. I’m told that they cannot do anything that I need to contact the refund department. I loose it – I explain the whole situation that the fault is ENTIRELY United Airlines as they did everything and that frankly the way my wife and I have been treated by United in this whole farce is enough to put us off ever flying with them again. After about 20 minutes they tell me that they’ve pushed it forward to their refunds department and to phone back tomorrow for an update.

So this morning I phone and get someone who says they can’t see anything on their systems. Eventually they do and say “its gone to the refunds department” and to phone back “the end of next week”.

Is this really the sort of treatment you should expect from a company like United. They have basically ripped us off and kept nearly $900 of OUR money for in excess of a month and they don’t seem to want to give it back.

Fly United : fly the friendly Skies.

I don’t fucking think so.

On the Road to Nowhere………………

So much for the plans for Easter.

We knew that the weather forecast wasn’t good for the weekend but we thought we’d give it a go. I picked Kathy up from work at 4pm and then after spending nearly twenty minutes at Sainsbury’s putting 60 litres of petrol in the car (thanks in part to a complete moron who decided to pull in front on me when I was paying my bill and blocking me in), we headed off for the boat.

Our plan was to use the motorway as far as possible. So we actually made it upto to Worcester North before bailing out and heading cross country. The going was good until we hit Kidderminster (Ah such a surprise to be stuck in Kiddoi!) where we spent 20 minutes sitting a queue where we did about 200 yards upto the ringroad round about.

After that it was pretty plain sailing and we actually arrived in Market Drayton at about 6:30. After unloading into the boat we headed off to The Talbot – a mere 2 hours and 40 minutes after we’d left Cheltenham. Its been a long time since Kathy and I visited to the Talbot – in fact the last time we were there was on our honeymoon back in 2002 when we both got rather merry and nearly fell in the canal on the way back to the boat (The next day has to go down in the History of Mintball as one of the shortest days cruising – I think it was about 1000 yards!)

The weather was pretty crap by the time we left the pub but the clockwork torch Nick bought worked very well so at least we weren’t staggering along the towpath in total darkness.

So we got back to the boat and went to bed.

Then the weather turned really rather unpleasant and the boat was rolling from side to side in the wind and kept slamming against the jetty and backwards into the concrete banking …. we’ve actually carved a very nice chunk out of the bank side so I guess we need to get some extra fendering down there. Neither of us got much sleep and morning arrived rather too soon. I decided to be lazy and stay in bed for a bit – partially supported by Kathy telling me that it was not only blowing a gale but it was also actually snowing, and certainly was not the sort of day that you actually wanted to be boating.. OK if you were out on holiday and you had to get somewhere you’d be boating but if you’re out for a few “fun” days then you’d do what we decided to do and NOT move.

So we had a very relaxing day doing absolutely sod all, which is probably what we both needed. We connected the laptop to the stereo and watched a couple of movies – which works remarkably well considering that its not something the we ever really thought of when we put things together a couple of years ago.

Its that time of year again..

… when the roads are gridlocked, the pubs and restaurants are full to over flowing and you can’t actually enjoy living in town.

Yes that’s right – its The Cheltenham Festival. When the world and his dog descends on the town, drinks too much Guinness and then throws up or pisses in the street.

So just what is the impact of the festival on town? Well it took 90m minutes for me to do a round trip to Gloucester today (about 30 minutes longer than normal) and the roads are a complete mess. Its not worth going out for a drink because everywhere is full of drunks from the racecourse. And of course THEY are more important than the locals because they are so pissed and flash with the cash that they don’t notice if they are over charged, and don’t even think about trying to go and eat somewhere.

I don’t want to even think about the carbon foot print of the festival. 4 days, approx 60,000 people per day. Thats a lot of cars/buses/coaches. Then there’s the shipping (and storage and preparation) of all the beer and food they consume over the four days and nights at the racecourse and down in town, and the placing of over 3 miles of “no parking” cones because these people will park ANYWHERE – they don’t give a toss about anyone else, and the shipping in of all the horses, the jockeys and the racing teams.

Then what about the litter, the mess that the council have to clear up (and I wonder who picks up the bill for that), and the policing? Tons of drunk drivers around and tons of people drunk and disorderly but no-one seems to get stopped/charged/fined.

But its “good for the town” apparently… not sure how

Off work

Last week I basically hit rock bottom. On Tuesday (one week ago today) I had major problems and was pretty much non-functional and I somehow managed to get through the day without considering anything too drastic.

I’m not going to say anything about the text messages I got.. “Can you just phone us, we need to know something…”. Ill means Ill – not “I just can’t be arsed coming into the office”

I went into work on Wednesday – primarily because I wanted to talk to the HR director about the process for me going off sick.

My Boss works from the US and when he came on line at about 2pm he asked me if I was feeling any better. I said that no I wasn’t. He then said the most amazing thing:

“If you are sick you don’t need to come into work”

Wow – that’s pretty fucking decent of him isn’t it.

“If you are sick you can work from home”

Err WHAT? What the Fuck? If I’m ill I can work from home… well that’s so mighty damned generous of him isn’t it.

By about 3pm I was a wreck and knew I had to take the rest of the week off. Well that went down like a lead balloon I can tell you.

I saw the doc on Thursday (having moved my appointment back by a week) and he signed me off work for 2 weeks and told me to keep my mobile phone turned off . I logged onto my works email account to set and out of office reply and there were quite a few emails demanding that I let them know things.

I ignored them because I knew if I replied to any of them that they’d just snow me under.

