General

Huh, I got “Lifehacked” this week (no link to Ensight though). It was from an old, old, old article I wrote on time management called the Pickle Jar Theory of Time Management. Anyways, it was a fairly positive article (even though I don’t work this way anymore). Some commenters ripped on me for “stealing” Stephen Covey’s ideas. Which is false, since both my piece and Covey’s say this is a church teaching (Covey’s mormon, I think, and the use of analogies is standard in both his and my church’s).

Either way, glad to see this getting some visibility. Everyone needs more structure, more simplicity and more discipline in their day. If this helped some folk, great. Maybe I should illuminate how I now schedule my day sometime…

Ever just have one of those experiences? Forgive the vent, but I’ve just got to. I had to buy 2 tickets online today, one for myself and one for my mother in law. Had to do it via aircanada.com, since they’ve got a seat sale on that they aren’t passing on to their industry partners like Expedia.ca.

Well, it’s now been about 2 hours of trying to spend my money with them. I got my ticket booked, but no luck on the second ticket. Here’s the process I had to go through to get my ticket booked:

1. Input all info 2. Input payment info 3. Click buy 4. Get routed back to payment info screen 5. Call support 6. Have to go into my profile and add my credit card manually 7. Go back through 1-3 8. Get routed back to payment info screen 9. Support gets me to manually enter my CC 10. Presto, it works!

So, I had to enter my credit card 3 times. And even though on step 7 the card I entered (and bought with) was the one I’d entered in step 6 (which was actually a 5 step process, but anyways), it still didn’t work. Craziness. But, I was okay. It was only about 20 minutes. Not ideal, but not stupid. Just vaguely annoying.

Then I had to purchase my mother in law’s ticket. I was prepped, though, so I went through the entire process (replete with error 4613′s) as instructed in about 10 minutes. Except that this time I got past the buy stage, had to enter my Visa Verified info AND THEN get pushed back to the main payment page.

So I call support. And do the whole thing over again. It’s now been 45 minutes trying to purchase this ticket. But no go. They’re going to transfer me to sales. Reason I didn’t call sales in the first place? Because you have to pay a 20-40$ surcharge for calling them when you could have used the website. I ask if, since I TRIED to use the website this fee will be waived. Apparently not.

Now, I’ll be honest, I wouldn’t have written about this until this point. Mistakes happen, no biggie. I mean, I’m annoyed but I understand.

However, so that they can diagnose the problem, the support tech asks for some “basic information”. The basic information. Some of it’s basic. Some of it, like my credit card number, so they can store it in plain text in the support ticket.

It’s at that point that I lost it. She can’t file the ticket without my credit card number.

Now I don’t mind giving companies my CC if I have a reasonable expectation of privacy on it. Y’know, encryption, auditing, that kind of thing. But for Air Canada to need my details on a SUPPORT ticket?

Bleh. Yeah, so maybe some of the AC employees who read Ensight can explain this.

Oh, finally got through to sales. He says they waive the fee when it’s coming from a support call. Cool. Took all of 5 minutes to book it. Nice guy too.

Anyways, I’m not really pissed. I’m just a little… awed that a company like AirCanada would require / allow this to happen. Seems like abuse just waiting to happen to me.