United Airlines Service Is Terrible

"Fly the Friendly Skies," my @$$.

I am just back from a two-week vacation in Venice, Italy.  It was supposed to be the vacation of a lifetime.  We have been planning it for over a year.  A villa was rented along with friends and family, plans were made, reservations for museums and historic sites made, etc.  Last March I had our travel agent book our airline tickets.  Now in case I haven't mentioned it before, I am a tall person.  I am 6'5" tall, and I suffer from rheumatoid arthritis, and therefore I do not fold up easily or comfortably.  And if I hate one thing about air travel, it is when I have the head of the person in front of me in my lap for most of the trip.  So I instructed our travel agent to either get us Business Class seats or, if those were unavailable, bulkhead seats in Economy Plus.  We had tons of time and lots of notice, and our agent booked us with United Airlines.  It was great.  We had a direct flight to Marco Polo Internation Airport in Venice -- no changes, no layovers.  Although we were not able to get Business class reservations, we did -- for a hefty extra fee -- reserve two bulkhead seats in row 16. Confirmed.  I still have the e-ticket, and if it didn't have other personal information on it, I would share it with you right here.  "Seats 16 A/B ECONOMY PLUS BULKHEAD--CONFIRMED."

We try to be good travelers.  We pack our liquids properly; we have our electronic devices charged and ready to be shown to TSA agents; in short, we waste nobody's time including our own.  So we arrived at the airport three hours before our flight was scheduled.  And that's when the vacation started to go to hell.

United no longer has as many human agents for baggage check-in as they once did.  They now use electronic kiosks which scan either your e-ticket or your passport.  We scanned our passports, checked our one bag, and the machine spit out our seat assignments.  They were not together.  They were not even in Economy Plus.  They were in Coach.

I had brought all the necessary receipts, so I found a human, and showed them that I had paid extra for bulkhead seats, and had seat confirmation.  They treated me like a shoplifter.  Eventually a supervisor deigned to actually look on his terminal and saw that we had indeed paid for Economy Plus.  He found us two seats in Economy Plus, but they were not together.  And they were not bulkhead.  His suggestion was to "contact United customer service when you get back."

SERIOUSLY??!?!??!  When I get back?  I paid for these f--king seats TODAY, pal!

He DID do us the "favor" of arranging for us to sit together on the trip home.  In Plus.  But not at the bulkhead.  Not at the seats for which I still have the piece of paper telling me were confirmed.

We decided we would have better luck with the gate agent.  The first agent told us he'd look into it, but never touched his keyboard.  You know how sometimes when you're dealing with someone, you get a vibe that they have absolutely no interest or intention of helping you?  This guy was giving it off in waves.  After twenty minutes, we asked him again.  He said he was still looking into it.  He must have been using his psychic abilities, because he never looked at his terminal.  A second agent, a blonde woman, showed up.  We asked her.  Same crap, different person.  She was looking into it for us.  Again, using a crystal ball perhaps, but not her computer terminal.  Another twenty minutes, another agent. We asked her.  She actually tried to use the computer, but her password didn't work.  It was rapidly descending into absurdity.

Finally, our angel of mercy, a middle-aged woman named Martha Green, came over to the gate.  We told her our story from scratch.  She couldn't help with the bulkhead seats, she said, but she was able to get us seated together.  She did it in less than two minutes.  All it took was finding a solo passenger, and switching him with my wife.  She paged the guy to tell him about his new seat and when he didn't show up, she gave his new boarding pass to the lady at the gate and said simply, "When Mr. XXXXXX shows up, give him this."

So we left for Venice (two hours late, but that was a whole 'nother clusterf--k) but what should have been a joyous departure full of anticipation was instead full of anger and resentment.  And of course, I had some a-hole fully reclined in my lap for the trip, albeit with a bit more room thanks to our Plus seating.  And we had the same problem for the return trip looming over us for the entirety of our vacation.  (And indeed, on the trip home I once again had a short woman in front of me who felt the need to fully recline her seat for the entire 9-hour flight.  Awful.)

Our travel agent is trying to get us a refund of the bonus we paid for the seats we never got.  She did get the United agent she spoke with to admit that there was no earthly reason for us to have been bumped from our bulkhead seats.

United, if you are reading this (ha!) all I can tell you is that I don't want any coupons or miles, because I plan to never use your airline again if I can possibly avoid it.  I don't want any crappy merchandise with your logo on it, because I don't want to advertise anything but your lousy service.  I might accept free first class tickets to any destination you serve, but I think I'll see that only if hell freezes over.

No, what I really want is an apology.  And your assurance that the next poor slob who tries to reserve himself some comfort in advance isn't bumped because of greed, or stupidity, or to accommodate a friend of someone on the crew, or to butter up a loyal 100,000 mile United customer.  I don't know how it happened, and I don't care.

United, you effing OWE ME AN APOLOGY.

First Jobs In The Theatah (Plus Propmaking in the Stone Age!)

