Terry Jones

I’m not a huge fan of rationality. But if you are going to try to think and act rationally, especially on quantitative or technical subjects, you may as well do a decent job of it.

I have a strong dislike of trendy terms that give otherwise intelligent people a catchy new phrase that can be tossed around to get grants, get funded, and get laid. I spent years trying to debunk what I thought was appalling lack of thought about Fitness Landscapes. At the Santa Fe Institute in the early 90s, this was a term that (with very few exceptions, most notably Peter Stadler) was tossed about with utter carelessness. I wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Evolutionary Algorithms, Fitness Landscapes and Search, parts of which were thinly-veiled criticism of some of the unnecessarily colorful biological language used to describe “evolutionary” algorithms. I get extremely impatient when I sense a herd mentality in the adoption of a catchy new term for talking about something that in fact is far more mundane. I get even more impatient when widespread use of the term means that people stop thinking.

That’s why I’m fed up with the current breathless reporting on the semantic web. The semantic web is the new artificial intelligence. We’re on the verge of wonders, but everyone agrees these will take a few more years to realize. Instead of having intelligent robots to do our bidding, we’ll have intelligent software agents that can reason about stuff they find online, and do what we mean without even needing to be told. They’ll do so many things, coordinating our schedules, finding us hotels and booking us in, anticipating our wishes and intelligently combining disparate information from all over the place to…. well, you get the picture.

There are two things going on in all this talk about the semantic web. One is recycled rubbish and one is real. The recycled rubbish is the Artificial Intelligence nonsense, the visionary technologist’s wet dream that will not die. Sorry folks – it ain’t gonna happen. It wasn’t going to happen last century, and it’s not going to happen now. Can we please just forget about Artificial Intelligence?

It was once thought that it would take intelligence for a computer to play chess. Computers can now play grandmaster-level chess. But they’re not one whit closer to being intelligent as a result, and we know it. Instead of admitting we were wrong, or admitting that since it obviously doesn’t take intelligence to play chess that maybe Artificial Intelligence as a field was chasing something that was not actually intelligence at all, we move the goalposts and continue the elusive search. Obviously the development of computers that can play better than human-level chess (is it good chess? I don’t think we can say it is), and other advances, have had a major impact. But they’ve nothing to do with intelligence, beside our own ingenuity at building faster, smaller, and cooler machines with better algorithms (and, in the case of chess, bigger lookup tables) making their way into hardware.

And so it is with the semantic web. All talk of intelligence should be dropped. It’s worse than useless.

But, there has been real progress in the web in recent years. Web 2.0, whatever that means exactly, is real. Microsoft were right to be worried that the browser could make the underlying OS and its applications irrelevant. They were just 10 years too early in trying to kill it, and then, beautiful irony, they had a big hand in making it happen with their influence in getting asynchronous browser/server traffic (i.e., XmlHttpRequest and its Microsoft equivalent, the foundation of AJAX) into the mainstream.

Similarly, there is real substance to what people talk about as Web 3.0 and the semantic web.

It’s all about data.

It’s just that. One little and very un-sexy word. There’s no need to get all hot and bothered about intelligence, meaning, reasoning, etc. It’s all about data. It’s about making data more uniform, more accessible, easier to create, to share, to find, and to organize.

If you read around on the web, there are dozens of articles about the upcoming web. Some are quite clear that it’s all about the data. But many give into the temptation to jump on the intelligence bandwagon, and rabbit on about the heady wonders of the upcoming semantic web (small-s, capital-S, I don’t mind). Intelligent agents will read our minds, do the washing, pick up the kids from school, etc.

Some articles mix in a bit of both. I just got done reading a great example, A Smarter Web: New technologies will make online search more intelligent–and may even lead to a “Web 3.0.”

As you read it, try to keep a clean separation in mind between the AI side of the romantic semantic web and simple data. Every time intelligence is mentioned, it’s vague and with an acknowledgment that this kind of progress may be a little way off (sound familiar?). Every time real progress and solid results are mentioned, it’s because someone had the common sense to take a bunch of data and put it into a better format, like RDF, and then take some other routine action (usually search) on it.

