Argue and Agree

Monday I had a flight to California. Sunday I printed out my itinerary, and what it says is this:

American Airlines flight XXX operated by Alaska Airlines

The intended receiver of said digital itinerary is none other than yours truly, and yours truly only gives a shit about one thing in this situation: where the fuck do I need to go to check in?

In fact, the single most important piece of information on that piece of paper is where and when I need to go in order to get on the fucking airplane.

PDX is a small airport, so I can’t go too wrong here. Unless, like is usually the case with me, I have about 15 minutes to get through security and get on the flight. I am a lagger that way.

My brain does the following: American is first on the itinerary, and it’s a bigger airline so I figure that this is the place to go. I am, of course, wrong. So, using a complicated system called trial and error I walk the 100 yards to the Alaska terminal where I try (with no luck, a topic for another posting) to check in using the humanless kiosk.

I do finally get a ticket, get some food and get on the plane.

I come home from California the next day. A man in a very long car is driving me to the San Diego airport. He has been given my itinerary, and so he drops me off where he interprets I need to go based on said itinerary.

He drops me off at American, thus falling into the same trap that I fell into the day before. Damnation.

The San Diego airport, though not huge, is much larger than Portland. It should then be no surprise to find that the Alaska terminal where I need to be is not the same terminal as American, where I now stand sweaty and angry.

I am only guessing at this, as I can’t find for the life of me find a map that shows where an Alaska terminal might be, or where any other terminals might be in fact. This time using process of elimination I figure out that I must be in the wrong place, so I walk outside, feeling rather like a vagrant, and begin to walk up the sidewalk of airport, hoping that sooner or later I will run into another terminal.

I do find another terminal and it does contain the Alaskan ticket counter (where the eletrco-kiosk thing does actually work this time around) and I do get a seat. A middle seat. A seat that I probably wouldn’t have gotten if I had checked in a half an hour earlier. I could have checked in a half an hour earlier if I didn’t have to try an relive a scene from “National Treasure” (a trainwreck of a movie) just to try and figure out where the fuck I am supposed to be going.

I don’t care who operates your flight. I don’t care about your business arrangements, your consolidations, your mergers. I care about three things: where do I need to go, when do I need to be there, and what time do I land. That’s it. The itinerary need not be 2 pages long. It needs to be 3 sentences long.

I don’t care about flight numbers. Flight numbers are useless too! They mean nothing to anybody except a computer that generates them randomly.

Let’s all speak using the works that matter. Let’s use the W words when we can. Who, when, where, why, what, etc. You know the deal. This is the important shit. Save the other trash for the paper pushers in the office.

I want clarity of information. This is the information age, right? I hope that the next age is the age of better information. Give me the info I need, nothing more, nothing less, nothing confusing. I am looking for quality, not quantity.

And those airport kiosk things can suck my balls. More on that later.

[r]