Since the last couple of weeks my wife and I were trying to make up our minds as to how to spend our Christmas and New Year holidays. It had been quite a while since we had travelled anywhere and I felt that the upcoming holidays would be a good time to get away from our routine daily lives in Boston. But thanks to our ever glorious gift of procrastinating till the last moment, it was too late to buy a ticket to any part of the country for Christmas. The obvious reason being that the ticket prices had skyrocketed in the mean time and just did not seem worth it, hence travelling for Christmas was out of the question.
We were now left with the New Year weekend, and we finally decided last night to fly down to Charlotte, NC to visit my wife’s cousins who had given birth to triplets few months back. So having finally decided the location, we sat down in front of our computer and began the arduous task of finding the cheapest itinerary and flights in typical Andhra style. I was meaning to use my unused Northwest airlines flight ticket from earlier this year which was due to expire in couple of months. I had paid $270 for that earlier flight that did not take place. After punching in the numbers I noticed that there were round trip fares for the New Year weekend starting at $225, which was a reasonable price based on the travel season, so having selected the itinerary I refreshed the page and entered the number 2 in the passenger field and re-did the flight search on the NWA website, to my wife’s and my astonishment in the 30 seconds between querying for a single passenger and querying now for 2 passengers the ticket per person shot up to $270. I had a blackout!! .deciding to get to the bottom of this diabolical change, I opened a new window in my computer and redid the search with the same itinerary in both the NWA website and one of the regular travel websites, and once again I saw that the previous lower price of $225.
This experiment only added to my astonishment and confusion, but at the same time more determined to get to the bottom of this. At this point my wife suggested that I delete my browsing history in IE and also all the cookies, this idea being based on a article mentioning this exact same occurrence. So after following my wife’s advice I tried the search again, but alas to no avail, the same crappy difference in prices for travelling single and travelling as a couple came up again. After a further 10 minutes of trial and error and crazy experimentation, I could fool the the NWA website no more. Ultimately I came to the sad conclusion that it is infact a crime to travel as a couple on NWA and hence I have to pay a higher price. I don’t know if this is how the other airline websites work, but by this point in time I was too angry to experiment anymore. I tried very hard to cool myself down at this grave injustice, but just could not help but try to think about the logic in the way in which the airline pricing program was working. It was just hard for me to understand the thinking and frankly the ingenuity behind the guy who designed this software such that it showed a higher price for travelling as a couple or group. I was just so pissed , I started cursing the airline and the software designer ( probably a desi consultant, like a lot of my friends, no offence guys ) who went along with this devious scheme. Its amazing sometimes how people find better and better ways with the passage of time to fleece you of your money in every unimaginable way possible.
And finally in no small measure, as if to the say the icing on the cake, when I finally resigned to buying the tickets for my wife and I, I entered my old e-ticket number info to redeem the credit and then the site informs me that there would be a $100 itinerary change fee for reusing my old ticket, as soon as I saw that message, there was no more self control left in me, I just let loose and ended up cursing anybody who was even remotely related to the airline industry. I just let off so much steam that words can’t describe it ( wouldn’t be wise either). Alas as a humble commoner with no other means of getting from Boston to Charlotte, except by a stealing airline which comes up with all these means of stealing your hard earned dollars I ended up paying the extra money and making the reservations for the both of us.
In the recent past I have come across a lot of news reports emanating out of India and from my friends in my dear Andhra, which talk about how the domestic airlines ( especially Air Deccan ), are similarly fleecing airline passengers, with overbooked and cancelled flights, the very reasons that we have become so used to hearing in America. Hence the bottom line I guess is in this globalised village that the world has now become, our biggest achievement has been finding common ground on the ways and means to flecce the common airline passenger. What is the solution to the above problem you ask?, simple just buy your own freaking plane!!, and if you can’t afford it, just SHUT UP and PAY UP.
Dec 14, 2007
DEC. 13th Storm and GLOBAL WARMING
We had 12 inches of snow last night, a superb sign of the winter to come. Everybody in the office ran home at 12pm on Thursday. I was lucky to get out and reach home just before the crazy Boston traffic started, but alas not everyone else was that lucky. It took my manager 7 hours to cover a distance of 10 miles, yes sir that exactly 10mi/hr and another co-worker 6 hours to cover 15 miles, that works out to 2.5/hr which probably works out to a new record on the Masspike. I just can’t imagine myself being stuck inmy car for that periods of time. Now c’mon how long can you listen to the radio or think about what you would like to eat for your next meal!!.