I fully agree with those who claim that important qualitative advances are on their way. Yes, that’s a truism. I mean that we are soon going to see faster-than-usual advances in how we work with information on the web. But the advances will be driven by mundane improvements in data architecture, and, just like computers “learning” to “play” chess, they will have nothing at all to do with intelligence.

I should probably disclose that I’m not financially neutral on this subject. I have a small company that some would say is trying to build the semantic web. To me, it’s all about data architecture.

Continuing from the last post, let’s suppose fuel costs are constant across all airlines.

On my 6-hour Air Comet flight, I will be paying about $8/hr for fuel and $10/hr for everything else (not bad, seeing as I get to watch a couple of movies and eat a meal).

Going to Cheaptickets I see the next cheapest option is Air Lingus (not a direct route), who will charge me $450. So you’d be tempted to conclude that Air Lingus is 4 times more expensive than Air Comet. But… the price of the fuel is constant. That means I’m paying $400 for the trip in non-fuel costs, which would be roughly $65/hr if the flights were the same length (they’re not). So Air Lingus is actually more like 6.5 times as expensive as Air Comet. The cheapest US carrier (Delta in this case) will charge me $1,127 which would be more like $180/hr or 18 times as expensive as Air Comet (were the trips the same length, which they’re not).

All very non-scientific.

I’m about to book a cheap flight from JFK to Madrid with Air Comet. There are some alarming and amusing comments about the airline online. See this page for example – search for hot red smocks and slit skirts. I flew that route with them about a month ago and everything went smoothly.

And the low, low, price? Just 83 euros one way!

According to this site a 12-hour flight needs 110 tons of fuel. Mine’s a 6:15 flight, so call it 55 tons of fuel. A ton is 2000 pounds according to google, so 110,000 pounds of fuel are needed. Jet engine fuel is like kerosene and weighs about 6 pounds per gallon. So that’s 110,000 / 6 = 18,333 gallons of fuel for the trip. Fedex charges a fuel surcharge when the price of jet fuel rises above $0.98, so let’s assume Air Comet is paying $0.80 per gallon.

Thus the price of fuel alone for the trip is roughly 18,333 x $0.80 = $14,666.

The plane is an Airbus 313, which has a capacity of 295. If we assume the flight is full, Air Comet needs to charge each passenger just under $50 for fuel alone. 83 euros is about $110. So Air Comet can cover the cost of fuel. Good.

Continuing, that leaves $60 of my ticket price times 295 passengers, or roughly $17K to pay for everything else.

This all assumes that everyone is paying the same low price, which of course they are not.

While googling for the above numbers, I found an article about the first model plane that crossed the Atlantic. It weighed 11 pounds (5 kilos) and got about 3,000 miles per gallon of fuel, i.e., less than $1 of fuel for the whole trip.

I’ve not read a single word of Dickens. I don’t know the plot of a single book, apart from superficial knowledge of Oliver Twist. For a long time this has seemed like a major hole in my reading. I’ve occasionally considered doing something about it.

But I have just finished a 50-page essay on Dickens by Orwell. I’ve read the obvious Orwell but never knew anything about the man. I like Orwell. The Dickens essay is good. After reading it I have even less interest in reading Dickens. Of course I should probably make up my mind about Dickens from reading him first hand. But life is short. Orwell strongly confirmed my suspicions. And so I’ve decided to skip Dickens completely. Forever.

It’s nice to have the hole, and to now know that it’s permanent. It has strategic value. Plus I have the good fortune that my hole happens to be Dickens. He wasn’t worth reading anyway.

In her keynote at PyCon a few minutes ago, Adele Goldberg just mentioned Mitch Resnick’s book Turtles, Termites and Traffic Jams. I wrote a review of the book for the Complexity journal in 1994 or 1995:

There is an important trade-off between realism and understanding in the construction of models of complex systems. At one extreme, a model may be so realistic that it allows no increase in understanding of the modeled system. At the other, the model may be precisely understood but be so divorced from reality that this understanding cannot be related back to the original system. The construction of a model requires that difficult choices be made about what aspects of a system should and should not be modeled, and about how abstractions, simplifications and generalizations are to be justified and implemented. Any unchecked tendency to include more than is absolutely necessary can soon result in a model that, at least aesthetically, feels somehow bloated. It is easy to underestimate the difficulty involved in these decisions, and in the requirements of good judgement and taste in the construction of models.

