I have a message to call my least favorite admin, who waffles indecisively and has one of those “what if?” guys, as in “What if I fly to Nanjing instead of Shanghai? What if I stop in Munich before Milan?” What if you tell me no more changes and I issue the ticket?? Grr.
I confess that I’m not a nice, forgiving person.
I grumble and swear under my breath at work all the time.
The last hour of my day, I am even less forgiving and more grumbly, because I resent anything that slows me down and prevents me from getting done those things that cannot be left undone.
There are certain people who are incapable of learning from their mistakes, after repeated ass-saving.
I often end up staying late fixing other peoples’ mistakes, partly from a misguided belief on my part that it helps the travelers avoid a bad experience, and partly from sheer arrogance on my part that “Only Ginny can fix it.”
This is so patently wrong-headed and not-true and bad and stupid of me.
I really, really must learn not to save other people from their own mistakes, else
Some days, I really, really feel like biting someone.
I don’t pay much attention to what goes on around me at work – I have enough to do trying to maintain focus and stay on task without getting into dishing the dirt much about colleagues. But sometimes, a topic just begs to be explored.
Yesterday, a co-worker who’s now a kind of tech services/general upgrades and hardware dogsbody was walking around behind me saying “Porkchops, porkchops,” in a sing-songy, “where are you” tone of voice. I responded with “applesauce,” because that’s what immediately leaps to my tiny little mind on instinct.
She came to my desk and related the tale of the disappearing pork chops: they previous day, her husband had bought pizza puffs and pork chops on his lunch break at the nearby mega grocery, and left the bag in the big restaurant-style fridge in the main break room (he works in the same office on another team). They had planned to have the pork chops for dinner, and after about an hour, he remembered that the pizza puffs had to be in the frozen, so he moved them, leaving the pork chops in the bag in the fridge.
At 4 p.m., they left to go home and stopped to pick up the food. The pizza puffs were where he’d left them, but the grocery bag with the pork chops were nowhere to be found!
Dunh dunh DUUUNNNH!
They searched the fridge, the freezer, and looked everywhere else they could think of, but no pork chops. Given the timing, it had to be another co-worker (sic) and not a member of the building housekeeping staff, who typically don’t appear until about 6:30 p.m.
That’s where another co-worker rolled over on her wheelie chair to chime in about other thefts of food from the break room fridge. It’s been going on for a while and suspicion falls here and there. One person is supposed to have witnessed someone taking their milk, but chose not to confront them. It’s a bizarre deal and I have my own theory, which will have to remain mine since it depends on some identifying characteristics.
But people are starting to get mighty cheesed off, especially since cheese seems to be a favorite target – last year, a fairly large quantity of expensive imported cheese and cold cuts disappeared between morning break and lunch. Milk is also an issue – people like to have it for coffee, and it’ll disappear from one break to the next. Lunch bags don’t seem to be touched, but grocery bags of any brand seem to be fair game.
It’s almost as if the perp doesn’t or can’t distinguish between stuff they bought and brought in, and everyone else’s stuff.
My idea is either to set some bait… or to set up a webcam. Others are more serious; they think that whoever it is should be fired when they’re finally caught.
When I lived in some cheap off-campus housing one summer in Eugene (Okay, it was a frat house that rented members’ rooms out to females when school was out), there was a food thief. No matter what you left in the fridge or how it was marked, it would disappear when you were most counting on it. Milk, sandwich fixings, leftovers. Also dry goods from the residents’ cupboards. Like cereal, which I lived on that summer. And if he (it was a he) left the cereal, he’d drink every drop of milk in the fridge, from the container, but leave all the sour milk for someone else to throw out.
He was caught, I don’t remember how. It turned out to be the person everyone suspected – the loudmouth obnoxious guy who got the house in trouble with the local cable company because not only did he steal cable for the TV room (which the frat guys applauded) but he used a splitter to get it into his own room (which is what got them busted, because it was a crap job visible from the street).
