A letter to the CEO of United Airlines

Jeff Smisek
CEO, Continental/United Airlines
77 West Wacker
Chicago, IL

Dear Mr. Smisek

I recently flew with your company on a trip from Denver to Frankfurt. It was the big leg of a trip I often make, from Boulder, Colo., to Berlin, where my family lives. Usually I fly with Lufthansa, but this time I opted for the home-grown firm, and I thought you might like to hear about one of your customer’s experiences.

First off, let me give a hearty and sincere “Thank You!” for getting me across the Atlantic Ocean in one piece. I do realize things could have turned out a lot worse, and I’m grateful that your pilots kept the plane in the air. They are to be commended.

I wish I could go on to say how you put your German counterparts to shame in other departments. I cannot.

In hindsight, I’d have to say that my problems began in Denver, while I waited to board and one of your employees asked that passengers volunteer to check their carry-on luggage. Since only a few of my compatriots stepped up, I decided I should pitch in. It worried me a bit, because my carry-on had all my clothes for the next five weeks in it, including my only winter coat (it’s cold in Berlin) and a brand-new camera. But I figured if you could get a multi-million dollar jet over the ocean, you should be able to do the same with my bag. Besides, I was less than enthusiastic about participating in the battle for the overhead bins, which almost never ends well.

The Denver to Dulles leg went splendidly, thank you. And the movie wasn’t even half bad, despite the fact that the censors dubbed “jackhole” in the place of “a#@hole,” which really doesn’t work well. I did have a fairly tight connection, so I got a nice jog in through the Dulles terminal -- always nice to stretch the legs during such a trip -- arriving at the gate just in time to board the flight to Frankfurt. I settled into my seat, and prepared for the long ride. Then I noticed that everyone else was watching movies on their video monitors. I also noticed my monitor was producing a never-ending stream of gobbledygook. At first, I figured it would fix itself as soon as we took off. Except we never took off.

After we had waited for about 45 minutes, the pilot announced that there were mechanical problems with the plane and we would have to wait another hour before takeoff. I’m 100 percent in favor of fixing mechanical problems before takeoff, even if it means a bit of a wait. After all, a few days earlier, one of your planes had an emergency landing in Grand Junction on its way from Denver to L.A. because of a bad engine. Such a landing in the ocean or on a Greenland glacier would be decidedly less pleasant, especially since I did not have access to my aforementioned winter coat. My building anxiety (flying scares me in the best conditions) would have been eased had I been able to watch a movie or, even better, have a nice, stiff drink. Yet my video monitor was still on the fritz (everyone else’s still worked fine), and the only alcohol flowing was among the plutocrats in first class. I pushed my flight-attendant call button repeatedly, to no avail. Finally, after the hour was up, the plane was fixed and we were getting ready (again) for takeoff, I hailed a passing flight attendant. He looked at my monitor and said, “Well, it might work later.” I explained that it hadn’t worked for over an hour. “Okay,” he said, already a bit impatient, “I’ll try to reset it.” He did. It worked, and I got to see the first part of Contagion, a movie I have been wanting to see, even if it is a questionable choice on an overseas flight filled with germ-carriers. 

Or at least it worked until the PA sparked up with another announcement: The problem with the pressurization/air-conditioning was not fixed, after all. The wait would continue. I tried to get back to the movie, but my video monitor was broken again. I flagged down another flight attendant. She reset the monitor. Back to Contagion and a now-building anxiety, on many fronts. Instead of handing out free cocktails, as they should have done after we had sat in the plane for nearly two hours, the flight attendants handed out free pretzels.

The PA kept kicking in to tell us that we would have to continue to wait, sending my video monitor into gobbledygook each time. Finally, after we had been on the plane for approximately three hours, we were told that we were switching planes. We de-boarded. We waited at our new gate for another hour and a half. We were told we had to board very orderly, and quickly, or else the flight would be cancelled. Yet we were also forced to wait until all the first class folks leisurely made their way onto the plane. We took off, a mere 4.5 hours late. This time my video monitor worked, but Contagion, the movie I had made it halfway through, was not a choice. I did note, with relief, that the delay gave the baggage folks plenty of time to get my luggage onto the correct plane.

I paid $1212 for this flight. Typically, I pay about the same for the Denver nonstop-to-Frankfurt (and then to Berlin) on Lufthansa. On Lufthansa, even those in the coach-class are offered warm, wet towels before meals to wash their hands and refresh their faces. Then the pre-dinner drinks -- including a variety of cocktails and wine -- come, free of charge. The food is airplane food, but it’s usually quite edible, even tasty. Wine is offered, free, during meals, and flight attendants are always happy to top off your glass. After dinner, they bring around Calvados and Bailey’s. Yes, it, too, is free, or rather, it’s included in the price of the ticket.