Before I have to disappear for a while thanks to some upcoming surgery, I wanted to at least get this out there.  So -- Chapter 3 in my story, for what it's worth.

After graduating with a 5-year degree in Drama, it was time to look for paying work.  At that time there was a massive "cattle call" style audition for something called the South East Theater Conference, or SETC.  Mostly it was used to help cast the giant "outdoor dramas" that were more popular back then than they are now.  Shows like "The Trail of Tears" and "The Book of Job" which ran all summer long in outdoor theaters, largely as tourist attractions.  But there were also dinner theaters and regional theaters doing casting as well.  I ultimately accepted an intern position at a dinner theater in Lexington, KY, which was supposed to offer room, board, a very small salary and a chance to learn the trade by working with more experienced professionals.  Sadly, it was grossly misrepresented and the interns were essentially slave labor.  Or at least indentured labor.  I did not learn anything new, but in fairness I was given the chance to put what I had learned at U.Va. into practice.  I did stage lighting, sound, prop creation, scenery building, and so forth.  The "room" turned out to be a cot in the basement of the owner's dad.  The "board" was dinner theater leftovers.  Luckily my sanity was saved by the fact that my roommate at U.Va. also took the same internship and we were thrown into it together.  I learned how to make props and dress sets on the cheap, by borrowing and scrounging and exchanging ad space in the programs for something essential (like, say, an antique candlestick telephone or a vintage lava lamp.)  I mostly wanted to perform, though; not intern as a stagehand, so I was always auditioning and lobbying for a chance to audition.  The owner was very reluctant to lose his cheap labor force, though, and resisted mightily.  I finally got a decent speaking part in "Fiddler On The Roof" and when the show closed, I was dismissed.  Not for anything wrong that I had done; hell, I taught them more about props and sound than they ever taught me.  I think the owner was just tired of having me try out instead of working in the shop.

I did leave them with some great stuff that I had learned how to do.  I built a vacuform machine for things like door moldings and set trimmings.  (A vacuform machine is basically a wooden frame that holds a sheet of thin plastic which you soften using heat.  Underneath this frame you place a mold of whatever you want to duplicate.  The top frame fits snugly over the bottom frame -- the one with the mold -- and is connected to a vacuum cleaner.  You put the softened plastic over the mold while sucking out the air and bam! instant mold.)

 A basic home-made vacuform machine.

 Photo courtesy of Punished Props: A vacuform machine with the mold in place, and with the molded softened plastic.  You can turn out as many copies of the mold as you need to make.

Another neat trick I left them with:  Making a bell with instant urethane moulding foam.  Instant foam is a two-ingredient product: you add Ingredient One to Ingredient Two and you get a growing mass of insulation-type foam.  If you place Ingredient One in a cup and add Ingredient Two to the center, it will "boil over" the rim of the cup and form the shape of a bell when it hardens.  It's versatile stuff, and in the days before EVA foam carving, it was used for a ton of different things.  Here's an incredibly boring video about it from the manufacturer:  

When I was actively making props, urethane foam and light woods like balsa were the tools I most often used.  Today's propmakers are doing insanely creative things with materials we never dreamed of using.  Things like floor mats and a moldable material called Worbla are de rigeur work materials for props and armor, and being from another age, I have almost no experience with them.  About the only props I've made recently are a lightsaber hilt (from leftover plumbing materials) and a steampunk style Doctor Who sonic screwdriver.

My homemade lighsaber.  Yoda is not losing any sleep.

And that's pretty much it.  About ten years into my career as an actor, I was still working children's theater and dinner theater.  It was fun and rewarding, and for the most part paid the bills, but then I began getting more and more sick from Crohn's Disease.  I also began having other autoimmune-disease related problems that have since been diagnosed as things like rheumatoid arthritis and some weird neurological degeneration thing similar to ALS that affects my sensory nerves more than my motor nerves and has caused peripheral neuropathy.  When I collapsed on stage during a performance and turned out to need a transfusion of 11 pints of blood thanks to an internal hemorrhage (thanks to Crohn's) I knew I had to seriously start looking at my life.  I didn't think I could continue to live out of my suitcase as an itinerant performer any more.

I basically decided to look at things I loved.  I knew I didn't want to do anything that would directly or indirectly harm the environment, and I knew I loved books and reading.  I knew that my favorite work-study job back in college had been at the library.  So I learned to become a librarian.  I eventually met my wife, had a kid, and stayed in the library business a lot longer than I would have been able to stay an actor.  Ultimately I had to quit that job, too, because of poor health. 

Which brings me to today.  I am effectively disabled thanks to autoimmune disease.  I find it difficult to leave the house most days because I am chained to the plumbing, so to speak, but thanks to the internet I don't feel as trapped as I certainly would have a generation ago.  I have a wife and a daughter whom I love very much, and to whom I dedicate these scribbles.

For what it's worth to you, that's my story.