REPORT: MALPRACTICE: Continental AIRLINE SLAPS AN UNDUE FEE

This friend of mine, AT, bought 2 international air-tickets for Continental Airlines. Soon after, due to some unavoidable circumstance, he had to abandon the plans for that international trip. Knowing that its an international flight, where tickets can be thus changed, he called the airlines for the same. Continental told him that he can get credit but not a refund. Fair enough. A week later, he booked himself 3 tickets for Florida, using the credit he had collected. He made these reservations on the phone (which is what one would use, if one has to use the credits). All well......till he gets his credit card bill, which shows that he has been charged $750 extra.....why? Continental tells him that when they make such reservations on the phone, they charge $250 per ticket! No one told AT anything about this, when he was making the FL reservations. He repeatedly called the airlines to rectify this charge-----but to no avail.

CONTINENTAL.......BAD-BAD.

Lesson: ALWAYS before signing off on any telephonic deal, ask the agent to repeat the charges you will incur, and do also take the agent id, name etc for your records.

    

New on this blog

So having celebrated my particular birthday now, I feel I have walked long enough on this earth to start giving back some 'wisdom'. Additionally when even on a continent so far removed from the country that I grew up in, in almost every other party I end up meeting someone who says s/he knows me from x years back, I know I am a veteran enough now. So capitalising on this known and unknown social circle of mine, I feel its time to further share the shared wisdom. What I will do now is to start chronicling the notable interactions of mine or of people I know, in order to spread the word about best finds, malpractices of corporates or some such everyday phenomena. These chronicles can be trusted, since I put my trust on the person(s) in the center of these, and hopefully they will provide some insights which will then make our lives a little better too. 

Knowing no better way to lay them out on this blog, I will start the title of any such posting, with the word: REPORT. This will be followed by a word indicating what kind of report it is. For example: MALPRACTICE, or BEST FIND, or SMART WAY. This will then be followed by a title that will hopefully best capture the gist of the post. 

Also, at the start of every month, I will post this above paragraph about the 'filing' method of reports to keep the reader reminded of the system.

The caterpillar is not so young after all

Today Google celebrates the 40th anniversary of the 1st release of Eric Carl's 'The Very hungry Caterpillar'. For those of you who have never had close interaction with small kids in the Western hemisphere, this is a book you probably do not know much about. Rightly so! It is a children's book--no, its no Harry Potter though. Its very small chidren's book. I had the honor of being introduced to the book once I had a kid of my own. Today as I read of Google celebrating the 40th anniversary of the book, I am a little surprised myself. Just because I first came to know about the book when I bought it for my 'fresh' new baby, DOES NOT mean that the book is all 'freshly off the press'. Its been around for a GOOD 40 years! 

And then, when I casually talked to some older kids born in the US about the book, well, they seemed to know all about it too. I know thats a childhood memory I do not have and can't share with my kid. All the same, the fact that I almost never realised that the book is so old, speaks about the timelessness of the very cute, sweet and simple tale of the very hungry caterpillar.

The Swearing in of Barack Obama

BO's swearing in today in DC as the 44th President of the USA was, as has been said a thousand times, an 'historic' event. While it is almost a climax for blacks in America and elsewhere, its significance for other people of color, including myself, cannot be discounted. When he lay his hand on the Bible used by Lincoln, my eyes filled with tears of joy too. I had to call my septuagenarian father, to congratulate him, for it is his generation that has seen both sides of humanity----him and his contemporaries were either just about to be born or were young people when Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was thrown off a train in South Africa because of the color of his skin. 75 years, or even 100 years is not a very long time for things to have so changed that today the leader of the most advanced democracy in the world is a person of color. Indeed it is an absolutely fantastic achievement for our generation. To me, what is most heartening is the understanding that the electorate that voted BO to office is actually a whole body of people who are color blind. These are my colleagues in universities, my students, my husband's co-workers, the bank clerk, the delivery man, the postal employee, the sales agent at the rental office, etc. I don't know all these people's political leanings, and I don't have to know them. Because I know that a large electorate was color blind, I can safely assume that the default in America is color-blindness. And I think this readjusting of the 'default', to me, is perhaps a real turning point, worth remembering to recount to generations that will come after us.