When confronted by several angry housemates, who loudly demanded compensation for all the milk and cheese and beer and cereal he’d consumed, he just laughed. Obnoxiously. He thought it was a great gag that he’d pulled and how funny it was that that everyone was mad, and he was completely unrepentant. He maintained he, as a real frat house member, had a perfect right to eat or drink anything we temporary residents… especially we gurrrlz, were stupid enough to leave in his way.
Years later, I ran into him when I went on an airline reservation system training course in a distant city. He was working for the airline, and had been caught dicking around in a secure aircraft scheduling systetm. He was still obnoxious, still supremely convinced of his lordly right to anything he wanted. Still convinced there would be no serious consequences.
I don’t remember his name. But I remember the name of my instructor for that session – one of 3 sessions attended in that city, over the course of 6 months, 4 days at a time. And the only reason I remember the instructor is that one of the other guys in the session had a tendency toward Spoonerisms and a strong Midlands accent, and one day he mentioned he’d been speaking to “Mu(r)ht Killah” after class, which cracked us all up in the bar. So: the instructor’s name was Kurt Miller, but damned if I can remember the food thief guy’s name.
I wonder if our own food thief at work has some kind of memory impairment – in addition to their fascination with other people’s groceries.
Memory for me is an extremely tricky thing – there are some things that I remember vaguely, but mostly I don’t remember details unless I run across something specific that matches a pattern and brings an old memory to light. I’m listening to This American Life now, an episode about memory and how deceptive it can be.
We’ve been home for a week, and our two-week vacation has become a memory. All this week, we’ve been getting up, going to work, coming home, catching up with shows on TiVo, catching up with reading, catching up with Riley.
For me, work wasn’t so much catching up as deleting a bunch of unwanted emails and shaking my head over the way a few of my clients seem to think that it’s no big deal to arrange a lot of hotel rooms with only 2 or 3 days’ notice. Unfortunately, my backup had to deal with this as it happened on the Thursday or Friday of the second week I was gone.
There’s a new, more strict policy at work about use of the Internet: basically, using it for personal reasons if not on break or lunch could be grounds for a very serious talking to, or possibly termination. So I won’t be blogging much during the work week unless it’s from home.
This is not a great loss to humanity. After encountering Stephen Fry‘s blog this week via AKMA, I’m feeling pretty humble about my mad blogger skillz.
The new “no pursnal internets” policy actually helps me stay focused better at work and I’m struggling to be a good little cog in the machine and mostly succeeding, but my patience was taxed last night when I received an email request very late in the day to add 6 people to an existing air group – I back up the air groups person, who logs out at 430pm.
For some reason, the particular division that does these little air groups always seems to have a crisis and needs to either add more people, or book an entire new group, after 430pm on a Friday, and there’s a mad scramble to get space, email the itineraries for approval, and receive it in time for sending everything to be ticketed before closing time. It’s maddening.
And then on Monday, the changes will begin, the boogers. I didn’t get out of work until an hour after quitting time, but at least it’s a legit overtime situation.
There’s also a moratorium on overtime – basically, you can’t get it unless you’re actually on a call or finishing a booking (or multiple bookings) when your scheduled log-off time is reached. There’s no more hanging around afterwards “watching” records (most of our stuff is run through a quality process that finishes and autotickets them). Now, everyone just logs out and leaves, after giving the team leader a list of their unticketed records. I used to be the person that did all the watching, but I now just leave my TL a list and go, too. I did last night, and I still had 2 exchanges to issue and she had to fix a couple of my other records, too. No wonder she had a headache and a stomachache, the new cost-cutting policies mean she has to be the backup person for the entire team as soon as the end-of-day cutoff time is reached.
I’d never be a team leader in a million years – I do not have the patience or the temperament to be able to handle it.
