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).

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

Beatles Playing “Stairway to Heaven” (sort of)

Ok so the band isn’t really THE Beatles but the music is pretty much the same style.

Scarry isn’t it.

Google’s Malware Warning and Bloom County.

I’m a big fan of Berkeley Breathed, the author of such great comic strips as Bloom County, Outland, and Opus. He has a great satire and I’ve always enjoyed reading his comics as far back as my childhood (of course now that I’m an adult his jokes make more sense). So out of curiosity I decided to take a look online for where they might be posting old Outland comics (Yahoo and GoComics are posting Bloom County Reruns, and Comics.com posts Opus on Sundays). So of course I turn to trusty Google. So I run a search for “Outland Comic” and the second listing is Berkeley Breathed’s website, and it is marked as “This site may harm your computer“. Now I’m not too sure I understand how that happened but I can say that I’m pretty sure that Berkeley Breathed would not have a site that has some sort of hazard seeing he’s probably trying to sell his books.

Strange thing this Google Malware Warning stuff. I hope they get it figured out soon. In the mean time does anyone know where I someone is syndicating the Outland comic?

The Right Tool for the Job? Using firearms to remove tires.

Well it seems that Europeans get another view of how dumb some Americans can be with their firearms. This article found on the BBC website proves just what you shouldn’t do to remove the lugs from your car tire.

The summary, a 66 year old man trying to remove a tire from his Lincoln Continental became so frustrated that he decided to use his 12-Gauge shot gun and blast the nut from his wheel. Needless to say this didn’t work and he ended up in the Hospital with shotgun pellets in his feet, abdomen, and chin.

So if you want to remove that stubborn lug nut get an impact wrench and air compressor. Shotguns won’t remove the nut unless the nut is referring to yourself.

Interior Decoration From the 70’s gone MAD!

 My wife and I are planning on eventually buying a house, once we get enough money for such an undertaking. We were looking last night at a website that posts property for sale here in Germany. There were some nice houses and some that weren’t as nice but this one stood out and had us almost in tears when we saw the interior decoration.

The outside of the house doesn’t look too bad, sadly the housing agent didn’t use this as the first picture instead they used this one.

This is where we started laughing. We have referred to this as the Red Room and is a place where you could film 70’s style porn. The red satin wall paper really does it for me as well as the 70’s era television on a stick sitting in the corner. Now if you think that this is all and that the rest of the house is better you should just keep reading.

This next picture is the reverse of the last. I’m not quite sure what the lady on the left hand side standing in the window thinks she is doing. Escaping most likely. The arch really is something though I’m not quite sure why the rest of the wall is black. At least it isn’t as red as the rest of the room.

The Red Room also has an annoying little corner that leads to … even more hideous red satin wall paper.

Now if you think that is funny let us take a look at the rest of this color coordinated house. Following the Red Room we come across the Blue Room or Maybe it should be Sapphire I’m not sure but it is definitely blue.

Follow the blue room with the Green Room. And what a disgusting shade of green too. I’m pretty sure that the previous owners were either 1. Very proud of how uniquely decorated their house was, 2. Extremely old, or 3. Blind

The bathroom left me completely speechless. My wife giggling over my shoulder and I couldn’t say anything my mind was lost in the thought that someone would mix sand brown with black in such a terrible way. It kind of put me in the mind of a Hundertwasser house.

This is probably the least eye injuring room in the house. The thing is I’m not sure what it was suppose to be used for.

Here is an example of the entry way. The mixture of red brick and green was again really hard on my eyes. It kind of looks like a waiting room in some old doctors office or worse.

The saving grace for this house (cough) is that it comes with its own little swimming pool.

I’m not sure what to make of this house other than I would not spend 218,000 Euros on it. EEEK

Medical Drinking Binge Equivalent Saves Poisoned Man!

Talk about tabloid sounding huh? But believe it or not it comes from the BBC.Here’s the summary, a 24 year-old Italian man drinks ethylene glycol and was taken to hospital. He is first given medical alcohol as an antidote however, the hospital ran out. So they used Vodka instead. The man was drip fed the equivalent to three drinks per hour for three days straight. The man has made a full recovery after spending a total of twenty days in hospital.

According to the report his hangover was finished before he came out of coma. Talk about being on a Binge.