United Airlines — Greed At Its Most Disgusting

As you all know recently I lost my father to an unexpected heart attack. We are still grieving our loss. What you might not know was that my father was planning on visiting us in Germany for the first time since I made the decision to leave the United States. This to me was a big step in our relationship as I felt that he finally accepted my decision.

When he finally decided to come visit I jumped on the internet with my wife so that we could get tickets for my parents. As my parents are not on the internet it might be more expensive and more difficult for them to get flights themselves. My wife and I are big travelers and have gotten the hang of most things with dealing with airlines and getting reservations. I say most things because we were soon to be seriously surprised and shocked.

We ordered our tickets over Opodo.de which is an online discount travel agent. We’ve used them plenty of times in the past without problems and may actually continue to use them. However, we have never used them to book flights for someone not living in Germany before. We were a little disappointed that the travel insurance that opodo.de offered was only valid for people who live in Europe. My parents living in the United States would not be available for this insurance. We went ahead and ordered the tickets anyway thinking “What could happen?”. Well it is obvious now what could happen. My father died and we had to deal with canceling his ticket (my mother will still travel to see us in April so that is nice at least). My wife, being the native German speaker, dealt with Opodo.de and they were really helpful when it came to telling us what we needed to do, and even called to make sure that they were only to cancel my father’s ticket. They were to take care of dealing with the airlines about getting some of our money back. We both knew not to hope to get the entire amount we paid for my father’s ticket but at least a good amount. What we received was 60 Euros out of approximately 490 Euros paid. The only excuse we received from Opodo.de was that the airline kept 383 Euros of the price. The itinerary that my parents (and mother still) will use had a flight from Knoxville (TN) to Dulles International (MD) then from Dulles International to Munich (GERMANY) and then back again by the same route. For three of the four flights they would be using United Airlines. So it is pretty obvious who kept our 300+ Euros from the ticket. We were shocked that an airline would be so greedy as to keep practically the entire cost of the flight (remember this is February and the flight isn’t until April meaning they have plenty of time to fill that seat for the FULL price again) from us when the only reason we canceled in the first place was because the person who was to use the ticket is dead.

These greedy bastards at United Airlines obviously can only think of the bottom line which to them is “Hey we can keep most of the full price of this ticket and charge someone else the full price for the same seat! Ain’t that great we get paid twice for one seat and screw the poor family who have lost their loved one!”.

Now I’m not a rich man. My wife and I rent our apartment. We’ve been saving up for the time when my parents decided to come visit so that we could help defray the costs of their visit so that they wouldn’t be too burdened by the costs themselves. I really felt as though I’ve been kicked while I’m down by this airline. Therefore I can promise you all this and I hope you share this with others, “Neither I nor any member of my family will ever again use United Airlines after this trip for my mother. We will never again use an airline who treats their customers with such disdain and disrespect.” You can quote me on that.

Now you might ask yourself why haven’t I written United Airlines about this. I have and here is what I said.

Dear United Airlines,
I must say that I am extremely displeased with the way the cancellation of my father’s ticket was handled.

In January we booked a flight for my parents to come and visit us in Germany where we live. This was to be their first time visiting us and the first time they were to see their new grandson. After receiving the tickets from our booking agent (OPODO) my father died of a sudden an unexpected heart attack. We of course wished to cancel his ticket and his ticket alone. We knew we should get some money back from the cancellation and knew that we wouldn’t get the entire amount back. What was returned to us was approximately 60 Euros with a comment from OPODO that the rest of the over 400 Euro ticket cost were held by the airline. As for most of the trip my parents would be taking United Airlines it is not hard to figure out who kept the money.

As we booked over OPODO for my parents who do not live in Europe we had no way of insuring their travel, which would have protected us from you. This we are taking up with OPODO directly about their limiting the insurance. This does not excuse your actions.

We are extremely disappointed at the show of heartless corporate greed on the part of your airline, during a time of morning for our family. The money that we were hoping to get back, again not expecting the entire sum, was to be used to make my mother’s stay a little nicer. However, those plans are also now in ruins thanks to your disgusting display of greed.

I will make this known to everyone that neither I nor any member of my family will ever again use your airline. I will be warning everyone I know in as public a place as I can find about your airline’s horrible business practice.

I know that you will cowardly hide behind some contractual or terms and agreement issue that your corporate lawyers have concocted to allow you to charge twice for the same seat when a cancellation is made, and the comments of a single person won’t phase you in the slightest. However, I feel that I must explain to everyone why I am so angry with the way I and my family have been handled by your company.

Sincerely
Jason Reed

I haven’t received an answer yet. I’m doubtful that I ever will. At least I got it off my chest and now that I’ve posted this in the most public place I could I’ll leave it at that.

EDIT!!!