On United, I received a meal that would have violated the Eighth Amendment had it been served in a maximum security prison. The “pasta” was mushy, covered with some sort of pea and tomato sauce that could only have been concocted from the plate-scrapings of last month’s first class offerings. It was so lacking in flavor that I used my entire salt and pepper packets to make it edible, and even still I barely choked it down. The bread roll was styrofoam-white and cold; the “spread” some strange dairy/soy stuff that made margarine seem like a delicacy. I ordered a wine to try to wash it down, and to her credit, the flight attendant offered me one free glass (normally $7 for some cheap swill that pairs best with beans and weenies heated up in a can under a bridge) “because of the delay.” Now, I know it’s not easy to run an airline in these hard times, and you’re just cutting costs where you can. But I also know that you got paid $4.4 million last year; it just seems like maybe you could put, oh, I don’t know, $.1 million of that into coming up with at least quasi-edible food for your customers. Maybe?

My original plan had been to get to Frankfurt, collect my luggage and make it to the train -- where a first-class berth awaited me courtesy of a special online offer -- just in time to zip off to Berlin. I wanted to use the opportunity to use the aforementioned camera to shoot some video of the German landscape sliding by for a project I’m working on. I got to Frankfurt alright (4.5 hours late). The former-carry-on-but-checked-at-the-gate luggage, containing aforementioned camera, clothes and winter coat, did not.

I staggered out of the baggage claim (22 hours had passed since I embarked on my travels) and found a credit card pay-phone on which to call my wife to tell her how late I’d be. My repeated, very expensive attempts at the call (I had the wrong number) apparently alarmed my bank back home, which triggered the deactivation of said credit card. Not knowing that, I headed to the train ticket counter, where I was told that my special offer ticket was invalidated since I missed my train and I’d have to buy a new ticket, for 194 Euros. My sanity continued to falter, but I took hold of myself, made my way to the United counter, and begged the woman there to put me on a flight to Berlin. Not possible, she said, but United would reimburse me for my new train ticket at some later date. I’m still hopeful this will happen.

I went back to the train office, and told them to put me on the fastest train to Berlin. They ran my credit card. It was declined. I started to see blue spots everywhere I looked, and pressure built in the back of my skull. You see, I needed the credit card to pay for the phone call to my bank to get the credit card reactivated, yet the credit card, obviously, did not work.

Luckily, I had a few Euros left over from my last trip, and started stuffing them into a pay phone at a horrid rate while my bank put me on hold once, then again. Then I was cut off because I ran out of change. I went to a fast-food sausage joint for more coins, and on the next call the customer service rep hung up on me (perhaps because I sounded slightly dangerous at this point?). None of this is the direct fault of United, of course, but had I arrived in Frankfurt on time, none of it would have been necessary, either.

Finally, I reached the correct person, my credit card was fixed, and I got on the train, which turned out to be relaxing and quite enjoyable (and the light was perfect for video but, alas, I had no camera). I arrived in Berlin eight hours later than planned. Too bad they don't run trains from Denver to Frankfurt.

I do want to thank you for the bonus miles I received for my troubles. I am booked on another United flight next month to get back to the States (oh how I wish it were on Lufthansa again), and I thought that I could maybe use those miles -- in addition to others I have -- to upgrade to business class to make the trip tolerable. When I tried to use your website to make the upgrade, however, it told me that I don’t have any reservations (despite the fact that other parts of your website confirm that, yes, indeed, I do have reservations). I’m guessing that when I call, I’ll be told that my reservations aren’t the right kind to upgrade, which happened recently when a friend with a lot of miles tried to upgrade my ticket on the troubled flight I've been going on about.

In any event, I won’t be volunteering to check my luggage at the gate. Assuming I have any luggage that is -- though I'm hoping it's on its way, it remains lost, somewhere between Berlin and Denver. (UPDATE: The luggage arrived intact, 24 hours late!)

Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,


Jonathan Thompson

Return of the Corn (at Taos Pueblo)

The roads that wind across the Taos Pueblo reservation pass through a cultural and environmental mosaic of a type common in the rural West, where natural beauty and human poverty overlap and sometimes blend. Here is a thicket of wild plums growing up along a lush irrigation ditch, the Sangre de Cristo mountains rising up as backdrop. Here is a tiny stuccoed house, accompanied by an old Chevy Chevelle that appears to be slowly melting into the shrubs and dirt. Nearby, a burned out, roofless shack sits undisturbed while a Rez dog, his thick fur dreadlocked with dirt and neglect, rambles in the dust alongside Deer Jaw road.

Occasionally, this intruder notices a shock of bright green. Each one is a cornfield, the maturing stalks emerald in the sunlight. It's surprising because after World War II many farmers in Taos Pueblo and in other parts of the West gave up traditional farming.

But farming, including corn growing, is slowly coming back to the Pueblo thanks to grassroots efforts that have sprouted over the last decade,  such as the sustainable agriculture initiative and the Red Willow growers cooperative. Now, the return of the corn is also being helped along by a couple of guys who were looking for changes in their own lives, and by an old tractor named the Red Buffalo.

Read the rest of this post here.

