How I Spent My Morning Yesterday

cat

Yes, this is exactly how I felt yesterday morning at work; my second call of the day was from a client flying on Continental Airlines, who had let a ticketing deadline expire. I had to call the airline to get a waiver code, and although I was confident I’d be given the okay to issue at Thursday’s rate, I groaned as I dialled their number. Why? Because due to Hurricane Ike’s merry romp towards Houston, CO had announced that they were closing down operations for a couple of days. Which meant that their reservations lines would be jammed with calls as travelers and agents scrambled to rebook people who’d been routed via CO’s hub at Houston Intercontinental (I try to avoid calling it “George Bush International, it will always be IAH to me).

Even though my client was going nowhere near Houston and was flying internationally, meaning I was callling an international res line, I knew the hold times would be long, as all their agents would be handling a huge amount of extra call volume.

Sure enough, when I got through, there was a warning announcement about “unusually high wait time” and then an automated voice said, “Your approximate hold time will be…[BLANK]”

Yeah, that’s a good sign when the hold time exceeds the announcement’s capability to relay it.

40 minutes later, I got through to a surprisingly cheerful agent named Diane, who was happy to help with my problem, as it required very little effort on her part and did not involve being sworn at or cried by a traveler whose plans had been ruined by Continental’s stupid insistence on caution in the face of a little old rainstorm.

It took all of five minutes for Diane to get the code generated for me, and my record was soon stored with the special formats that put the previous day’s price in so the ticket could be issued. It was easy for Diane to give the waiver, because it was a business class fare, on a corporate client of Continental’s with their own internal “hey, it’s me, I’m important” ticket designator code. No problem.

But those 40 minutes, although productively spent working on other tasks while I listened to Continental’s very short loop of “please hold” mood music. It was so short that it must have repeated dozens of times. After finishing up with “stuff I can do while on hold,” my brain slowly went on hold, too. Just like in the picture.

Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?

Pizza At the Beginning and End of All Things

This morning when I got to work, I had a notice that one of the hotels where I’ve got a group booked was going to be in the office with treats. After dealing with some morning stuff (why can’t people plan in advance?) I wandered in to the board room where they were set up.

MMmmm! Breakfast pizza! That’s nice and fattening and full of calories and sodium!

(and it was delicious too).

This evening, after futzing around meal-wise, David and I decided to forage in the cupboards and fridge. I had a vague idea I’d heat up some soup.

“Oh, hey, we’ve still got leftover pizza!” called out David from the kitchen.

MMmmm! Leftover pizza! Why yes, you can heat me up a couple of slices!

And so our day beginneth and endeth with the pizza.

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National Annoy Your Co-Workers With Your Offspring Day

It’s the most underwhelming office holiday of the year: it started out being a feminist holiday to encourage daughters to dream of careers. Now it’s devolved into an excuse to bring your kid to work instead of dropping him/her off at school or daycare. Most years, the kids are kept busy with activities. Some years, the designated wranglers drop the ball and the l’il dollinks wander around on their own or in packs. This year seems to be in the latter vein – a couple of boys have been mooching around on the work floor looking bored and have had to be herded back to where they’re supposed to be. But this one kid keeps evading the sweep, even though he’s been challenged by a couple of people with a friendly “Are you lost?” or “Can I take you back to the activity room?” At least he doesn’t seem to be playing on the elevator as happened in a previous year.

And here comes that kid again, for the fourth or fifth time or sixth time. I’m going to lunch.


UPDATE:Back. While at lunch, I stopped at the jewelry fair set up in the atrium – I’ve bought stuff there before – but they may have lost a sale. While browsing, the lady brightened when she saw me and cried out “Madam! I believe I saw your daughter!” Yep, all us red-heads are assumed to be related. “Oh, she was not your daughter? Do you have a daughter?”

Grr.

“I don’t have children.” I smiled and turned away. Not shopping today.

As I came back to my desk, the entire herd was gathered at my desk. Horrors! But it appears I just missed the tour, as they moved on without trampling my desk or getting cooties on my stuff.

By the way, I’ve really enjoying the last couple of days at work. I checked with my TL, and it’s okay to listen to music on headphones while waiting for a call – it’s such a blessing to be able to mechanically tune out all the rowl-de-dowl around me. I do love my iPhone/iPod.

Very Freaky Friday

I’m already having a bad day, and it’s not even noon yet.

All seemed normal until I went to leave: the garage door was stuck halfway open. I didn’t notice it until I checked the rearview mirror and couldn’t see the street. There was enough light to see by when I went out, so my blinkers were on and I thought “David left the garage door open.”