So here I am – and I’m feeling a lot better surprisingly It didn’t help that we got a phone call early on Thursday morning letting us know that Kathy’s dad had died on Wednesday night. So Kathy spent most of Thursday getting a flight back to Maine sorted out and I took her down on Saturday morning.

So I’ve been out for too much beer and Vietnamese food on Saturday (Simon’s birthday) and then I fixed Simon’s Internet Connection for him on Sunday and then had a couple of beers as we listened to Señor Coconut and his Orchestra’s take on some Kraftwerk Classics – and until you’ve heard “Showroom Dummies” played in the Latin style you really have no idea what you are missing.

Talking to Simon and Richard and my brother Nick it’s good to know that people out there understand what its like and are all rooting for me to get better soon.

When Food Labelling goes mad..

I went to the supermarket today to pick up a few things.

Thought I’d have some mackerel as I like a good bit of fish.

So I’m standing at the checkout and I wonder how Sainsbury’s recommend I cook said Mackerel fillets.

I turn the pack over:

No cooking guidelines but two very, very important things that I’m sure will shock and astound you all :

Ingredients: Fish

Allergy Advice: Contains Fish.

Really? I would never have guessed!

Facing up to Depression

For the past few months I’ve been suffering mood swings and often they kick in without notice or warning. I’ve also got disrupted sleep patterns and find my self getting annoyed very easily – both with myself and with others.

I booked an appointment at the doctors and went in and I didn’t say the D word once but described all my symptoms and filled in some paperwork.

Diagnosis is that I’m suffering from moderate depression… I’ve got another appointment in a couple of weeks when I’ll be re-assessed and he’ll then look at prescribing medication or other possible treatments.

So there hasn’t been much work done on the Canalblogs code – so sorry about that.

I’ve been building up a new server and Ubuntu is totally different from Suse so its complete learning curve for me (apache is totally different).

We’re also thinking of moving house – getting sick and fed up of how the neighbourhood is going. I’m married to a US citizen so going and living in the US is always a possibility but Maine really doesn’t have much call for Oracle DBAs….

Cheltenham – not a nice place to live

Got up this morning and found the 93 has been vandalised again

So in the past 8 months:

93 – smashed windscreen
93 – dents in the roof from some scrote running over it
95 – smashed windscreen
93 – smashed windscreen (and this time they left the rock behind in my front garden)

Cars parked on the road, only third party, no windscreen cover (thanks a bunch Tesco for lying to me)

£400-500 per windscreen.

So that £1500 paid out in the past 8 months to repair damage that the police show little interest in.

I report it- they want to know if I’m White English. I ask them is it going to make a difference to how they investigate it?

I think I manage to persuade them that as no other vehicle has been damaged its targetted against me or my cars or my wife.

Don’t expect the police to do anything  – they’ve no teeth any more and the scum who do this sort of thing aren’t afraid of them.

Can’t afford to repair the cars so will have to get rid of them and buy something cheap and nasty that I can do fully comp insurance on and if that car gets worked over then I’m going to be raising hell

Kerboom???

There are some very interesting markings on the road outside our house.

Two nice long skid marks which start in the middle of the road, drift slowly over to one side and end at the back end of another vehicle which is a bit mashed.

Now our road is quite narrow, its wide enough for one vehicle to get down the middle with a car parked on both sides. The road goes nowhere and is posted at 30mph.

The skid marks are, at a quick visual estimate (based on the length of our canal boat), about 70 feet long. How fast does a car have to be going to leave 70 foot long skid marks on a road?

No doubt it was some piece of chavvy scum from Whaddon in a stolen car… it won’t be the first time that some moron has crashed on our road (someone clipped 3 cars once and then flipped the vehicle they were in).

I really do despair about Cheltenham sometimes…

Differing levels of Vandalism

A week after I phoned to police to tell them that our 95 had been vandalised I get a letter through the post from Gloucesteshire Police.

Its depressing reading – says so much about what our police force has become:

————

Offence : Criminal Damage to property valued under £5000 – vehicle
Date Reported : 03/12/2007
..
..
..
The offence you reported has been recorded within our computerised crime reporting system…..

To date our investigations have failed to identify the offender. Nevertheless we shall continue to review the matter.

————

So its been logged on their computer – wonderful. Did it really take them a week to do that? Actually No. It took them 2 days to log in into the computer (or print the letter) as the letter is dated 05/12. Then they posted it – two days AFTER they had printed it, and it arrived on the 10th (they did at least not waste money sending it out first class!)

So how do we interpret “Criminal Damage to Property valued under £5000”. Does it mean the property is worth less than £5000, does it mean that they did less than £5000 worth of damage?

Its sodding vandalism – my personal property has been vandalised. But apparently the severity of the crime is linked to some odd concept of commercial value. Would it be more of a crime if my car was a £350,000 Ascari and they’d smashed the windscreen, or it would it be more of a crime if they’d mashed the mirrors and slashed the tyres on the 93 at the same time.

Its my car – its how I get to work, its how I go shopping. But to the police it is simply an item of monetary worth.

As for the “we have failed to identify the offender” well, to use an american phrase: no shit sherlock. It happened on a quietish side road, where we hardly ever see policemen. The scrotes from Whaddon roam round the neighbourhood causing trouble all over the place. The police do nothing and then the sodding council gives Whaddon a million pound community centre which I’m sure they’ll torch to the ground soon.

Still the police have more important things to do than chase criminals – its learning Polish All this from the police force whose Chief Constable – Dr Brain (just got to love that name!!) says will have to cut services as they are short of money in next years budget

Oh well

—————-
Now playing: Bif Naked – Nothing Else Matters
via FoxyTunes