After being mildly annoyed that Southwest doesn't post a toll-free number to their customer relations people (which just serves to further annoy already disgruntled customers), I decided to suck up the daytime minute cost and give them a ring. A surprisingly short wait later (only 5 minutes!), I was talking to one of their customer reps. It turns out that if there's a delay caused by mechanical failure or maintenance, then Southwest will compensate you for it, but if the delay's caused by weather or some other external force, then it sucks to be you. As it so happens, the flight I was on last week was delayed by mechanical errors.
So the customer rep gives me two options: a) a refund ($168) of my flight, or b) a $300 gift certificate for Southwest travel. Since I wasn't really expecting to get anything, and I wasn't about to stop flying on Southwest over something like this (their prices are just too good!), I opted for the $300 gift certificate.
I'm not sure if this means I win or not, since I'm still going to be throwing my money at them to fly me back and forth from Seattle to Oakland...but at least this covers (almost) two round trips.
So what the hell, Randy wins! :D
About 90% of things in the world don't really bother me. Depending on who you ask, this happens mostly because I don't really care enough, or because I have an odd way of lookings at things.
I've had beef with airlines for a while, partially because I have to use their services so often, and partly because it's such a crappy experience. There are oodles of silly security checks that don't actually provide any real security. If you're 5 minutes late to your gate (which is actually 5 minutes early since they close the gates 10 minutes before departure), you're stuck paying a hefty fee to be put on another flight. If the airline's two hours late, you're expected to take it in stride without so much as an apology.
The silly security measures annoy me because I feel like they're insulting my intelligence, and hassling me for no particular reason...but I've gone on at length about that before. The planes being delayed usually doesn't me either, since I just shrug and look at it as an extra hour or two to read (and I love my books). But when all is said and done, I can't help but feel like the airlines are shafting us consumers en masse without so much as a gesture of apology. So while things like this don't bother me much at the time, looking back at it now bothers me on principle.
So Southwest was late on my two flights this weekend: one to Oakland, and one back to Seattle. In one case it was delayed by about an hour; in today's case it was delayed by two. It's funny to say "it was delayed" instead of "the airline dropped the ball," but that's something for another day. Going there didn't bother me too too much; it was unpleasant to make Helen wait an extra hour before we could go to dinner, but she had a snack beforehand anyways so it wasn't all that bad. Coming back, on the other hand, put me dangerously close to the time of night when the buses don't run anymore and I'd be stranded at the airport (around 12:30am). I was lucky enough to get a seat in the front row on the way back, and as I walked out of the terminal I barely had enough time to run to the last bus, bang on its just-closed door, and be let in by the driver. I'd be in a whole other state of displeasure if I hadn't been lucky (and it really was incredibly lucky) enough to catch that bus.
I got back, checked Southwest's website, and it turns out they don't accept e-mail. Instead, you can either call, or write via post mail to try and get their attention. They probably figured out that most people don't care enough to exert more energy than an email would require, and so they put up a sign saying "No e-mail":
"E-mail Policy - Why We Don't Accept E-mail
Call us traditional, but we elect to steer clear of the chat-style, respond-on-demand, quick casual format and focus on meaningful Customer dialogue. This is not because we don't care. It's because that style counters our commitment to Customer Service.
Our Customers deserve accurate, specific, personal, and professionally written answers, and it takes time to research, investigate, and compose a real business letter. We answer every letter we receive in the order it arrives, and we streamline in order to keep our costs low, our People productive, our operating efficiency high, and our responses warm and personal."
Which sounds like total bull to me.
So! Not to be defeated by their move, I'm going to first call them and complain, and failing that, write an odious number of letters to harass them.
This does bring up a little internal conflict: The Asian part in me says "just suck it up and deal with it, it's not that big a deal." The white part in me says "How dare that corporation try to take advantage of me! I'm going to bitch and moan until they give me something for free." Suffice to say, the white part of me won today. White Randy 1, Asian Randy 0.
What the score will be between mixed-Randy and Southwest has yet to be seen!
Now that the rain has stopped and the sun's come out, it's even colder than before. Huh?
Apparently, Seattle gets really cold once the rain stops because the rain is warm, blown in from Hawaii. But even though it's colder than before, it's absolutely beautiful outside (part of the benefit of being on the waterfront). It's become a much more pleasant place to live, despite being freezing half the time.
I went up to Canada to visit Brett this past weekend. He's up at UBC doing the PhD thing, and I'm the sort of degenerate that has nothing better to do on the weekends than hang around at casinos...so I decided to go up and hang out with him instead.
Some fun (unverified) facts about Canada:
* They shown softcore porn on public access television.
* The legal age of consent is 14
* Weed flows freely. A friend of mine was once stopped by a cop while smoking a joint and told that he couldn't smoke it while standing around, and had to be walking.
* Vancouver has a very dense Chinese and Japanese population.
* It's food is better than Seattle's (when it comes to Asian food)
And while it can't be called a fact, women in Vancouver look significantly better than the women in Seattle.
I found a picture of myself from two years ago (while I was in Japan, some time in April or May). I'd been wondering lately if I'd gotten fat, since my parents always tell me I have. Looking at that photo, I really have gotten a lot chunkier. This reminded me of when I stopped by Dickson's place with Shannon when she first got to Japan and he commented that I didn't have any fat on me (I'm sure he was being more than generous).
Things have changed, and I've got a fat pair of cheeks now!
To remedy this, I'll have to find some way to cause myself a great deal of grief and unhappiness, so that I'll be motivated to run around outside for miles on end in an attempt to bury the inner pain with outer pain. That's how I worked off fat the first time; chances are that's how I'll end up working off the fat the second time.
