Our gym needs a makeover

The fitness room on the ground floor of our residence is in bad shape. Every cardio machine is wobbling on its last legs and the treadmill is a safety hazard in the making. The last time I tried to run on the treadmill, the belt spun and rattled boisterously, sped up and then shut off on its own. I got off before I ended up on some goofy accident video on YouTube, flying off the treadmill and bumping my head on the free weights. I don’t find those web videos of freak accidents funny; I don’t enjoy watching them and I sure don’t want to end up inadvertently starring in any of them.

I decided to work out on the recumbent exercise bike and watch CNN on the rickety analog TV dangling haphazardly from the ceiling. But the TV remote won’t work from any angle so I tap it gently against the handle bars. A clear liquid oozes out from under the remote control buttons. I’d like to think that some of the Lysol cleaning product seeped in when someone hosed down the machine after using it but I’m pretty sure it’s sweat. I just gave up on changing the channels and sit on the bike listening to silly “yo mama” jokes on an animated series on BET. I have heard all these jokes before: Yo mama’s so stupid, she thinks a quarterback is a refund; Yo mama so old her social security number is 1.

I have to renew my gym membership.

June photos

  

Uncorked

The second best thing you can pour out of a champagne bottle – after Perrier-Jouët

Malayalam

At a friend’s dinner party this evening, I met a woman whose native language is Malayalam, the native language of Kerala. It is also one of India’s 15 official languages, including Hindi and Bengali. The word is also a palindrome, at least in English.

Deal on Airfares

I miss getting great deals on airfares and flying to Europe or cross country for a few hundred dollars roundtrip. Over the past few years, airlines have been steadily increasing the cost of airfare, either because the economy is strong and they can get away with it, or because the economy is weak and they can’t do otherwise. And what gets me is that ticket prices and surcharges don’t seem to come down when conditions stabilize. For instance, they don’t seem to remove the gas surcharges when gas prices come down. As a result, I have been steadily paying more to fly in the same economy seats offering fewer frills.

I just booked the tickets for our trip to France this summer and they weren’t cheap. Granted, we will be flying during the peak travel months of July and August, and we needed lots of accommodation. But you’d think that researching and booking more than two months in advance would have gotten me a better deal. 

At least we’ll be flying direct to Paris and the dates and times are convenient for us. And since we we are going to have our hands full on this trip, it just wasn’t worth the inconvenience to settle for a flight leaving Sea-Tac at 4 a.m. with a 12-hour layover in  Johannesburg just to save a couple of dollars. What’s more, Air France issued us a small travel voucher to offset the big inconvenience of the pilot strike last November. And as small as it was, the voucher amount would still help soften the blow of the final ticket prices, with all the taxes and charges thrown in. 

Applying the travel voucher, however, proved to be nearly as painful an ordeal as the predicament that got us the voucher. I searched on and off for airline tickets for about a month so when I reserved online, I knew I wasn’t going to do any better for the travel dates. I called an agent immediately to apply the voucher and pay. It seemed simple enough, I thought, expecting nothing more inconvenient than being put on hold and listening to that annoying recording about my call being very important. 

But there was lots worse, as I discovered. None of the numbers on our paper vouchers meant anything to the customer service reps we spoke to. David spent more than an hour on the phone arguing with different intermediaries before giving up. It’s as if we were deliberately issued useless paper vouchers and the automatons on the other end of the line were all instructed to be as unhelpful and as unaccommodating as possible. I can just see them going over their scripts: “if the customer insists the vouchers are valid, just throw in an uncomfortable silent pause. Then ask him to repeat the numbers 10 times and put him on hold. Then offer to transfer him to somebody who has no idea what he’s babbling about.”

None of the numbers on the voucher, which looked like a stack of standard paper airline tickets and receipts stapled together, seemed to work. And even worse, none of the service reps could give D any guidance. You have been issued paper tickets and not electronic tickets, one agent confirmed, and different rules apply to each. Our only option would be to mail the vouchers to some Florida processing center within 24 hours to have them taken into account. If the vouchers didn’t get there on time, they would not be applied to the final amount and we would have wasted our time, plus the roughly $20 it would cost to cover express delivery and confirmation charges.

There has to be an alternative, I heard D yelling into his smart phone. This is 2009. What major airline still needs to operate so inefficiently with paper vouchers? He was on the way to Sea-Tac Airport that afternoon, he explained to the rep on the other end of the receiver. It would be an inconvenience but surely he could drop them off at a ticketing counter at the airport. But that wasn’t an option, he was told. We’d have to mail the vouchers to Florida and hope they got to the processing facility before the reservation expired. Those were the rules. Eventually he gave up and we decided to go with another airline.

I couldn’t let them get away with the bad service and I wasn’t about to let the voucher go to waste, so I continued the battle hours after David had boarded his flight to Los Angeles.

“I’m not sure what to say,” one agent explained to me in defeat, “none of those numbers are showing up on the computer.” In other words, the conversation was over. So that’s it? His job was done? He wasn’t even going to try to help? Since when do customer service specialists get to have defeatist attitudes and to give up on customers? Sure enough, he offered no more assistance and I found myself coming up with suggestions on how to validate the vouchers.

At least he wasn’t rude like the first guy I spoke to that afternoon, the one who pretty much accused me of printing bogus paper vouchers in my basement with the help of an ink jet printer and some construction paper. He kept pronouncing the word voucher as if he were making air quotes each time he said it.

I asked to speak to a supervisor but none was available to take my call. After a second attempt, the customer service person returned to the phone with instructions that a busy manager had apparently dictated to him. Make a photocopy of the vouchers, she instructed, and fax them to the office before the end of the day. The tickets couldn’t be scanned and emailed; they had to be faxed. And how I got to a fax machine on a Sunday afternoon was my problem. At the time, I was sitting in my living room on a Sunday afternoon, multi-tasking while Tiggy napped in his room. When he woke up, we walked to the library to make a photocopy, then trekked to the grocery store to pay $1 per page to have the vouchers faxed.

But it would have been too simple if a simple fax solved my problem. “No, I don’t see a fax,” explained yet another uninterested representative on the other end of the line, making no effort delve further. “Is your machine working? Is there another fax number I can use? Is there something else I can do? I need to pay for my tickets before the end of the day.” She transferred me so that I could be somebody else’s problem and not hers.

I got a verbal lashing from the new intermediary about her not making the rules regarding paper vouchers and my needing to respect them. This only set me off even more so I let her know what I thought of the service we had been getting. And now that we were even, she proceeded to help me. You can take the voucher to the ticketing counter at the airport right now, she suggested, or mail them to Florida. I had more things to do on a Sunday afternoon than drive 40 minutes to the airport to look for a ticketing counter which would probably be closed by the time I got there. This would infuriate me, considering that David, who was on his way to the airport this afternoon, asked whether he could drop the voucher off before he boarded his flight and was told that was not an option.

I was just about to give up. But when I read the voucher numbers to this woman, they showed up on her computer! I don’t know why the same numbers weren’t registering for some 10 previous representatives but at that point, I didn’t care. I gave a credit card number then prepared to spend some $20 to mail the vouchers to Florida using Express Mail.

The lengths I’ll go to save a dollar.