Alsop's Small Thoughts

Stupid Airline Stories

I was picking up my girlfriend at the Albuquerque airport Monday evening. She emailed me that the flight left at least 20 minutes late, but that she didn't know when it would arrive. Here's the sequence I went through as I drove to the airport from Santa Fe, more than an hour away. I share this with you just to embarrass the airline, which is so much fun:

8:54pm Automated system reports that the flight is arriving on time at 9:25pm. I don't believe this because Robin sent email time-stamped 20 minutes after flight was supposed to leave.

8:56pm I call back to bypass the automated system. Press 0 four times to get human being. Human being says flight is arriving 2 minutes late, even though the flight left 39 minutes late. "They will make up the time in flight". Right.

I keep driving, knowing that it would be worse to arrive after the girlfriend than to park somewhere and wait.

9:35pm: I'm in Albuquerque, maybe 10 minutes from the airport. Call the automated system again and hear that the flight is due in at 9:25pm, as in 10 minutes before I called.

9:37pm: I bypass the automated system and get another human being who reports that the flight is due to arrive at 9:27. I say, "10 minutes ago?" She says, "Oh, they haven't updated the system." She says that the flight left San Francisco at 7:08pm for sure. I ask what's the normal flying time. She says it takes about 2 hours and 20 minutes That would put the flight in at 10:28, not 9:25 or 9:27pm.

Reality: Flight lands at 10:08pm. I watch it from the airplane viewing area. Aren't they embarrassed to be this incompetent? Apparently not.

Good Thinking, Motorola!

In all the coverage of Motorola's acquisition of Good Technology (over the weekend for a reported $500M), no one has remembered that this is the second company acquired to get synchronization technology. That's right, Motorola already bought Starfish in 1998. I think they paid something like $200M for that company (founded by Philippe Kahn). Starfish made something called TrueSync for PDAs. This from a Business Week commentary about Motorola in its August 10 issue of that year: "Thanks to Starfish, Motorola says, phones released within the next 18 months will store addresses, telephone numbers, and other data, just like 3Com Corp.'s (COMS) Palm organizer." I'm still waiting.

Must passwords be hard?

I just bailed on a registration that was required to buy a book that looked nice. I bailed when I got this message: "Password must be at least 6 characters long, and contain at least one alphabetic and one numeric character." My standard e-commerce web password has six characters in it but only alphabetic. I can't handle coming up with yet another password or remembering which password I used to register for which site. Can't do it. So Pictopia.com just lost a sale for sfgate. (Nice looking book called "Mystical San Francisco". Maybe I'll get it in a book store, which doesn't require any kind of password at all!)

What dumb nerd thought that that particular site needed to enforce a different password format. What the heck is so important about Pictopia's products that it needs to be a pain in the keister to its customers to achieve "better" security.