Well, not quite. I couldn’t open it or close it, and last time it got stuck, the red release handle caused the whole thing to drop down and bust the springs, which were replaced the next day. Looks like we’ll be getting a new garage door opener-upper-thinger, I bet. So I called in late, and took a cab to work. David will pick me up today.

Of all days to run horribly late: today was moving day and I had to pack up my stuff quickly and get to my new desk, as they needed all the desks in my former row to be empty for an incoming refresher class on some of the software we were supposed to be using all along (grrrrr).

But I couldn’t log in, because we’ve got some brand new phone software that takes a while to load up. This means that in future, I’ll need to get to my desk at least 5 to 10 minutes before login time: no more sliding in the door and punching into my phone-based time clock.

While moving things back and forth and setting up all the stuff I work with on my desk (the computer and monitor were already moved and working, huzzah) I got a call from yesterday’s Favorite Traveler.

This FT is going somewhere in South Asia that’s a pain to set up: you can’t get there from here unless you overnight somewhere, in addition to flying all those hours in biz class. And she was starting her trip with a personal side trip to somewhere in Canada, and had needed to know all these different “what if” parameters to satisfy herself that she wasn’t soaking the company for too much in extra fare cost. And she was leaving tomorrow. I was here last night until 7pm wrestling with the thing trying to get it to issue, as there were technical problems. So when it finally finished issuing last night, I went home irked but happy.

So this morning: she looked at her passport and discovered her visa for one of the countries she’s visiting is expired – no can go. And she made a date error on the itinerary that she changed many times and that I recapped many times, because she was confused by a flight that takes off just after midnight. So it all had to be rebooked and repriced to avoid that one particular country. And it’s been like this since the booking was first created.

Now I’m trying to get the tickets to reissue, but there are issues, you dig? Almost there, but grrr.

And now I’m at lunch and will go away for a while. And we’ll find out what else is going to be freaky weird.

Prayer Can Move Mountains And Get You De-Boarded

7online.com: Praying passenger is removed from plane 4/17/08

I don’t want to be too dismissive and need to know more specifics, but on the face of it this smacks of the kind of prayer that’s less private piety and more public propriety. I don’t know if it could have been started earlier or not to be considered right and proper, but it sure sounds like an attention-getting device.

Airline Cancellation Blues

American: Normal schedule days away — chicagotribune.com

The number of canceled American flights stands at more than 3,000 since late Tuesday, wreaking havoc at the airline’s hubs in Chicago and Dallas and eroding its profits at a time the industry is hurting because of high oil prices and economic worries. Chief Executive Gerard Arpey said the costs to the airline will run into the “tens of millions of dollars” from the disruption of service, but he said American can withstand the loss. The American terminal at O’Hare International Airport was calmer Thursday, despite 124 cancellations, as passengers had more notice and did not show up at the airport to rebook their flights.

Part of the reason for the passengers having more notice and not having to show up in person at the airport may have to do with the special waivers American has issued to travel agents (hey, like me!) to reissue e-tickets onto the next available AA flight without having to park someone on hold for an hour just to get through to an AA res agent empowered to reissue at no cost.

We got empowered today after spending the last two days gradually getting a handle on records on a case by case and then batch basis. Most of the other agents have taken a lot more calls than me; I’ve either been spinning my wheels on international records or been stuck off the phones, rebooking and reissuing records that were identified and put in a queue for batch processing. Tomorrow, even more empowerment goodness; for records that need intervention by an airline rep, we’ll have a more technologically savvy method of getting the records handled.

Meanwhile, I’m praying, literally, for some space to open up on one international record that could have been handled last week, but it was a thing I left undone for too long. My own fault. Also hoping for some space on one record that is the last of 6 that I ended up having to fix, because I made a fare quote error on the first one. It’s all due to inattention and having too many things going on at once. I keep feeling the need to take a break from doing 3 or more things at once.Honestly, this week it feels like I’m losing my mind. The stress isn’t THAT bad, but my brain is toast.

Also: I did a little stylesheet tweaking; the Talian theme has some oddities in the way some things are displayed, and I was finally able to take an hour and make the post title section font a little less freakishly HUGE. Also, the custom field entries – the mood indicator doodad – no longer has a needless border that floats outside of the margins of the entry. I may make the colors paler and less intense, or do something completely different in a week or two.

UPDATE: The space cleared whoohoo!