Ok so I can’t leave it at that. Apparently there are a lot of greed issues with United Airlines. Check these links out:

• http://www.damniwish.com/2008/02/prediction-shor.html
• http://workinglife.typepad.com/daily_blog/2006/01/at_united_greed.html
• http://www.randomduck.com/2008/02/04/want-greed-fly-the-un-friendly-skies/
• http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/15842/
• http://www.counterpunch.org/sustar05012003.html

Now some of those links point to dealing with their own workers and how the executives are acting with the company’s money, but there are few with how they are treating their passengers. So I leave you with this question:

Do you really want to support an airline who treats their customer’s so poorly, and yet charge you such high prices? For my part the answer is No, and I never will again.

Circle the Wagons Boys … US Court Attacks Web Freedom!

So if you haven’t heard yet a court in California has signed an injunction (note I didn’t say wrote an injunction they let the plaintiff do that) that blocks the access of wikileaks.org. In case you don’t know what Wikileaks is it is a website which provides a place for whistle blowers to post documents anonymously for the world to see. Pretty awesome that a place like that exists in the world. The site is managed in multiple languages but has its primary servers located in Sweden. The plaintiff in these matters is the Bank Julius Baer which is a Swiss bank and does business in the Cayman Islands. It is apparently the type of business in the Cayman Islands that was posted on Wikileaks which has led to this unfortunate turn in internet freedom. Now I could re-iterate everything that was said or better yet I’ll just link to an alternative Wikileaks page (you know they would have a backup) the FULL correspondence between Bank Julius Baer’s shyster and Wikileaks.

So not getting their way the Bank Julius Baer wrote their own little injunction and took it to a US Court of the Honorable [sic] Judge Jefferey S. White. Who is just delusional enough to think he has jurisdiction over this insanity because Wikileaks made the slight error in registering their domain in California. What do expect from a Bush appointee. So instead of writing his own injunction he signs the one that was create for him by the plaintiff. How lazy of our judicial system. Now you might be wondering where the Wikileaks lawyers were during all this? They had no idea that it was coming. They weren’t informed. They were NOT represented during the legal [sic] proceedings that has blocked all access to their website.

So what’s next? Well apparently on the 29th of February there will be a hearing. Who knows what will happen during this. Maybe the Judge will try to force the non-US based domain registers to block the other wikileaks domains. My personal thought is that people should start writing in to this “Loose Cannon” Judge to explain to him that he is really out of his jurisdiction and should possibly send this to a higher court. Or maybe you can visit him in Person at the court house in San Fransisco, or you could just call his office (it is amazing what you find in Public Domain) and voice your opinion. Personally I my opinion’s voice would be more like the sound of gas leaving a tight smelly orifice.

Oh I forgot to say that if you are still wanting to get to Wikileaks you can access them also through the UK site at www.wikileaks.org.uk which as far as I know is not under jurisdiction of Judge White (at least for now).

Beware of Video Conversion Software that Says It Is Free.

Yeah so I learned a lesson today. You would figure a computer/internet savvy guy like me would know better but I really wanted to convert some video to the 3gp format that is used by my Nokia phone. Needless to say I was happy at first (at least I got the video I wanted converted done before this happened).

So I did a search for free 3gp conversion software and found an application at SmallVideoSoft.com. Downloaded their 3gp converter and installed it. I was able to run it right off the bat with no nag screen or anything (bells and whistles should have been going off in my head at this point). So I converted some video and closed the application and tried the video on my phone. The video transfered OK but I didn’t like the quality so I wanted to convert the files again with better video settings. So I started the application again. I got a nag screen asking me to register and that registration is free. However, I didn’t have the time to do it at that very moment. So I converted the files I wanted with better video settings. Strangely enough I couldn’t find a button or menu selection that would take me to the registration page. So I closed and the program and decided I would try again later.

So today I woke up and decided I had better register this application. I started it up and sure enough it gave me a nag screen. So I clicked the link that it had to send me to the registration web page. I registered and when I clicked the section to get my registration number it gave me this comment:

(The free registration has been closed for the huge website traffic.)

Give me a fucking break. If I want to register I have to pay (the good things in life are not free). What gets me the most is that they try to make it look like that they HAD to stop free registration like they ever really had a free registration. So I figured I would just click on the Later button and sure enough when I did the application closed and said it wouldn’t run until I registered.

So what they didn’t isn’t really illegal but it is really annoying and I refuse to do business with a company that doesn’t come right out and say “Hey our app will let you do some video conversion for about 10 or so videos and then you have to pay to do more.” or they could say “This is a trial version and it is only good for 24 hours.” But to pretend that their software is completely free and then try the old switcharoo afterwards really pisses me off.