It was with great pleasure then that I read Mitchel Resnick’s “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations in Massively Parallel Microworlds” (1994, MIT Press). Resnick’s StarLogo system achieves a balance between simplicity and realism that it would be difficult to improve on. This is an accomplishment in itself, but Resnick takes us much further. His StarLogo is not a single model, but a platform for exploring a wide range of decentralized systems. The StarLogo system deals so effectively with the trade-off between realism and understanding, that at times one tends to forget it is an issue.

The most provocative situation in modeling, and a sure sign that a model has dealt with the trade-off well, occurs when an apparently simple model produces unexpected results. At these times, the potential for increased understanding is at its greatest. The probability of explaining the surprising results is high, because the model is apparently simple. The decentralized systems constructed and described by Resnick repeatedly produce surprises of this kind. The delightful simplicity of StarLogo makes it possible to understand what is happening, and why our expectations were incorrect. These systems, few and far between, offer the highest returns for the effort we must invest to understand and use them.

In five short chapters, Resnick guides us through thinking about centralized and decentralized mindsets, the StarLogo system, and reflections on psychology and education. The “Explorations” chapter describes simulations (or, as Resnick prefers, stimulations) of Slime Molds, Artificial Ants, Traffic Jams, Termites, Turtles, Frogs, Forest Fires, Geometry and Recursive Trees. Resnick guides us through the thinking behind the construction of these simulations, presents alternative ideas for their construction, and argues well for decentralized views of these systems. Resnick offers the reader challenges, surprises, insights, and simple heuristic guidelines that he developed as a result of these explorations. It is remarkable that Resnick includes the entire StarLogo programs for these systems in the text of the book. The code, only once slightly over two pages in length, is clear, instructive, and incredibly simple.

Resnick’s book is a little treasure. Though much of the book is presented in the context of high-school education, any temptation to discount it on this account should be resisted. Resnick has something to teach us all. If it has a failing, it is the modesty of its presentation and claims, which may retard its recognition in “higher” academic circles. Virtually every aspect of this book should be instructive to researchers involved in agent-based modeling and simulation, especially to those in biology and artificial life. To the many scientists interested in agent-based computational modeling who are, however, not computationally inclined, read this book. It is an example of someone getting a set of deceptively difficult problems absolutely right. There are many ways in which to appreciate “Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams.” It is an important book.

I’m at PyCon in Dallas, at the Dallas/Addison Marriott Quorum. There are 580 attendees. Morning talks start at 9 and people are milling around downstairs from 8 or so. Of course they’re looking for coffee. But unlike every other conference I’ve been to over the past 20 years, there is no coffee. But the hotel does have a small store with a Starbucks outlet in it. There’s a line of people paying $3 per head for coffee. The conference has tons of coffee after 10am, but Starbucks has the early traffic by the balls.

I smell something, and sadly it’s not a fresh-brewed roast.

OK, this has nothing to do with calculus, but I wanted a short title. Better would have been On the monotonically decreasing incentive to keep secrets, etc.

If you have a secret and you tell someone, it makes no sense to tell them they can’t tell anyone else.

Let’s say there are 2 kinds of secrets you might be tempted to pass along: a) those that are more important to the receiver than they are to you (e.g., you just found out that X is sleeping with your friend Y’s partner and you’re considering telling Y), and b) those that are less important to the receiver than they are to you.

Clearly it doesn’t make much sense to tell the receiver in class (a) that they can’t tell anyone. They probably have less incentive to be telling people than you do, they’re closer to the source than you are, and perhaps the information is “theirs” more than it is “yours”. Things like that.