Gov Now Wants More Air Flyer Data, Redux | Threat Level from Wired.com

A couple of years ago, blog posts like this:

Gov Now Wants More Air Flyer Data, Redux | Threat Level from Wired.com

and this:

Practical Nomad: January 2004 archive on passenger name records and US/Canadian security surveillance

went by my eye, more or less under the radar. So noted, but not really impacting my daily working life. But today I somehow got my reservation computer (SABRE) to cough up the following in response to a normal request for “direct connect” availability for a specific light out on United (UA) that somebody was trying to change. This was while there was a snap FAA grounding of all American (AA) MD-80 aircraft (I thought it was just Dallas, but apparently it was systemwide). So I was checking availability on a competitor flight to try to get someone home. And this is what came up on my screen. My own entry is in the upper right – a perfectly correct entry, but some system glitch sent this back:

1¤I1«
UA            **** INFO ONLY ****
NSA TEST TOOL BIT SETTINGS FOR GTID F1170E
-------------------------------------------
DISPLAY INCOMING POLL KEYWORD FILE  BIT1‡ ? ON
DISPLAY OUTGOING POLL KEYWORD FILE  BIT2‡ ? ON
DISPLAY INCOMING LSA KEYWORD FILE   BIT3‡ ? OFF
DISPLAY OUTGOING LSA KEYWORD FILE   BIT4‡ ? ON
DISPLAY INCOMING FS KEYWORD FILE    BIT5‡ ? ON
DISPLAY OUTGOING FS KEYWORD FILE    BIT6‡ ? OFF

“What the ???” was my first thought. But then I saw “NSA” and “GTID” and keyword queries and I started to wonder.

I made the

1¤I1«

entry a couple of times, because I really did want to get direct connect availability off of that first line of itinerary, but this kept coming back. And then it started returning what I expected to see, but I had already copied and pasted it into an email to myself. Should have taken a screenshot, too, but I was kind of busy trying to help the lady who is still stuck in Dallas.

my husband David.

But this is very, very weird.

Airlines In Free Fall: Aloha AQ, Ta-Ta TZ

Passengers and employees showed up at Midway Airport today to find that ATA Airlines, code TZ, has filed for Chapter 11 and is ceasing operations. Earlier this week, Aloha Airlines (code AQ) shut down in Hawaii. We only had a few passengers affected by the AQ shutdown, but may have quite a few more on TZ, although they’d announced they were pulling out of Midway Airport a while back.

I flew on ATA to Maui with a group of friends once. And once was all it took, as that was the first time I encountered a surly flight attendant who barked orders at boarding passengers like a drill sergeant. There seems to be a pattern…  on our flight, only the people on the starboard side of the aircraft could watch the movie, because the sound was busted port side (because “some people were using non-FAA approved headsets instead of renting those provided for our convenience by ATA.” )

It was ridiculous, and we never flew them again on any of our subsequent trips to Maui, or anywhere.

ATA Airlines

After filing for Chapter 11 on April 2, 2008 in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Indianapolis, IN, ATA Airlines has discontinued all operations and cancelled all current and future flights. Following the loss of a key contract for our military charter business, it became impossible for ATA to continue operations. Unfortunately, we were not in a position to provide our customers or others with advance notice.

Meanwhile, Southwest (WN) is in big big trouble with the FAA too, and a suddenly energized Congress is hauling them in for hearings today over some cozy relationship between the airline and an FAA inspector that apparently liked them a lot.

United’s flight cancellations for safety inspections continue, Delta has some going on, and oh boy, we’re flying American in a month or so.  It’s going to be a somewhat turbulent day at work today. What next?

Fone Etykit: Or, How To Take A Message

There are a number of my co-workers that need to be reminded how to properly take a phone message:

  1. Send an email. 
  2.  Send an email. Don’t get up, scribble an illegible message with no date or time, walk all the way over here and drop it on my desk where I won’t see it and it gets covered up.
  3.  Put that little pink pad/tiny little sticky note/random torn-off scrap of paper away; send an email.

It really irks when someone calls repeatedly – if I don’t answer, either I’m on a call or away from my desk. And then they walk over and hover anxiously at my elbow until I’m off the call or can put someone on hold to inquire.

90% of the time, it’s a routine call that anyone can handle, it’s not a crisis. The times when I come and stand at another agent’s desk are when they’ve got control of a record that I need to ticket because someone’s standing at the gate screaming their head off. I don’t hover for “so-and-so wants to talk to you because you helped them before” or “They asked for you, I don’t know why.”

It is to sigh.