So now I’m weighing my options:

• Crack their app (Completely illegal but probably not so difficult, nope I won’t be doing that. Got too much to lose).
• Buy their software (Nope I don’t do business with companies that play tricks on potential buyers, at least if they aren’t smart enough not to get caught.)
• Find out the 3GP requirements and build my own converter then offer it on the net completely free and really piss off these companies that charge for the software. (quite a possibility once I’ve finished off a few projects).

The Canadian Foreign Minister is a Coward.

I was shocked but also happy to see earlier this month that the United States (my home country) as added to Canada’s list of countries that torture. I was further shocked and surprised when Canada decided to back track from this statement. Now the Foreign Minister is apologizing for the “Mistake” of putting the US on the list. Even though recently the US National Intelligence Chief Mike McConnell actually said that he would consider waterboarding as torture. So I’m gathering that the Canadian FM is a coward. He changes his statement when the big bully on the block complains that Canada is pointing the finger at its wrong doing.

Personally I’m sick of what the current US Government is doing under the name of protecting our citizens. I’m surprised that the “Holier Than Thou” President we have in office doesn’t start claiming that it is written in the bible that he should torture for information. Other western nations have a responsibility to the rest of the world to stand up to the United States and keep them in line. It would be a good bet to say if the shoe were on the other foot and the US Government thought it could get something out of it they would point their finger at a close neighbor.

My message to Canada and other nations: DON’T BE A COWARD! DON’T LET THE UNITED STATES DICTATE YOUR NATIONAL OR INTERNATIONAL POLICY. TELL THE UNITED STATES IT IS ABOUT TIME THAT THEY TOE THE FUCKING LINE!!!

Cox Communications Inc. Obviously Doesn’t Care About Abuse of Their Network!

So today I finally got fed up with the all the spam bots that have been appearing on my forum and started going through and contacting the ISP to have them blocked as well as doing the blocking locally.  Actually I don’t have that many bots visiting but there are enough and they like to try to do this type of posting http://www.mysite.com/index.php?topic=http://somepornsite.com/lookatme?. Which of course doesn’t work on my website but adds crap into my error log. I’ve never really heard of Error Log spamming but apparently it is happening quite often.

Now normally when I contact an ISP I find under ARIN or some other Who Is type site the email address for abuse reporting. However when I looked up Cox Communications because of this IP 68.103.150.86 I find that they have no way of reporting abuse on their network. I even went to their website and still found nothing. Honestly, they really need to do something about this. I’m actually tempted to ban the entire COX network from my site. I might do it still if the number of bots on their network increases.

Persian Gulf – Arabic Gulf What’s so Damned Important About a Name?

Since my company does a lot of work in THE Gulf region (you know the one where the US is always meddling in), I wanted to make sure I got the names correct of the countries that we do most of our business with. So I did a search for the Arabic Gulf since that is what most of the countries on the Arabic Peninsula call it and I find this mock 404 page. Which basically says that the Arabic Gulf doesn’t exist and that you should try looking for the Persian Gulf, as well as suggesting that you really need to read history books. There is also a link to a site called Legofish (which makes me wonder if a certain toy company in Denmark will be very happy to know that this guy uses their trademark), which apparently discusses that the mock 404 page was created as a Google Bomb because Iranian bloggers weren’t happy with National Geographic using the name Arabic Gulf instead of Persian Gulf. So it makes me wonder what is so damned important about a name?

Here’s my reasoning on this and not in any particular order:

1. Everyone on the other side of this body of water usually prefer to refer to it as the Arabic Gulf.
2. Although at one time the Persians were a very powerful people in the area around this body of water, how many people living in the area are still Persian.
3. If my history is correct the Persians were led by the Shah who was ousted when the people of Iran decided to follow the religion of the Arabic people.

Since no one can really decide which is the proper name for this body of water I have a suggestion that should please everyone. How about we call it the “Black Gold Gulf” or “Oil Gulf” or “Gulf of Oil Tankers”.

Diskeeper Corporation Has No Concept of Exchange Rates!

Ok this irks the hell out of me.

In the past I’ve used the trial version of Diskeeper and was really happy with how well it kept my hard drive in order. However, I wasn’t sure if I really needed it so after the trial I removed it from my computer.

Fast forward to today when I realized that my hard drive is more fragmented than china plates dropped from the Empire State Building. So I decided maybe I should give another check on the costs for buying a license for Diskeeper since I was pretty happy with it. So I look their website up and they offer a European website for buying their product, and since I live in Europe I figured I should look their. The first thing came up was the British costs for the software which for a single home license was 28.56 British Pounds which converts to about $56.13. Ok but I don’t live in England but in Germany so I click on the German flag and get the price there. The price in Euros is 40.91 which converts to approximately $60.12. Wow so it costs about 4 dollars more to buy it in Germany than in England. So out of curiosity I decided to look at the original United States site where the price for a full version cost $29.95!