It’s been a nice week for catching up with Riley, too. He’s been extremely lovey-dovey all week, and has been a complete slug as far as wanting to be petted and cuddling up close at all times. He may hate me tomorrow, though, as it’s the annual Pet Blessing at Holy Moly, and today we bought a nicer carrier for Riley, and a harness and leash, so that I don’t have to take him in the large, awkward airline-style crate.
The choir is doing an anthem based on a prayer by St Francis, and the plan is for me to have Riley in the pew with me. At least we’re not suiting up in our choir robes, as the weather is still too unseasonably warm for that. So I won’t be the wacky choir lady in the penguin-colored outfit holding her cat and singing about St Francis as she struggles to turn the pages of the music… but as near as dammit. Things could get interesting if my buddy Katy brings her dog Belle, but she sits a row ahead with the sopranos, so there will be some separation.
Since we’re pretty informal at church, I’m seriously thinking of wearing the faded old “Maui Window Shopper” T-shirt I have that shows a little fuzzy orange kitty snorkeling in a school of tropical fish. I may repent of this notion and wear something a bit less casual, that won’t show the pet hair. After the service (I probably won’t stay through the second one, and may plead the kittybox defense if pressed by the choir leader) we’re supposed to go help our friend Steve at a “punchlist party.”
We’ve been catching up on “our” shows via TiVo; the season finale of Doctor Who provided one of those “WHOOOOOOOOOOAAAAA!!” moments at the very end, via a throwaway line.
As in “The Face of Bo WHOOOOOO? WHAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!?”
Very enjoyable, if you’ve been following the “New Who” since the very beginning. Also, I don’t know if the series will pick up where it left off (David Tennant is doing Hamlet, and the show doesn’t expect to return before 2008) but if it does, it’ll be a period mellerdrammer. Love it when the Doctor collides with his next storyline…
I’ve been reading several books; while in Maui, I mostly finished American Gods and bought several more books, one of which had me laughing so hard last night before getting totally put off by the author: Bright Lights, Big Ass: A Self-Indulgent, Surly, Ex-Sorority Girl’s Guide to Why it Often Sucks in the City, or Who are These Idiots and Why Do They All Live Next Door to Me?
The author, Jen Lancaster, is very funny, but she’s also from the “get over it” school of eye-rolling conservatives, and I just can’t find a joke that depends on a stolen election or two for the punchline to be all that amusing. Especially since people keep insisting on dying in illegal wars and all.
I’ll probably finish it, because politics aside, her mordant wit (and the local touches, she’s from Chicago) make me laugh too loud to read this book at bedtime. The following two books are more in the Hawaiian vein, Six Months in the Sandwich Islands by Isabella Bird, and Holy Man: Father Damien of Molokai.
Now that we’re caught up, we’re just in time for Sunday, and a new week. During which, I’ll be playing catchup again. Whee, etc.
Certain of my clients tell me that Northwest is the airline most likely to have delays or cancellations. Guess they’re running short of goats. If you like yours, leave it at home.
KATHMANDU Reuters – Officials at Nepals state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said Tuesday.
Storms rip across Chicago area — chicagotribune.com
There’s damage everywhere, and there’s still no letup in the rain.Hours after a fast-moving storm packing winds over 70 m.p.h. turned skies from day to night across the Chicago area Thursday — damaging buildings, splitting trees, causing flooding, and bringing planes and trains to a halt — the rain continued to fall.
A severe thunderstorm watch was in effect for Cook County until midnight, and a flash flood watch was in effect for the area through late Friday night.
Occasional showers and thunderstorms will continue tonight, with heavy rainfall and damaging winds possible. Lows will be in the lower 70s.More showers and thunderstorms are likely on Friday, with highs in the lower 80s.
No break in the wet conditions is forecast until Saturday.
UGH!!! This is a muggy wet mess here. Not as horrible as in some areas of the country, but it’s annoying.
We got evacuated to the basement twice today at work – and the rest of the time, I was trying to help some stranded travelers in New York among other things. Hairy day, and then when I got home we had a bit more water in the basement because of the pooling problem by the outer wall. That’ll have to get fixed right quick after the weather lets up, which won’t be real soon.
