Isn’t great when we have all this information at our fingertips these days? However, here’s a screenshot of an epic fail.
Why is it showing progress of a flight that, according to the same screen, has been cancelled?
This is a flight that my nephew Nick was on from Nashville to D.C. right before a snowstorm. It was an important flight because he was heading back to Istanbul that evening from Dulles. It had been cancelled the night before the flight and after 2 hours of hold time and many conflicting stories, he was told that first, he was re-booked on a flight the following day and second, that he could not change his international flight. Ouch.
The conflict remained throughout the actual day of the flight . We still got him to the airport for his original flight, which, despite the information provided, was not cancelled. He made his flight to Istanbul and all was right in the world.
But why, o ye technology gods, can you screw up so badly? Come to find out, the flight was cancelled and then re-instated. My guess is that the system feeds are not designed to communicate vacillating changes and couldn’t cancel the cancelled status. Epic fail considering what is at stake with flight statuses. To be fair to all, the carrier website showed the correct status. However, their lack of communication (1.5 hour phone queues) and no messaging back to the re-booked passengers to notify them the flight was back on is just as bad as the incorrect status at flightstats.
Makes me long for the old days. But just briefly.
Categories: Technology
A Deliberate Life 
This reminds me of the Covered CA website for Obamacare. Unfortunately, our old insurance carrier, Aetna, is no longer offering insurance in CA. I filled out the application on the CC website with the help of a friend who has been in the insurance business for 20 years and became an authorized representative. We completed the application on Dec. 20, and yet I still have no actual policy # or paperwork from Blue Shield other than a letter saying our application is being processed. She has been on hold a minimum of an hour each time she’s called them to follow up. The link to make a payment on the CC website doesn’t work, and I was trying daily on the Blue Shield site to get in and make a payment, because I couldn’t do a phone payment without having the BS policy info. (no pun intended). CC hadn’t sent over the application information, so they didn’t have our Soc. Sec. in the system to set it up. Finally, on Jan. 21, I was able to create a member login on the BS website and make a payment, but we still haven’t gotten our insurance cards or policy information that was supposed to begin Jan.1, 2014. Welcome to government inefficiency! Let’s hope this isn’t the tip of the iceberg showing how healthcare is now going to be run, but I fear it is. BTW the cheapest Obamacare policy is $200 more/month than what our family was paying before! So much for the “Affordable Care Act”.