The news also reported that a lot of cars were stuck on the highways because they ran out of gas, wow how crazy is that. If that had happened to me I would a have just left my car wherever it was standing and just walked home. Well maybe not, considering my car would have been towed and I would have to walk through miles of blowing snow. Hmm talking about the snow, I have pretty much got used to dealing with the snow by now, having spent all my years in the America in the snow states, but I guess this was the first time that I have experienced such a major storm during the second week of December. Actually it was my wife who mentioned this to me, and it struck me to be true and she jokingly mentioned that probably the cause of this early winter storm was global warming, I laughed at the idea at first, but a local news channel was also kind of hinting at the same idea, and it suddenly struck me how in today’s media we tend to blame a lot of the world’s problems on global warming. If summer’s are too hot it’s global warming, if there is a winter storm it’s global warming, drought in Georgia it’s global warming and of course falling wheat production across the world is a result of, you know what , right GLOBAL WARMING. Whether global warming is indeed the reason for all this “unnatural and supernatural” phenomenon is beyond my knowledge. I’m of course no climatologist to determine that, but as a simple engineer trying to make his living it just seems interesting how any weather related occurrences that has been happening across the globe are all related in some way or the other to global warming. As a person watching from the sidelines and reading the commentaries from the skeptics and proponents of the global warming theory I find it amazing how the media can get so locked into an issue and constantly convey the message to your brain irrespective of the facts of the issue. If global warming is indeed the cause of the today’s global problems and an unbiased set of facts are presented to the world to support this theory then I’m all for spending trillions of dollars to take care of the problem, but otherwise I just want the media to pipe down and report the true facts and stop pounding people’s brain with their own interpretation of skewed facts.
A lot of people out there might say that the proof supporting the fact that global warming is for real is exactly what the inter-governmental panel in climate change (IPCC) has been trying to say, but my contention is that why is it that we only hear the supporters of the warming theory and not the skeptics. You could then argue that there are no skeptics and the facts are firm. C’mon guys give me a break, there are as many skeptics of global warming as there are proponents, they are just not given a opportunity to voice their concern. This fact was highlighted very well by Glenn Beck on his show in CNN a couple of months back.
Personally I do think that the earth is warming, we all of know or rather feel I should say that the summers in our native Andhra are a lot more warmer now that they were when we were tiny tots, but whether the cause of this is humans or a natural warming cycle of the earth is still unclear to me. No media outlet has presented the facts in clear and plain English. You can point me to all the IPCC reports, but hey, frankly how many of us can actually understand all that mumbo jumbo in those reports. All I’m saying is that put the reports out in easy English, with plain facts and figures so that commoners like thee can understand and participate in our own little way to avoid future problems due to global warming. I think I have said enough on this issue for now, but I’m sure that I will be blogging a lot more on this issue as the debate gets more heated across the globe.
The news also reported that a lot of cars were stuck on the highways because they ran out of gas, wow how crazy is that. If that had happened to me I would a have just left my car wherever it was standing and just walked home. Well maybe not, considering my car would have been towed and I would have to walk through miles of blowing snow. Hmm talking about the snow, I have pretty much got used to dealing with the snow by now, having spent all my years in the America in the snow states, but I guess this was the first time that I have experienced such a major storm during the second week of December. Actually it was my wife who mentioned this to me, and it struck me to be true and she jokingly mentioned that probably the cause of this early winter storm was global warming, I laughed at the idea at first, but a local news channel was also kind of hinting at the same idea, and it suddenly struck me how in today’s media we tend to blame a lot of the world’s problems on global warming. If summer’s are too hot it’s global warming, if there is a winter storm it’s global warming, drought in Georgia it’s global warming and of course falling wheat production across the world is a result of, you know what , right GLOBAL WARMING. Whether global warming is indeed the reason for all this “unnatural and supernatural” phenomenon is beyond my knowledge. I’m of course no climatologist to determine that, but as a simple engineer trying to make his living it just seems interesting how any weather related occurrences that has been happening across the globe are all related in some way or the other to global warming. As a person watching from the sidelines and reading the commentaries from the skeptics and proponents of the global warming theory I find it amazing how the media can get so locked into an issue and constantly convey the message to your brain irrespective of the facts of the issue. If global warming is indeed the cause of the today’s global problems and an unbiased set of facts are presented to the world to support this theory then I’m all for spending trillions of dollars to take care of the problem, but otherwise I just want the media to pipe down and report the true facts and stop pounding people’s brain with their own interpretation of skewed facts.