But it doesn’t make sense to tell the receiver in class (b) that they can’t tell anyone either. That’s because it’s unreasonable to expect them to keep something secret that you’re not keeping secret when it’s even less important to them than it is to you. Even if you swear them to secrecy, as you may have been sworn to secrecy, you can’t rationally expect them to keep the secret.

Most secrets fall into class (b).

The rational and responsible conclusion is that either you decide that the buck stops with you and you don’t pass it on, OR you decide to pass it on, in the full knowledge that you are actively spreading the secret, and in fact lowering the barrier to it spreading more widely. At the very least, have the intellectual honesty not to preface the secret telling with “you can’t tell anyone about this…”

I often wonder if I’m super sensitive to issues in user interface, or if everyone notices the same things that I do.

For example, when I find things that are inconsistent in user interfaces it really bugs me. I’m sitting in front of a beautiful Apple cinema display attached to a laptop, all made by a company that clearly cares a lot about user interface. BUT, when I want to maximize something that’s iconized, I have to remember the command to do it on an application-by-application basis. Yes, I could reach for the mouse, but I don’t want to reach for the mouse.

If I want to get my iTunes window up, I can Apple-TAB to get to iTunes, and then to get the window up from the dock I have to Apple-Option-1. If I’m tabbing over to Terminal, I have to use Apple-1. If it’s iCal, there is no key combination to maximize the window. Duh.

Nokia care about user interface too. Yet on my cheap 6070 model, no doubt with a stock version of Series 60, when I go to delete things from the messaging area, the buttons I have to press depend on the type of thing I’m deleting. If it’s a text message, I click Left (Options), Select (Delete is the first option), and then Left (Yes, I want to delete). It’s the same for the Sent Items. It I try to delete a template, I have to click Left, Down, Select, Left. If it’s a sent email message, I have to click Left, Select, Select. There are various other items in there, and I bet they have differing delete sequences too.

Those would be such simple things to make more consistent, you would think. I find stuff like that in user interfaces all the time, and I always wonder why these companies with huge budgets don’t have someone who can see these things take a look at their products for what seem like glaring inconsistencies.

I’m getting a tooth crowned. I had no idea how involved the process is. I’ve been to the dentist 3 times and she tells me it’s going to be 3 or 4 more visits before it’s done.

I think I first became aware of the tricks dentists use when I was 17 and having my wisdom teeth out. My dentist was a master at the art of gentle persuasive suggestion. “Now you may experience a slight pulling sensation” he’d say smoothly; ahead of a maneuver that felt like my teeth were fastened to a departing tugboat while he held my head firmly in place.

The introduction of the needle is the most basic dentist trick, like the magician pulling a rabbit from a hat, or a juggler eating an apple. You’ve just got to be able to do it, and you have to do it in every show as you warm up the audience. There’s the delayed low sweep of the arm bringing the needle. The needle hand hugs the terrain like a plane coming in under the radar. The needle, out of sight during the whole journey, is upon you before you know it. Ah, but you knew it was coming, didn’t you?

There’s little variety here, and not that much scope anyway. Perhaps a little distracting chatter, a more relaxed and slightly sideways approach (body concealing the delivery arm) as the dentist engages you, watching to see if your eyes are straining wildly to see it. You know the needle is coming, but you know you’d better not look at it, else the dentist will think you’re terrified and start with more tricks.

The tricks are designed for the masses, and so many are quite obvious if you’re thinking about things even a little. But dentists are smart people too, and they’ve been doing this for a long time. So they probably have tricks you don’t notice. I wonder how much of a 5-year course in dentistry is concerned with patient psychology and stress management. Apart from using well-practiced techniques, you have a situation in which one person is trying to pull the wool over another’s eyes, literally right under their nose, and that’s of course full of opportunity for improvised patient management. Add to this the patient probably wanting to believe and wanting to stay calm, and you’ve got very fertile ground.

It’s not easy to engage dentists on the subject because your mouth is typically numb and full of instruments. By the time the show is over, you’re being whisked out to pay and you don’t feel much like talking anyway. I have occasionally managed to get some sense out of dentists about all this. I told the guy that removed my wisdom teeth that he was a master. He just smiled. I had some time the other day before my current dentist started in on me. I told her how all the little techniques had always amused me, especially the introduction of the needle. She said that she can’t help the reassuring stream of comments, like telling me to relax, not to worry, that we’re nearly done, etc.