The Trib is gathering “storm photos” and so far the best of the bunch is probably this one:
Taken by roscoe83, who is either incredibly lucky or knows where to set up his gear and wait for the shot. Probably the latter.
I rated it 5 stars. Unfortunately it’s buried in the Trib photo gallery or I would have linked to it directly.
Old rule still holds magic for stranded air travelers — chicagotribune.com
It served as a secret handshake, of sorts, between airlines and passengers for decades.Travelers whose flights were delayed, or who simply were running late, would sidle up to ticket counters and whisper, “Rule 240 me.” And the airline workers usually would oblige, putting them on the next flight to their destination, even if it were on a rival carrier.
The days of Rule 240 as an official component of the era of regulated air travel are long gone. But in this summer of endless delays, steamed passengers and overcrowded planes, a little bit of the magic behind that phrase has reappeared, with savvy travelers invoking their rights as customers to demand special treatment.
As noted farther down in the article, Rule 240 is still invoked by travel agencies who’re attempting to intervene on their passengers’ behalf when something goes wrong mid-trip, or also when airlines carry out major schedule changes that mess up itineraries enough that the passenger has to be rebooked. They commonly notify the agencies via an internal queueing system, which links carriers’ reservation systems to that used by the individual agencies. I’ve used this magic phrase many times myself and have even been advised by airline customer service reps to put it in the “endorsement” field of the new ticket before reissuing (we sometimes have access to a special desk, depending on the relationship between our major cliend or our company and the airline).
I started out as a travel agent in 1985, a few years after deregulation, but Rule 240 has generally been honored whenever something causes a cancellation. There’s another one that’s weather-related: Rule 260, which governs whether change fees can be waived due to a major storm that’s about to hit, or whether nonrefundable fares can actually be refunded because the flights were all grounded. We’re sometimes asked to add a comment invoking Rule 260 to all the affected airline reservations (PNRs, or Passenger Name Records) in a way that sends a message to the airline and puts the record on a working queue somewhere. Then we batch submit all the electronic ticket numbers (or paper tickets, if there are any) for refund direct with the airline, rather than through the central clearinghouse agency, the Airline Reporting Corporation. We had to do this with a couple of “major” winter storms last year, and most memorably when 9/11 happened and there were thousands and thousands of flights cancelled for several days.
I had a flashback yesterday on the phones. I was working with a client the day before who needed hotels booked from one end of Utah to the other, because she’d just been transferred to the West and had a long, long, long, skinny district to check out. We were chatting along and kidding around a little while I made with the flying fingers – I’m faster booking things “old skool” although the graphical tool we have is useful for “set it and forget it” bookings. So this woman was laughing about something I’d said to crack her up, and we signed off as new best friends. Next day, same woman on the line; she needed one of the hotel bookings moved farther up the road. Clickity clack, whickety whack, bada bing ka-ching, done. I recapped the cancellation number of the old hotel, gave the confirmation of the new one, and she was burbling on about how beautiful the drive was. I recommended she return in the fall to re-drive Price Canyon, which I knew she’d be driving the next day.
“That’s amazing! How do you know that?”
“Well, I used to go through there at least once a year with my mom when I was a kid, and one year was during the fall — it’s just gorgeous then. Based on where you are, and where you’ll be tomorrow, that’s your route.”
The traveler laughed, and got a few more “road anecdotes” from me before before the record was finished and emailed to her. She exclaimed, “You are the goddess of travel, do you know that?”
I was bowled over – the flashback kicked in, and for a second, it was… 1988 or so.
“Well, actually I do – it’s a long time since I’ve been called that, but that’s what they called me when I used to book travel for a little music company in Seattle called ‘Sub Pop Records.’ That was a loooong time ago.”
I’m not sure that she was suitably impressed; probably never heard of the legendary bands on that label. It sure was fun doing their travel (if a little nerve-wracking), and it gave me a peek at much weirder and more interesting and, hell, creative lives than my own.
