In America, largely for historical reasons, residential customers have “all you can eat” plans. Buffet bandwidth is the order of the day, every day. As the number of people online continues to grow, and they do more bandwidth-intensive things (YouTube movies vs all-text web pages), telcos must buy new hardware. “How do they pay for it?” the article asks, and offers up three solutions: charge heavy consumers more (the Australian and New Zealand “metered Internet” solution); charge the people serving lots of data rather than we who consume it (which pisses Google off and starts a “network neutrality” war); or just suck up the costs themselves.

One element missing from this discussion is that every year brings more demand for bandwidth. Over time, we build more sophisticated applications that gain wider use: last.fm, Skype, YouTube, video chat, BitTorrent. To pick a number and say “this amount of traffic is reasonable use and will incur a reasonable charge” is to prevent the uptake of new applications that would drive the network use past the “reasonable” point. Unfettered, I’d expect to see this natural growth in our bandwidth use year on year. However, fetters are exactly what the ISPs have put in place to keep that down.

I suspect that the current ISP charging model is really: “3% of users take 50% of the traffic, so if we just price them out we’ll be able to get twice as many customers without having to buy any more hardware!”. The longer they can keep down our demands for bandwidth, the more customers they can “serve” without having to invest in new hardware.

But capital outlay is what growth is all about. If you want to double the number of customers, you should expect to have to double your bandwidth. One of the ISP CEOs said “I don’t subscribe to the view that network capacity is finite at all …. Optical fibre basically doesn’t run out of capacity, it’s just a question of how fast you blink the bits at each end.” Well if it’s not about capacity, mate, what’s left?

It certainly feels like you want your cake and you want to eat it: you want new customers without having to put in new hardware to increase your capacity, and you want existing customers to stay at their current levels so you won’t have to put in new hardware to increase capacity.

And if that’s not rorting your customers because you’re a greedy bastard, I don’t know what is.

My fellow O’Reilly Radar blogger Brady forwarded a comment from a mailing list that said “Software can’t keep people focused/productive, it has to come either from within or through external forces (deadlines, time limits, etc.)”. I was moved to respond.

Raising kids, in particular one with a “tackle the hard stuff” problem which I’m SURE that I have NO idea where he gets it from, I’ve realized it’s not an either-or.

You need the little switch inside you set to “I will do this!” rather than “I will shirk this!”. Will is not optional. Systems and checklists aren’t a substitute for this switch. However, if your switch is set and you don’t have systems, you run the risk of doing an incomplete or incorrect job. Systems and tools keep state, context, and direction for you.

Any system to keep you from browsing websites isn’t going to work unless you actually want to stop browsing websites. Cognitively, I think the web is candy to our mind’s sweet tooth for novelty. You can easily lose a week thinking you’re accomplishing something when all you’re doing is reading people’s thoughts about other people’s thoughts about things that still other people have done (techmeme and RSS are enablers, the candy racks at the grocery in my metaphor). You’re so far from actual Things Getting Done that you might as well have hibernated in the couch with a bong and your cousin’s collection of exotic porn for all the good that week has done you.

See this WSJ article on why we like the taste of new and newer things, and this New Yorker article on how checklists are useful even to doctors (some of the most determined, focused, motivated, and skilled workers on the planet).

Yes, the irony of blogging a post on the futility of reading most blogs is not lost on me. Hopefully your ability to tolerate hypocrisy exceeds my ability to hypocritise, and therefore you can stay tuned for my coming tweets on “why Twitter is a waste of time”, and the blog meme “what are your most hated blog memes?”.

It began, as all good nightmares do, on the web. I booked a multi-city trip: AKL-LAX, then SAN-LAX-AKL (I drove LAX to SAN). Or, at least, I thought I booked it. Within a few hours I got an email message:

	Subject: 	Unable to ticket reservation
	From: 	  memberservices@travelocity.com
	Date: 	17 February 2008 3:22:37 AM
	To: 	  nathan@torkington.com

Thank you for booking your travel reservations with Travelocity.com.

We are unable to complete the processing of the reservation you
made on our system, until we can obtain some additional information
from you.

We are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  Please call us at
888-872-8356 and give the agent your 12 digit Trip ID 5551246369.

Your reservation has not been ticketed, so please remember
that no fare is guaranteed until it is ticketed.