A lot of people out there might say that the proof supporting the fact that global warming is for real is exactly what the inter-governmental panel in climate change (IPCC) has been trying to say, but my contention is that why is it that we only hear the supporters of the warming theory and not the skeptics. You could then argue that there are no skeptics and the facts are firm. C’mon guys give me a break, there are as many skeptics of global warming as there are proponents, they are just not given a opportunity to voice their concern. This fact was highlighted very well by Glenn Beck on his show in CNN a couple of months back.
Personally I do think that the earth is warming, we all of know or rather feel I should say that the summers in our native Andhra are a lot more warmer now that they were when we were tiny tots, but whether the cause of this is humans or a natural warming cycle of the earth is still unclear to me. No media outlet has presented the facts in clear and plain English. You can point me to all the IPCC reports, but hey, frankly how many of us can actually understand all that mumbo jumbo in those reports. All I’m saying is that put the reports out in easy English, with plain facts and figures so that commoners like thee can understand and participate in our own little way to avoid future problems due to global warming. I think I have said enough on this issue for now, but I’m sure that I will be blogging a lot more on this issue as the debate gets more heated across the globe.
The Beginning
The day is Friday December 14th 2007, I have finally come about to starting the blog that I was meaning to do since a very long time. My title for the blog pretty much sums up the context of the posts that I will be putting up on this blog.
The title “Andhra America Ramblings” is synonymous with all the thoughts and the day to day activities that take place in the course of routine life here in America for a person who grew up in Andhra. Daily life in America brings forth unique experiences and situations for anybody who has been bought up with a totally different approach to a lot of things in life, be it the food we eat, the manner of our friendships and societal interactions or just our whole approach to money and finances in general.
You look at things around you in a city like Boston and sometimes can’t help but comment, and at the same time wonder about so many day to day things and then have a reminiscent feeling about how the exact same situations would play out in India and especially your hometown. The mind just races back in comparison and you just cannot stop doing that. When things happen the right way here we feel that we made the right choice in continuing to live in America, but at the same time when things don’t happen according to how you had hoped they would, we just find it so easy to criticize society here and tell ourselves that such a thing would never happen in my hometown.
These unique journeys of the mind between the place that I live in and have just started making as home and Andhra the place were I grew up in the best years of my life, is what put simply prompted me to blog and put forth the daily random thoughts and situations in so that both I, with my short term memory and people out there in general with similar experiences and thoughts see all this in writing.
The title “Andhra America Ramblings” is synonymous with all the thoughts and the day to day activities that take place in the course of routine life here in America for a person who grew up in Andhra. Daily life in America brings forth unique experiences and situations for anybody who has been bought up with a totally different approach to a lot of things in life, be it the food we eat, the manner of our friendships and societal interactions or just our whole approach to money and finances in general.
You look at things around you in a city like Boston and sometimes can’t help but comment, and at the same time wonder about so many day to day things and then have a reminiscent feeling about how the exact same situations would play out in India and especially your hometown. The mind just races back in comparison and you just cannot stop doing that. When things happen the right way here we feel that we made the right choice in continuing to live in America, but at the same time when things don’t happen according to how you had hoped they would, we just find it so easy to criticize society here and tell ourselves that such a thing would never happen in my hometown.
These unique journeys of the mind between the place that I live in and have just started making as home and Andhra the place were I grew up in the best years of my life, is what put simply prompted me to blog and put forth the daily random thoughts and situations in so that both I, with my short term memory and people out there in general with similar experiences and thoughts see all this in writing.
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