Bats, bear poop and prairie dogs: A country boy meets the urban wild

In the beginning was the bat. Roger, Isolde,* and I sipped margaritas on a warm August evening in their Boulder condo. Suddenly, Roger slammed down his drink, pointed to the ceiling and screamed, “Look out!” As a black, papery blur fluttered around the living room, I dived to the floor and slithered under the table. Roger, more experienced in such matters**, whacked the bat to the floor with his flip flop, trapped it in a bowl and relocated to the out of doors. After we determined that the house was clear, I crawled out from under the table and noticed a scratch on my arm that wasn’t there before. “Rabies is 100 percent fatal,” Roger said. Then he mixed another round.

The bat incident, which occurred just a few days after I moved to Boulder, was my initiation into the urban wild. I’ve spent most of my life in rural areas, and many days and nights exploring the depths of so-called wilderness. Yet my encounters with wildlife, especially potentially hazardous ones, have been fairly scantº. That is, until I moved here, to Colorado’s sprawling and heavily populated Front Range metropolitan area.

I knew Boulder was fraught with hazards, from yoga instructors, clad in curve-and-crevice-revealing spandex pants striking poses in upscale coffee shops, to guys in short shorts yammering on about body mass index, to the high-priced frozen yogurt treats that, only after you get through the checkout line, you realize are made for dogs. But wild animals? Yes. It turns out that whether I’m on a trail run or my daily commute, I’ve become a sort of suburban Craig Childs, with every bike path and cul de sac offering the neck-prickling danger of some animal encounter.

Read the rest at the High Country News Goat blog (where I'll be doing most of my posting while I'm here in Boulder). 

Rain Bow meets Sun Flower

Darkness and light in the North Fork

Berlin to Boulder

I've been back in the US of A for just over a month now, and the culture shock is waning. Kinda. After spending a year in Berlin, my wife, daughters and I came back for the summer. I'll be sticking around for another nine months, as a Ted Scripps Environmental Journalism Fellow at CU Boulder. I'm super excited about the opportunity; I'll be taking classes, reporting and writing, with a focus on environmental issues in the West.

Which is just what I focused on for several months while still in Berlin: I wrote a monster of a story for High Country News about global economic influences on the extractive industries of the West. It's some crazy stuff. Check out the story, and accompanying infographics here. I'll start posting here -- about being back in the US and other personal musings -- again in mid- to late August.

I come from the land of no history

Sometimes, being the only American in the room can be a little, er, embarrassing. I find myself in that position quite often, especially in German class.

I've taken nearly five months of German classes since arriving in Berlin. Actually, I should call them integration courses, since that's the official name, and that's also the goal: integration. The German government wants to mold me and my fellow Auslanders (foreigners) into good Germans. So they require folks like me to take these courses in order to keep my residency permit. Mostly, the courses just focus on language, but they also sneak a bit of German culture, politics and history into the mix. Out of five different classes, each with 17 to 25 people, I've always been the lone American. As such, I've also been an object of curiosity in my classes.

Probably about 1/3 of my current classmates come from various parts of Africa, another third comes from Poland and other former Soviet-bloc countries, and the final third is a mix, with folks from China, Vietnam, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Brazil. And then there's me: The Newbie. I call myself that because I've only been in Germany for less than a year; most of my classmates have been here for at least three years, some as many as 23 years (Yes, 23 years, and they're still taking German classes. Whether this speaks to their language-learning abilities or to the difficulty of the German language, I can't say). I also call myself the Newbie because I come from the U.S., which is not only part of the "New World," but which also is sort of new, or maybe young, in other ways, which were impressed upon me in class recently.

We were reading a sketch in which a middle-aged guy looked back on his life in Germany, and remembered when the Berlin Wall was built, remembered seeing Kennedy during his visit, remembered the Wall coming down, etc. That prompted my teacher to ask the class what historic events we had witnessed. Everyone had a story: The Africans of Civil War and strife, the Poles of the end of Communism, the Pakistani of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. As one student after another told his story, I scanned my memory for something, anything, that would compare. 9/11? It was dramatic, sure, but I was thousands of miles away when it happened. I compiled a mental list of other big events, and as I did so, I realized that while I had indeed experienced a lot of history, I had mostly done so from some distance, i.e., via the television.

I started panicking. What was I going to say? Should I be honest and tell them about the really important moments of American history that I had witnessed? The revelation on television about our former President, his intern and a cigar? The invention of the iPhone? Or something even more critical to world history: The final episode of Seinfeld? Or Lost? Or the Sopranos?

Damn it's embarrassing to be an American sometimes. Luckily, thanks to someone's narrative about suffering under the hands of Slobodan Milosevic's terror, the conversation changed to: Who was your country's worst despot. I relaxed a little bit as a picture of Dick Cheney, riding in his wheelchair all Dr. Strangelove-like at Obama's inauguration, popped into my head. Finally, I was up. I opened my mouth to speak, but the rest of the class answered for me: "Bush!"