Ooookay. I jumped on the phone, though I’m paying international rates (888 = toll free, but it’s $ to call a “toll-free” number from NZ). Indian agent, female, picked up. She was puzzled by the message, her systems showed no reason why such a thing would be generated, but said she’d look into it. “Can I put you on hold for two minutes while I contact the airline?”. Sure. I spent about 10 minutes on hold, then she came back and said the problem was that I wasn’t spending long enough in LAX between the San Diego flight landing and the Auckland flight departing–it has to be two hours and I had only allowed 75m. The airlines won’t ticket unless it’s two hours. Would I like to take a few minutes with her to rebook?

I’d love to, but I had kids to get from school. I figured, I’ll call back when I return and we can sort it out then. I returned with kids and try again. The next agent was not just puzzled by the email I’d received but also by my explanation of what I wanted to do. “You want to book another flight from LA?” No. “You are happy with your flights, then?” No. “So would you like me to book another flight from LA for you, sir?” After ten minutes I managed to communicate my desire to bring forward my SAN-LAX leg. “Can I put you on hold for two minutes, sir?” Sure. Long delay. “I’m showing all your flights in the system, sir.” “What?” “All your flights are in the system, sir.” Okay, perhaps I wasn’t so successful in the communication of the desire. “Yes, I was aware of that, but I need to change the SAN-LAX leg to an earlier flight.” “Oh! Ok, sir. Two minutes!” Fifteen minutes of hold ensue.

Ring ring, click. “Hello, welcome to Travelocity. How can I help you today?” “Um, I was being helped but the phone rang and you answered it.” “Certainly sir, what can we do to help you today?” Repeat the saga. “Two minutes on hold while I–” “Riiiiiight.” On to hold I go for ten minutes.

Ring ring, click. Oh, you are SHITTING ME. “Hello, welcome to Travelocity. How can I help you today?” In clipped tones yet still in the face of provocation remaining polite, I reiterate my simple request to change a leg. “Can I put you on hold for two minutes while I–” “Well, actually, that didn’t go so well last time.” “Well, I have to put you on hold to talk to an airline representative, sir.” Can’t you just use the, oh I don’t know, INTERNET to change my flights? Why does Travelocity have to use the telephone to talk to United? Oh well, “sure, if you think you can manage to avoid losing me, go for it.” Hold.

Ring ring, click. Don’t you dare. “Hello, welcome to United. Mary speaking. How can I help you?” THE FUCK?! “You are NOT going to believe how I came to be talking to you, Mary …”. Mary confirms that they’ve held the seats but not issued tickets. I check my bank’s web site: they’ve got a hold on the account for the money but haven’t put the transaction through. I don’t trust these incompetent pricks by this stage, though, so I get Mary to also hold the seats but not issue tickets. I’ll call Travelocity back and cancel the flights (hopefully easier than changing them!) and thus avoid being stiffed.

So I hang up and call back. After about five minutes someone answers. I immediately ask to speak to a supervisor. “Certainly, sir!” and I’m transferred to an unanswered line. Twenty minutes of not speaking to a supervisor and many swearwords later, Jenine convinces me to get off the phone before I give myself a coronary. I use the customer support part of their website to request they simply cancel the ticket:

	Subject: 	Travelocity Customer Service Request - Change or cancel a trip
	From: 	  memberservices@travelocity.com
	Date: 	19 February 2008 8:14:23 AM
	To: 	  nathan@torkington.com

The following information request was submitted to customer service : 

E-mail : nathan@torkington.com
Message : There is a problem with the flights--the layover in Los
Angeles is not long enough to issue tickets.  I've spent over two
hours on international phone calls with your "customer service"
and nobody has been able to make the simple flight change
without hanging up on me.

So please cancel this transaction.  Do not charge my card.  Do
not issue me tickets.  I will buy tickets elsewhere and I will
never use your "service" again. 

Product : Air
Topic : Change or cancel a trip

The reply comes, less than three hours later:

	From: 	  memberservices@travelocity.com
	Date: 	19 February 2008 11:03:06 AM
	To: 	  nathan@torkington.com

Dear Nathan,

Thank you for writing to Travelocity.

First and foremost I would like to apologize for the frustration this has
caused. 