That’s what I think about at the dentist. It helps keep my mind off the needle.

I find it amazing that huge corporations are unable to see that attempts to copy protect things always fail. Here’s another one gone wrong. Undoubtedly, millions were spent on getting this protection in place, and it’s picked apart by one guy in a mere 8 days.

There are so many examples of this. I guess it can’t be that “they” don’t know their schemes will be broken. Perhaps they assume that, but also know that just a small percentage of customers will avail themselves of the means to use the crack. If so, it’s certainly better to use some form of protection, but why not face facts and put less effort into making it obscure. After all, what’s the difference between an elaborate scheme that’s cracked in 8 days and a trivial one that’s cracked in an hour?

I don’t seem to need to sleep as much as some. I’m perfectly happy with 4 hours a night, can probably go indefinitely on 6 hours a night, and anything more is just cream. That’s not to say I don’t like sleep. I love it. I’ll happily stay in bed for 12 hours if I feel like it. I think I’ve been like this my whole life – my parents told me that when I was a kid they’d just leave me in bed awake when they went to sleep. My son is perhaps also like this, he never wants to go to sleep – though he’s often determined to sleep in.

When I’ve slept 4 hours, I don’t feel impaired in any way. I’m happy to then get up and work 16 hours – certainly not as efficiently as some people, but that’s just me, it’s not because I’m tired.

So I always wonder about sleep advocates who insist that all humans need 8 hours of sleep a night, or else. It feels like a conspiracy of people who really do need that much sleep, trying to stop those of us who can work much longer hours from getting ahead.

After all, have you ever heard that you really need to sleep 8 hours from someone who only needs 4 hours a night?

I didn’t think so.

Large passenger planes have two aisles. When leaving the plane, the right hand side always moves much faster than the left.

I think this happens because the door is on the front at the left and at the moment when the two lines meet the people coming from the right side have some momentum up, they’re going straight ahead, and they don’t need to turn a corner and merge to get off. The people from the left side have to inject themselves into this stream. Everyone is tired and maybe the people from the right are less inclined to politely let someone in from the left.

Whatever it is, the effect is pronounced. On some flights the right side will drain completely while there are still dozens of people left on the left. I’ve watched this many times. I’ve asked a couple of stewards, and they agreed but hadn’t noticed or didn’t know why.

Random thought for the week.

I don’t know how much weight I’d give to this study. But it reminds me of a joke we had in mathematics at Sydney University in the early 80’s. It went like this:

∀∀∃∃

Translation: For all upside-down A’s, there exists a backwards E.

I didn’t say it was funny.

I love the dynamics of the upcoming US presidential race. With Hilary and Obama both in the running for the Democratic nomination, it’s gonna be a doozy. You can see the shape of things to come from recent events:

• A story appears claiming that Obama attended a Muslim madrassa in Indonesia. Nevermind that he was about 6 years old, that it’s not a particularly Muslim school, and that madrassa doesn’t imply evil (it’s just Arabic for “school”).
• Fox News runs with it. A caller (random, no doubt) suggests that maybe Obama “doesn’t consider terrorists the enemy.” Nice.
• Then it is claimed that the story arose from work done by Hilary’s research team. Aha!
• Clinton’s team denies it.

So there you have it in a nutshell. Ugly and damaging fabrications are manufactured about Obama, and they’re pinned on Clinton. For how long will Obama continue to believe that the Clinton campaign is innocent? For how long will the Clinton campaign be able to resist doing some Obama smearing and then claiming it to be part of Hilary’s vast right-wing conspiracy? Is the Clinton campaign in fact innocent?

It’s a field day for the right wing. They get to play all sides: inventing muck on both Dem candidates, airing it, AND then sourcing it to the other Dem candidate – hey, it must be news if it’s coming out of the Dem camp, right?