Michelangelo

Just finished reading the biographical book on the great Italian Master-Michelangelo Buonarrotti. Some thoughts from the reading:
a. He lived a full life, dying short of age ninety. And yet, the book (by Irving Stone) will have us believe that on his death bed, Michelangelo was not ready to die, not because he loved life very much, but because he loved his work-his creativity with marble, too much. He still thought that he had an entire (one more) lifetime of sculptures to chisel and frescoes to paint. Is this really what a truly passionate person thinks of in his/her last moments?
b. Despite his creative genius, and the accompanying passion he had for his work, he comes across as very stereotypically chauvinistic. Completely in sync with the opinions of his times, he expected women to be nothing more than wombs to 'bear sons' in order to 'carry the family name forward'. Not only did he never question the relative subservience of women in his society, but that he almost naturally treated them with the same prevalent attitude. Additionally, throughout the book, spanning ninety golden years of Renaissance, it is noteworthy that women appear only as part of the background. Not because Michelangelo was a misogynist, but because there was actually so little role for women to play in that society. Women in the book were mostly wives, daughters or mothers, or if they had some separate identity, then it was because they were either mistresses, or nuns. It makes me realise that actually human history-----the greatest majority of it, is 'man's history'. Women seldom created landmarks--they just marched on and on and on, to the tunes of the times. It was men who carried out trade, waged wars, preached from the pulpit, carved, created and ruled. They created ripples on the lake of time, and thus created History--a chronicle of events, made up of actions and meditations of men.
Needless to say that those few women of the past(like Joan of Arc, Rani Lakshmibai and so on) who actually did dare to do more than what was asked of them, deserve a tremendous amount of awe.
c. Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were contemporaries for some years. They shared the love of painting, and were rivals too. It would be interesting to compare their lives and note how events shaped the two people.

How to be Green?

Yes, there is a question-mark there in the title of this post since, I am actually asking all of you how to be green? We can choose to not believe in all the global-warming talk since there are still a lot of people in the scientific community who can churn out esoteric numbers from equally obscure mathematical formulae to show how phenomenon like global warming are routine in the evolution of planets. And yet for those of us mortals living in the present time and witnessing fairly drastic changes in weather patterns and in melting icebergs, global warming seems to be the one event closest to D-day. We live our ordinary lives, believing that every thing we do is somehow contributing to earth's decay.
Needless to say that from from every form of medium of expression we are also being forewarned about global warming. However, somehow as I said, many questions still exist about how we can help in the cause of global warming. As winter descends upon most of the northern hemisphere, a mere walk in the park becomes an arduous task and we seek refuge in the warmth of man-made structures. It is at this time, I most see literally every facet of our life depend on something not natural. All the gas we consume in generating heat and keeping ourselves comfortable. So my question concerns what we can do at these times:
Is switching off the heat better during the daytime when there is so little need for a blowing hot air, or should we keep the heat on, and let the room's thermostat maintain a temperature of our desire?
If we do not unplug the electrical equipments but they are switched off---like an iron, a lamp, etc, is it still consuming power?

It would be nice to know the correct information on this---and so while my search continues, please let me know if you hear or know anything relevant.

Oh to be O!

Now this posting is a desperate attempt by me to log in the minimum one per month (unwritten) norm of blog-writing. My clock says I have a meager 2 hours to go before we will be in October, and if something is not posted on the blog page till then, well then, I would have left a blank for September 2007. Not that there is not much to write, but that the usual bug has been biting me----of wanting to preserve my ideas till I can really pull them all into one big bang theory, and then present them to the world. However, that big finale may not come any time soon, and so I guess I must present the small parts of ideas that come till then.
Sometime back I saw an Oprah Winfrey show on TV, where the usual glamorously magnanimous Oprah showed videos of how audience from one of her past shows had stood up to her generosity challenge. Essentially the challenge consisted of O giving a thousand bucks to each member of the audience asking them to pay that money forwards in creating some act of generosity. The range of ideas which people applied to this challenge was wide and touching. People had gone on to do simple things like paying a thousand dollar tip to absolutely shocked and happy pizza delivery boys to galvanising an entire town to come together to organise food drives, or fund drives for some local needy folks. The amounts collected over the small sum of one thousand dollars sometimes ranged till several hundred thousands. The social multiplier here was thus unexpectedly large, and pleasantly so.
Despite any amount of allegations of pomposity on Oprah, her shows and her own personality do have the power to move her listeners. What is appreciable about her is her very human surrender to worldly pleasures of fashion, style, money and power, balanced so energetically with her more than human sense of reaching out to the wider world. She makes all of us realise that we don't always have to be Mother Teresas to help others. We can be just ourselves, live our good lives, aspire for better lives, and yet lift someone else with us.
So I sat by thinking what would I do if I found 1000 bucks on the road? How would I be able to pay it forwards? Having looked at O's show it is clear that 1000 bucks need not be a small amount if rightly used to augment secondary support. We'll see how far my thoughts on this go.