It’s true: the founders of Seattle’s Sub Pop, and a couple of the other people in their office, used to call me up to book bands like Mudhoney and the Afghan Whigs on crazy trips to Amsterdam and Australia to go on tour. All I really had to do was get the bands to the starting point and from the ending point, for as little money as possible. I hardly knew what I was doing, but was a tiger for finding a crazy cheap routing, and more than once the owner of the fledging company would say “You are the GODDESS of travel.”
For some reason, the band organizers were always really excited when I booked the bands into and out of Amsterdam. “All riiiiight!” they’d exclaim. “I can deal with Amsterdam!” I had an inkling as to why, but didn’t want to alert my old (SFX: hawk-spit) boss or she would have gotten all prissy about it. Fact was, Sub-Pop was big cool juju in Seattle at the time, even though they were constantly hanging by their toenails on the raggedy edge of ruin.
Aw, shucks. Good times.
I remember the agency’s owner sent her dad down there on a delivery run to the old Sub Pop office, and he about stroked out when he experienced the full-bore giddy weirdness that was SubPop in the late 80’s/early 90’s. They’re still trying to work out just exactly what happened in “the early years,” but from what I saw, it was like a juggling act with flaming chainsaws, with an excess of excess.
Still, they survived into the new millennium, and have the blog to prove it.
I wonder if they came across a mouldering box of old 3-part self-copying travel agency invoices with the “ears” still on? If so, the stuff would make wonderful mulch. Working at that agency was great experience for me, as I learned never to work for a family-owned business ever, ever, ever again.
Here I am almost fifty, and I still have a fondness for what was laughingly called “grunge” as a joke, and it got turned into a national music phenomenon. I was listening to WXRT today on my way home, and lost all patience with the evening drive-time guy, who is this kid half my age. For some reason, he insists on playing dinosaur shite, and fawning all over it, and blathering about how cooool it would have been to be at this or that legendary show what took place when he was nobbut a lad, or a glint in his ex-hippie dad’s eye, more likely. And he plays the Stoooones. And the Beeeeeatles. And Le-ehhhhhd Ze-ehhhp. Meh. Shite.
Make with the Decembrists and the Arctic Monkeys and Nickle Creek and Amy Winehouse already, young dude. Your station has a hugely diverse catalog of music to play from – get yer mitts out of the 70’s Arena Rock bins and play something from this decade already! The Goddess of Travel demands musical offerings that are not stale.
[tags]SubPop, WXRT, music, grunge, fifty, the Goddess of Travel[/tags]
Tornado sirens activated as funnels sweep NW suburbs — chicagotribune.com
The muggiest air of 2007, which first reached the area Sunday, exploded Wednesday for a fifth consecutive day into downpour and funnel-cloud producing t-storms. Doppler radar velocity measurements identified tornadic rotation around 2:45 p.m. Wednesday afternoon in northern Kane County. A flurry of funnel reports ensued from Maple Park to Schaumburg, prompting the activation of tornado sirens.
It’s been awfully, awfully wet, humid, hot, and stormy for days, and yesterday was highlighted with a little trip to the basement for us at work.
I started hearing people talking about the weather in concerned tones after lunch – I’d spent my meal hour watching the rain come sluicing down the windows of the cafeteria, and on the way back through the covered walkway to my building, it hammered a tatoo-like drumbeat on the flat metal roof. People were standing outside under an awning walkway that was just a sheet of moving water with their shoes getting soaking wet, because the sidewalk was the only place for all the water on that side of the building to go downhill.
Upstairs, some of the team leaders and people on the emergency evac team started grabbing their red hats to get ready for an announcement, because a couple of the agents had had calls from panicked kids at home who’d heard the tornado sirens in their part of the suburbs and didn’t know what to do. I’m supposed to be on that team too, so I got my clipboard and cell phone and looked fruitlessly for my hat.