If I were Karl Rove I’d be rubbing my hand with glee at the prospects for evil. I’d be planning to smear both Obama and Hilary, in each case planting evidence to frame the other, so that whoever (if either) emerges battered and bruised with the Dem nomination will have all sorts of problems – but none of them caused by the sweet ol’ GOP. Nope, that was just those ugly divided Democrats tearing each others throats out. Which may come to pass. It’s like the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Hilary and Obama have to continue to believe that each other’s campaign group would never do the low-down things that they are claimed to have done. How long will they continue to take it on faith? How long can they resist the opportunity to defect? There’s 22 months left…. lots of time to someone to crack.

Hilary and Obama could make the problem go away if they announced right now that they were running a joint ticket (but which of the two would settle for the VP slot? Neither, I bet).

So it looks like open season on the Dems for 2008, both from without and within. At this point I don’t think Obama or Hilary can win the presidency, but that’s no reason to stop one of them winning the nomination. Surely Hilary & Co will have the upper hand when it comes to political machinations, no matter who Obama has to advise him, and they’ll almost certainly have more cash.

2008 is going to be much more fun than the last time around.

Here’s something that seems new. It’s a shop where you can go to get legal help.

Maybe I’m behind the times, but this seems like an idea with huge potential. The legal profession could do with some shaking up. There are several hurdles that make getting legal advice feel like such a big deal. It’s supposedly very expensive. You need to make an appointment. You feel like it’s something you just want to do for major problems. You wonder if you should dress up to go to the lawyer’s fancy office. You need to go to the richest part of town. You expect the process of talking to a lawyer to be complex and drawn out, advice to be full of qualifications, and to encounter a broad range of issues whose scope the lawyer will take pains to describe. You expect to be billed by the hour and through the nose, and you somehow need to know when to cut the legal advice (and the billing) off because it’s probably no longer important or relevant.

That all seems a bit old-fashioned. It’s in the strong interests of the lawyers to keep things semi-obscure and to maintain their priesthood at your expense.

The creation of easily accessible walk-in legal shops like lomaslegal seems to strike at the heart of this old-fashioned system. I think it’s great. I also think there’s a strong chance the traditional legal firms will turn up their noses at this sort of initiative, just like the traditional airlines turned up their noses at budget airlines offering cheap and easy no-frills service to the masses. Given that the law is so vast, that we bump into it so often, and that the legal profession preserves itself in a self-interested archaic state, it seems like there’s the strong potential for change.

Another initiative, also in Spain, is iAbogado. You just call them and pay a euro a minute. Or you can buy an electronic token and IM them for half an hour (though I’ve no idea why anyone would choose that low-bandwidth option).

But…. maybe it’s just me who’s behind the times and this sort of thing is already commonplace elsewhere.

Here’s how I spent my night. Which says nothing of the amount of time I spent deep in the debugger finding the problem in the first place. Not to mention a whole bunch of extraordinarily obscure digging and thinking and hypothesizing and and and…. argh.

I just got spammed at the email address I signed up with at YouTube:

Nora72o has sent you a message

Use http://www.youtube.com/my_messages?folder=inbox&filter=messages to go directly to this message, or go to your Inbox at http://www.youtube.com/my_messages on YouTube to view all your messages.

Thanks for using YouTube!

– The YouTube Team

Thank you for using YouTube indeed. And thanks for your email address too!

Maybe someone at Google missed out on the IPO, so they’re doing a little business on the side selling the mailing list of Google’s acquisitions?

London tube poster

Why do all airlines treat their customers like shit?

I’ve wondered this from time to time, and I guess there are many reasons. I’ve been treated like shit so many times by so many airlines. It’s so common that it’s almost not worth mentioning. But, it’s Xmas and I’ve just had the usual run around, and seeing as that has left me away from my family as well as otherwise inconvenienced and out of pocket, I feel like a bit of a ramble.

Today wasn’t even a particularly egregious example, and I really don’t care that it’s Xmas. Today was just run-of-the-mill being treated like shit.