Per your email, we have checked your reservation and we are sorry
to inform you that your reservation for your trip to Los Angeles, CA is
unconfirmed and not yet ticketed.

Nathan, to cancel the reservation you will need to contact our Customer
Care Center as we cannot change or cancel reservation online or via email.

We request you to call our Customer Service Center at 1-888-872-8356
Outside of U.S. and Canada: 210.521.5871 once again so one of our phone
representative will assist you in canceling the reservation.

We are sorry for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience and ask
that you call back at a later off peak time 10PM to 7AM (CST).

Please forward a day and night phone number where you can be reached
so that we may set up a callback request for you. 

We regret this inconvenience.

We appreciate your patience and co-operation. 

Sincerely,

Victoria T
Travelocity Customer Service

I give up, confirm the flights with United so I’ll have at least one set of tickets, and hope that in a few days the credit card authorization will lapse. It does.

So, to reiterate, Travelocity’s big success in this whole affair was that they failed to book me tickets.

ADDENDUM: I just got a “so how’d we do?!” customer support survey from them. I went through checking all the “suck” boxes, and got to the final “any other comments” field in the form. I’m submitting the following and will consider the matter closed.

I'm actively telling all my frequent flying friends to avoid Travelocity. I spent way too much money and two hours of international phone calls with incompetent customer service staff, who repeatedly proved incapable of operating the phone equipment (an agent would pick up my call, hear my problem, put me on hold while they talked to the airline, then the next agent would pick me up and have no idea who I was and the loop would start again). When I sent mail to the customer service saying, "look, I just want to cancel the reservation and never have to spend another dollar on the phone not being helped", the only answer I got was "sorry, we can only cancel on the phone!"

Up the lot of you. I'm booking through the airlines from now on. I've realized that saving $50/flight isn't worth the international phone calls and two hours of my time on the telephone trying to clean up when Travelocity shits its pants. Your customer service is appalling and the entire division should be lined up and shot. This may already have happened, judging from the 30m lack of answer the last time I tried calling. It wouldn't surprise me: helping the customer is obviously regarded as a cost centre and something to be understaffed, poorly tooled, and generally avoided.

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This is an example of the intellectuanal Ouroboros that hits Silicon Valley in waves. Let’s see what’s wrong with this intarwebs blow up, shall we?

1. Who in their right mind goes to a keynote with Mark Zuckerberg and is DISAPPOINTED when it goes wrong? What the fuck did you EXPECT? I mean, come on, he runs a bloody SOCIAL NETWORKING SITE. That’s like running a “web mall” in 1997! What did you think you were going to learn? The secret of getting a hundred million users? Hint: Zuckerberg would pay to go to a keynote to learn that–Facebook barely has 60M. MySpace passed 100M in 2006.
2. It happened at SxSW, a conference with no discernable purpose other than to meet Texas’s annual quota for bloated pointless panels in two weeks. The only thing worse than hearing people toss off “South by” in person is the flood of tweets from those there: “queueing for Zuckerberg”, “queueing for Google party”, “this blows, anything better happening?”, “I got to touch (some designer you’ve never heard of)!”, …. Please don’t confuse SxSW for real life.
3. Valleywag “broke” it. Jesus Christ, people, have I taught you nothing? If there’s a blog post and it links to Valleywag, you can immediately skip the entire post. This should be built into Google Reader. The only thing worse than reading Valleywag is being ejected into the depths of space, naked, covered in honey and angry fire ants, wearing your kidneys as ear muffs, and with a ticking bomb shoved up your ass. But even then I think most people’s last words would be “thank the sweet merciful Lord that I don’t have to hear about Valleywag again”.

SxSW? Social networking? Valleywag? It’s the trifecta of “for fuck’s sake”. The US economy’s heading down the shitter faster than a Superfund chicken tikka marsala, the web industry is in the clutches of an intellectual stagnation that reeks of death, and you have a government hellbent on burning every last civil liberty in front of a crowd of “WE SUPPORT OUR TROOPS”-chanting pantypatriots. That interview has the approximate news value of an ant chipping a fingernail during Hiroshima.

Dear Intarweb blogging peeps, please pull your heads out of your collective self-absorbed ani and get back to guessing what Apple will release next and drawing captions on cats.

Thanks,

Nat

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