WTF, FTW Have the people at Diskeeper Corporation ever heard of a conversion rate? Why are we in Europe paying approximately 1.5 to 2 times more than the United States? Do they think people are really that stupid? Is it any wonder why people pirate software like this when they add such a high markup on it?

Of course nothing would stop me from actually buying the software from the US Site where with the exchange rate it would charge my credit card for 20.37 Euros which is much better than the rate they are offering as mentioned above.

I’m going to attempt to contact the company to see what they think about this problem. I would like to hear how they justify charging so much just because people live outside the United States! I’ll keep you posted.

P.S. So you can see the pricing yourself here are the websites that I’m referring to in this post:
Diskeeper Corporation US
Diskeeper Corporation Europe

Disappointment in Drachenwald

We recently traveled to the Kingdom University event for Drachenwald. We were full of hopeful excitement since many of our old Shiremates of previous years would be attending and we were really looking forward to seeing them again, as well as taking some classes. This was the first Kingdom level event we have attempted with our son. I knew from previous events that the Kingdom had Youth Minister to assist in ensuring that children also have a place to participate and have fun. I of course figured this would be the case here. The event had approximately 140 people registered and about 10% were children under 12. You kind of figure that someone would have thought of this, but sadly no. There was really nothing for small children to do at this event, and sitting through 1 to 2 hour classes for small children is just not feasible. The only place where our son could play and stay warm (it was pretty cold outside) was in the sleeping room which we shared with seven other people. Now, you would think that this would be ok because these people “SHOULD” be going to classes. However, several of these people wished either to sleep in or to take a long nap before court and feast. So this left us with pretty much no where we could take our son. Now, we weren’t looking for someone to watch our child for us, just a place where he could be a child. Our question: Where the hell was the Youth Minister, or a deputy, or someone to say “Hey we should do something for the children!” Sadly like most in the SCA (at least as I’ve seen it) everyone only thought of things for the adults. I had one mother say to me on her arrival, “I hope my children stay asleep so I can be an adult for a while.”, and this coming from a Royal Peer.

Now if the family-unfriendliness were the only problem we felt then I probably wouldn’t be commenting about this here, sadly that was not the only problem at the event. This one was much more personal. There was a Royal Peer at the event who I’ve known since I’ve moved to the Munich area. He was a member of our shire and he and his lady were friends with me and mine. So much so that  he stood as my Best Man at our wedding. They ended moving away to the Barony of Knights Crossing just before our wedding. We hadn’t seen them in a couple of years and we were really excited about seeing them again. During the time we hadn’t seen them, he was Knighted, and then they won Crown. Although there was a greeting (even with a hug) there was no real warmth in the greeting. More distant and forced as though they were only going through the motions. I had hoped to talk to him about a previous conversation we had had about Chivarly some years before. I didn’t even get a chance to bring it up. I asked my wife later how she felt about seeing our old friends again, thinking maybe it was just me. She also felt that our old friends treated us as though we weren’t worth their time. In my mind and heart at least if you are friends with someone it doesn’t matter if they were Knighted or not, or if they had won Crown or not. They are friends to be treated with warmth and respect. If they are friends that I have not seen for sometime of course I would find a way to sit down and talk with them about what is new in their lives or what they are currently doing, and most especially what has happened since we last saw each other.

My wife and I have pretty much decided that if this is what the SCA is about then maybe we don’t want to be a part of the SCA, at least not here in Germany. Here, the SCA is not the only game in town.

Open Letter to the Munich Mass Transit Group MVG.

I’m going to be honest with you, I don’t expect anyone from the MVG to actually read this post let alone respond to it. I do hope that some one else living in Munich reads this and starts thinking and possibly continues this on. Even if they don’t oh well at least I’ve got it off my chest.

Tonight my family and I were leaving from the Frötmanning U-Bahn station to where I had parked the car. As we were crossing over the tracks we could see numerous U-Bahn trains that were off duty sitting there lit up like proverbial Christmas trees. I’m not just talking about break lights or warning lights but ever single light in every car all the way down the train. These trains are fairly long and that is a lot of energy being used up. Now, I’m not really that much of “Green” person however, with the current raising costs for energy I can’t understand why a company that seemingly raises ticket prices every year can waste so much energy.

So this is for you MVG, turn off the lights when not at use so that I don’t have to pay higher ticket prices next year!

Beware of Mail Fraud!

Today my wife received a letter from Spain saying that she just won 1 million Euros. They provide a form that you must fill out and fax to them. When you look at the form they are asking for your personal data.

It is an obvious scam. First off the letter says that they got my wife’s name and address because she flew on an European Airline in the last 10 years. Which is funny because my wife has only been using my last name since 2003 (when we were married) and we have only lived at this current address since 2004 (since our son’s birth). In that time my wife has not flown on a European Airline.

So if you are living in Germany and you get a letter Spain saying you won 1 million Euros. Take the letter to the police to take care of.