First of all, I manage to inconvenience several others in getting myself back to Barcelona last night – borrowing a car, filling it with gas, leaving the key somewhere exposed (risking theft), leaving Ana and the kids on Xmas eve, etc. All my choices. I set the alarm and get up early (for me) at 8am.

Taxi to the airport (25 euros). Check in. Coffee. Wait in departure lounge. Wait in departure lounge. Departure time comes and goes. Wait in departure lounge. Then there’s an announcement: flight canceled due to an unavailable part, no chance of a replacement, no chance of an alternate flight, maybe we can get you all on something tomorrow. It’s Xmas, you’ve got probably 150 people, many of whom are heading home to family, many of whom are leaving family.

Does a single Delta representative say a single word of apology, commiseration? Nope.

They announce a phone number to call in a few hours to check what’s going on. Everyone is to be herded to a hotel. Of course I head back to my apartment in a taxi (25 euros).

I call my hotel in NY and cancel the night. They charge me, in accordance with their published cancelation policy (USD 85.94).

I start calling the local Delta number, the one provided by the friendly folks at the gate who canceled the flight. A machine answers, telling me the normal working hours. It’s not normal working hours right now though. It’s xmas. This seems to be standard practice: hand out a phone number that does not work. Shift the blame and the responsibility.

Finally I call the US. After navigating through the voice mail system (Press here if your flight was just unceremoniously canceled – NOT), I get a human on the other end. I tell her calmly what happened. She is an idiot. She asks me if I have already flown. I say no, I repeat that I am still in Barcelona. She asks if I am in a hotel and I repeat that I am in my apartment. She asks if I am still at the airport. She tells me my flight was BCN to Newark and I say no, to JFK. She tells me the flight was definitely to Newark and asks me if the flight left. No, the flight was canceled. I am paying in time and money (same thing?) to talk to this woman. Fortunately it turns out I have been booked, through Newark, on a Continental flight, tomorrow.

I tell the woman I’m hoping to be reimbursed for two taxi trips and one hotel room. She asks a few questions – why did I take a taxi if I’m in the hotel? No, I’m in my apartment. Did I book through hotels.com? No. Well I should talk to the ticket office in Barcelona at the airport and they will sort out the reimbursement. Fat chance. They will no doubt refer me to Delta elsewhere.

Does this woman say “Gee, I’ve just noticed it’s xmas day, I’m really sorry for the inconvenience, it must be a bummer to have your plans ruined”? Nope. Does she say anything remotely human? Nope. In fact I had an easier time getting information into and out of the voice system that fielded the call.

I say that in my experience it’s not really worth the effort to try to get money back from airlines. She doesn’t answer. There’s just a silence on the other end of the line that lasts for about 20 seconds.

She’s one step above the voice mail system. She’s been trained not to say anything that might imply culpability. Someone might sue Delta if an employee were to admit that maybe they fucked up. So there’s just a silence on the line. I don’t remember who broke it, probably me saying goodbye.

And that’s it. I’m not even upset, and I far prefer an extra day in Barcelona instead of a day in NY in a hotel waiting for a flight to Chicago. This has all been extremely mild compared to some screw-ups.

Like I said, I think there are many reasons the airlines can and do treat their customers like shit. Blogging about it isn’t going to help much, but I don’t have the energy to do much more. And that’s part of it too.

In the US one very often runs across incredibly stupid “service” people on the phone (and in person – at the bank, buying fast food, etc). I don’t mean that in a nasty elitist way, even though I am nasty and elitist. These people are just dumb or bored or…. They speak great English, there’s no problem there. They’re just really dumb. On top of that, they are trained to be robots. Any attempt at humor or any unexpected remark is a deviation from the expected script and simply causes confusion. I’ve seen it so often, I can’t be bothered going into it here. I think legal fears also add a further level of bleaching anything human out of interactions. That’s ironic – I wonder if there would be fewer lawsuits if company representatives were a little more humane. I know I’d be a hell of a lot more forgiving if the representative were able to field a joke or make a self-deprecating remark about life as an airline customer, etc. Maybe we need a class-action lawsuit for being treated so poorly.

Blah.

I’m sitting here drinking a beer with Fergus. That’s it.