Saturday, May 31, 2008

Unbloodied, but Bowed

We're back in safely in Palookaville, with no special thanks to United Airlines, who cost us an unscheduled extra night in Chicago, each way, coming and going. Okay I concede these guys can't control the weather, and I admit we got some pretty good counter help most (but not all) of the time.

Still, you can't go through two rounds of this without developing the sour conviction that United's current business plan is to make air travel so unpleasant that nobody will want to fly any more.

On second thought, strike “nobody” and substitute “the poor chumps who guilelessly attempt to use their Frequent Flyer miles.” You really do get the impression that United is doing everything it can to encourage you to despair of ever using your miles for actual plane rides, reducing you, I suppose, to frittering them away on unwanted management subscriptions. And here's a thought; when governments degrade the currency by, e.g., turning on the printing presses, we brand them as financial criminals. Seems to me that the habitual degraders of the Frequent Flyer contract are doing the same thing. I wonder, shouldn't we at least count this war on good order as part of the Consumer Price Index?

Vagrant afterthought: my friend Ian says he has flown through Chicago a hundred times without event. Next time, I think I'll take Ian.

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