Apparently, a funnel cloud had actually been sighted out here where we live, and it was headed toward work. A double whammy, whee! David tells me he and his work and online buddies were watching the webcam to see if the house would blow away.
My TL was out for the day – she has a real knack for being out when a real emergency happens – and I was “Acting TL” for my team. So as soon as they made the official announcement, “log out of the phones and go to the basement,” I called the outside contacts on my list to inform them – one of which was probably hunkered down herself, as the storm came from her direction – and went to my designated wait point. I’m supposed to check the floor and bathrooms and meet people at the elevator who have to be escorted by someone from the building because they can’t walk down multiple flights of stairs. Last time we had a drill, I forgot that part and nobody ever came up from building services to escort them down the freight elevator, so I was determined to get it right.
Not to be. Half of the people waiting at the freight elevator decided not to wait for the building guy, so they went down with my nod. The other half that were supposed to be there either went down already, or went down the stairs. I had one person with me, and nobody from the building was coming. Some of the other TLs cleared the floor and called it in, and then also called the building contact for an escort. That’s when we realized the freight elevator was shut off, so all of us waited around for a while before just bagging the thing and taking the main elevators down, which WERE still running.
The building has never gotten around to specifying locations for each floor of each tower to gather in in the basements (which are huge but labyrinthine) so I wandered around trying to check off everyone on my list that was there yesterday. Last time, I totally forgot about a couple of new people, so I made sure to add them. Never did find the person who has joined this new team that took over parts of my old support job, although several people said they’d seen her.
People stood or sat on the floor, chatting in crowded groups. Finally, we got the all clear to go back up, and I walked up about 5 flights with one of the new guys. We got disoriented on this one floor because there seemed to be only the freight elevator access, until we realized that half of the floor had been closed off with wooden doors (not fire doors). The other half had no office access at all – it was just weird! Only a couple of anonymous doors back by the freight elevator. I’d never noticed that no one ever gets off at the fifth floor from the main elevators before.
There was a lot of flooding in outlying areas, but by the time I got home there wasn’t much to see, even across the little creek near the forest preserve. It was quite, quite full but not flooding, at least then.
Couldn’t sleep much last night, as it happens, and yes, it rained again. This is getting ridiculous.
[tags]weather, rain, tornado, deluge[/tags]
It’s been a hellish few months at work. Every now and then, jobs there get switched around, and my job is no exception.
For the last few months, I’ve been getting away from work – in the sense of escaping – at least an hour after “quitting time.” Most nights, it’s been even later. Part of the problem was starting out the day “in the hole,’ spending at least an hour going through the overnight queues, fixing records that the “emergency travel services” agents had worked during the off hours. Mondays, there were sometimes 20 or 30 records to go through -most of which required no action, some of which required a few minutes’ worth of documenting and fixing up to be auto-invoiced, and a few of which totally stalled me out because they required a good 15 or 30 minutes of fixing, calling, and documenting using this really pokey web-based “customer service” tool that is extremely tedious to use, since all the data from each record has to be entered into it by clicking little radio buttons and drop-down menus and popping back and forth copying and pasting bits of info. And for multiple records with the same problem, your only friend is copy and paste the text you put in the “request action” box. Everything else has to be repeated manually.
Meanwhile, I’ve gotten totally bogged down with the hotel groups thing – now there’s this entire division of one of our main client’s that’s conducting regional meetings all over the country for the next year, and this division has no friggin idea how to delegate this task so that the “organizers” actually are organized enough to give me the information, and to stay on top of changes. And the travelers… they’re like a herd of cats, because most all of them are either new hires, or raw recruits, and they have no idea how to behave, apparently, on a business trip.
