…and I *will* be gone when the morning comes. Heck yeah - because it’ll be day 2 of my motorbike riding class. I wondered if I’d spaz out and be unable to pull corners, but it turns out I can actually make the thing turn, at speed. It’s fun! Everybody keeps telling me things like “ooh, be careful, my friend crashed head on into a semi while pulling a wheelie at 90mph, and broke his leg,” but I already know all that. The truth is that I saw a) The Motorcycle Diaries and b) Long Way Round / Long Way Down, and was inspired… what a great way to travel some real distance! I’m leaning towards buying a dual sport (like the one in the icon) so that I can do some offroading, as well as on - maybe I can conquer (ha! too much KDE, almost wrote konquer) the Darién Gap once I get really good at it. Tip to tip, here I come.
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I’ve had some reports (and seen on one friend’s computer) that the embedded videos don’t render for some people on this site. I don’t understand why…if you are one of the affected and know the reason, please let me know. If you don’t know the reason, please post a msg with your OS (”windows XP”), browser (”IE 6″), and information on where you are accessing the net from (work, home using cable, home using DSL, etc.)
Here’s a sample:
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Travelocity lost the tickets that I bought from them.
Now, given Travelocity’s customer service guarantee:
the Travelocity Guarantee is our commitment to you that everything about your booking will be right, or we’ll work with our partners to make it right, right away… Human error happens; nobody’s perfect - but in those rare cases that we make a mistake you can count on us to take responsibility for it.
…you might expect that they graciously accepted responsibility, and issued me a new set of tickets, right? Wrong. Travelocity’s best solution is that I “arrive at the airport one or two hours earlier than usual, file a ‘lost ticket claim’ form, and pay either a fee (around $100) or the full price of the tickets,” which they would refund later, once I’ve sent them the receipts (so, 4-12 weeks later.)
This, to me, is bullshit. I have spoken to 4 supervisors in the past week on the phone, all of whom apparently are using the same customer service script, and have emailed their “guarantee” division of their customer service department multiple times, only to receive a form reply back (after three to four hours) containing identical paragraphs, and absolutely no offer to make right. None of the people I spoke to seemed to care in the least; all were obviously members of an outsourced call center, probably receive less than $10/hr, and probably speak to dozens or hundreds of angry customers a day - why should they care?
The amazing thing is that a similar thing happened to me recently with Orbitz (who also suck) - an hour after receiving the ticket confirmation email, I received an email saying the tickets could not be reserved, that my credit card would not be charged, and to please try again. I did. Orbitz charged me anyway, and I went through perhaps 8 people on the phone before I even found somebody willing to agree that it was their fault (one customer service lady even told me that I “should have ignored the second email,” i.e. the one received an hour after the confirmation, telling me that my credit card would not be charged.) They offered to apply the ticket value to a future purchase with Continental, and a $50 discount on future transactions with Orbitz. Since the whole point of using these sites is to compare prices across airlines, I replied back threatening legal action, and they eventually folded — hanging on to my money for a further 14 days, and needing two emails before it finally showed up again in my account.
What is the problem with these companies? Here’s my theory - they’re concerned (obviously) about the bottom line. Because of that, they don’t pay as well as they could; their Sr people migrate over time to better paying positions. They outsource, temp, and contract out work where possible; these people do not really care about the company and provide lousy service and product. Since they pay so low, the full time hires they do make are Jr to mid level. Bugs creep into the system. Morale falls. Customers are just a pain in the ass to deal with.
Anyway, enough of a rant. My message is simply this: don’t use Travelocity, and don’t use Orbitz. If everything goes right, you’ll be OK, but they suck when things go wrong.
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I reorganized the site. Everything seems to be working adequately now, although the AJAX search is flakey in IE. Also, I had to simulate position:fixed using javascript for IE, which is pretty flickery. I will probably put up a notice to let users know why.
So far I’ve been concentrating on layout and functionality; I’m going to spend some time prettying it up during the week.
Notes on decisions:
- Optimized for 1024×768 resolution
- Content pane is wider, allowing me to more easily post code samples without wrapping
- Degrades to 800×600 gracefully
- Google/amazon ads are now off to the right edge for wide monitors
- Ads can be seen at 1024×768 if user scrolls right
- Search / Categories navigation is emphasized
- AJAX search preview (NB flakey in IE!)
- Amazon ads on single post page instead of google, since they’re more easily contextifiable
- Content sidebar is on the left, emphasizing it
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