Example: one particularly disorganized organizer had no idea that she was supposed to make sure that lists of names that she sent to me were:
Yeah, this one group is really getting on my last nerve, because it was one that started out with problems and it’s been one problem, change, or complete rebook after another. Plus it’s confirmed at two different hotels, because the disoroganizer did not contact me far enough in advance to secure her space. And the first section, which was at a second-choice hotel, wanted to stay there the whole 5 weeks, while they’re supposed to move to the primary property on Sunday for the next 2-week sections of their training (they get weekend breaks every 2nd week).
At approximately 4pm today, a Friday, the sales rep at the secondary hotel, who’s been rather annoying about wanting to get the entire 5 week stay instead of the 1-week stopgap I booked with her, sends me this email that says in part “The guys are in mutiny, they want to stay here the whole time and I’ll offer a great rate” which is still not as good as the rate the company gets with the primary property, and there are signed booking agreements in place. My reply to her was “Do not extend their stays, do not let them cancel their upcoming reservations at the other hotel, there are booking agreements and direct billings in place, PLEASE do not meddle.” It’s been a nightmare – I’ve never, ever had a group give me this much trouble with changes. It’s like being nibbled to death by ducks, while trying to herd cats.
I’m not even going into how I had to change the block dates all around because the travelers all got sent a calendar with the wrong travel dates marked, and they booked their air for those wrong dates, and it was “easier” for all concerned if I changed the blocks and… oh look, I just did. Yeah, so I had to completely revamp dozens and dozens of name records to show the new hotel dates and email the itineraries, and put them into the air reservations that they booked all wrong. All because some idiot secretary forgot to CC: someone in on the “final” copy of the booking calendar (which didn’t show the actual arrival and departure dates, just the days the meeting took place on – causing no end of merry hell in the beginning, too).
And oh goody, I’ve got another 5-week for the same city, same primary hotel, different disorganizer. Things are going to be different this time, bucko. But dammit, this one only gave me 3 weeks’ notice, too. They have no frickin’ idea that the need to block the space a few months in advance and THEN let me have the namelists 3 weeks prior. Idiots. I’ll have to add that comment to the “groups checklist” that I send out, because half the battle is educating the organizers the first time through.
But aside from those frustrations, today was a happy day, because I discovered a new city code that is entirely unsafe for work, and it becomes more and more obscene when combined with other naughty city codes. It caused me endless mirth today, especially when I had to call someone at another company to discuss a rental car at this location, and I know she’s a rather straight-laced person. She giggled, but would not even spell the code out. It made for an interesting time working out the niceties of booking a rental car to be delivered to a flightline at the little GA airport with the naughty, naughty code.
Did you know the airline pseudo city code for Westhampton Beach, NY is
FOK
? I did not know that either.
Would you like me to book you a hotel in FOK? I would be happy to do that, sir or madam, the entry I will make in SABRE will begin HOTFOK. Smoking or nonsmoking? Would you like a king size bed with a Jacuzzi bath and fireplace?
How about a rental car? Let me look up the car vendor for FOK. Why, it is Enterprise, which reminds me of the world’s oldest profession when I look up their location record in SABRE, which for some reason repeats that jolly pseudo-city code so that the address portion actually begins:
FOKFOK WESTHAMPTON BEACH
and reminds me inexplicably of a cocktail I once had called “Sex on the Beach.” I’d heard the Hamptons can be a bit racy this time of year, but my word.
Where are you flying from, sir or madam? Sioux City? I will be checking availability on the 10th of August:
110AUGSUXFOK
I am sure you will enjoy your return flight, let me check the schedule on August 22nd for you:
1R22AUGFOKSUX
Mmm, that is nice, turnabout is fair play.
There are many more enjoyable examples – Fresno is lovely this time of year, if you like things a bit hot and heavy:
120AUGFOKFAT
This may make you feel a little ill, so you probably won’t want to continue on to Spokane:
121AUGFATGEG if you have a week stomach.
It’s a good thing there’s no such thing as a direct flight from Westhampton Beach, NY to Fukuoka, Japan, though. There are limits to the amount of travel porn I’ll blog about.
[tags]FOK, DO NOT WANT, overtime[/tags]