Sun Tzu said that every battle is won before it is fought. Ringing true in my own heart, I wanted to exercise this wisdom.
So, after last weekend's Olympic performance in the New Delhi airport, I kept thinking, "Perhaps I should re-think my exit strategy." My flight out of here is on Saturday the 7th of May, the plane leaving Bangalore at 6:10 in the morning. It arrives in Delhi 2.5 hours later where I have a 2h 10m layover until my next flight. Thus, in the space of that 2h 10m layover, I have to first arrive on time, quickly deplane, exit the secure areas, get my bag without significant delay, go to the check-in counter, check my bag, go through border control, go through security, become once again infuriated behind the human plaque on the moving walkway, then find the gate and board my next flight – all in just a little over 2 hours.
Two hours and ten minutes. It should be enough time if I focus, stress out, run and beg my way to the front of lines AND if everything goes perfectly well.
Yeah.
Incidentally, a group of the brightest scientists pulled from across many disciplines were recently pulled together for a government-funded study on probability theory. (Ok, this is a slight twist of the truth. The government funding was the PowerBall Lottery. The scientists were all hopeful purchasers of lottery tickets. And the results of this study are found on the internet unattached to the actual scientist names. I think that's what they call peer review these days, so it is totally legitimate.)
This esteemed group of well-educated losers concluded the following:
So instead of creating material for yet another blog entry detailing a stressful airport connection, I conclude that it would be worth calling the airline (India Air) and ask what it would cost me to get on a flight Friday evening and stay the night in Delhi instead of doing it all Saturday morning. I assume that this would result in a more relaxed, low-stress entry into the airport for my Shanghai flight late Saturday morning.
A quick look at their web site allows me to verify that there is indeed a flight @ 9:20pm Friday that gets me into New Delhi @ 11:55pm. It's late but that's not a big deal. I can sleep in a little since my Shanghai flight leaves at 11:40am the next day.
Unfortunately, for reasons not given me on their web site, I cannot make the change online, so I call the airline, prepared to be put on hold for long and anxious minutes. Surprisingly there is no wait time and within mere seconds I find myself talking either to a human being or a sufficiently advanced intelligent machine. It did not ask if I knew Sarah Conner, and so I regrettably must conclude it was a human being. Since I don't like being boxed into conventional options, I therefore reserve the right to suspect extraterrestrials exercising a slow conquest of Earth through phone support centers.
For now, however, let's assume this was a human. It's what they want us to think.
This immediate connection to humanity is in contradiction to universal airline policy (keep the customer as frustrated and helpless as possible), and so I am suspicious. Nonetheless, I describe my request to the airline guy and he seems to understand on the first attempt, and then says he has a few questions he needs to ask to verify my identity and my eligibility to make the change.
Ok, I can accept that.
Fortunately I am not in a rush, doing this late evening before heading off to bed. It takes 30 minutes of repeated cycles of questions, answers and being put on hold while the airline guy verifies information, updates certain data and executes various tasks before I am confirmed eligible to switch my flight.
I imagine that what is really going on is much the same tactic as you would experience going to a car dealer to purchase a car. Everything you say or do will result in the salesman's need to "talk it over with my manager." This manager is always in plain sight sitting in an elevated platform where, like Zeus presiding in Olympus, he can be approached on your behalf only by qualified sales priests and priestesses. You are able to watch the intense discussion between salesman and manager, but are unable to hear what they actually discuss. The manager's brow furrows and you feel despair. The salesman's arm begins wild gesticulations and you feel hope. A shake of the manager's head is able to stir up butterflies lying otherwise dormant in your digestive tract.
This is an ancient game, and the point of this tactic is quite clear: build anxiety and fear. Put the customer (or, in my case, the caller) on the defensive, believing that at any point something might go wrong, and it will be only you (the salesperson, the phone operator) who can rescue the situation on their behalf.
And so when the airline guy tells me that there is going to be a penalty for rescheduling and in addition to that there is a difference in the price of the flight, I get a little worried. I start to think to myself, "how much is removing that stress from my departure worth to me? $200? $300? Maybe as high as $400?"
“Mr. Hamilton, the penalty for changing your non-refundable flight fare is going to cost you five thousand, five hundred…”
My heart sinks. I’m not that desperate and certainly not that rich to pay $5500 to avoid a little exercise.
But the airline guy on the phone isn't done talking. He continues, “…five thousand, five hundred rupees. And the difference in flight costs will add another 100 rupees to your charge for a total of 5,600 rupees.”
I reply only with stunned silence as the gears turn slowly in my head, processing that last extra bit of critical information. Fortunately I am prepared for this contingency. I have Google all cued up to convert rupees to USD. I begin to feed this new data into Google.
Airline guy: "I am very sorry, sir."
This change was going to cost me a whopping $84.31 to make this change. I know that this is nothing to sneeze at but compared to the damage I would incur running through the airport with a stressed-out heart beating frantically against hope to keep me alive long enough to get to the plane on time, this cost seemed more than sufficiently compensated by the return on that investment.
I clear my throat and, in my best Captain Picard imitation tell him to “Make it so,” He acknowledges the order with a complete absence of trekkie panache and puts me on hold to make the changes. For all I know he had to go discuss it with his manager.
Being on hold at this point is stressful. There is music while I’m on hold that scientists assert is supposed to reduce the stress of those listening but no one knows where those scientists are today because they are all dead and the government is covering it up. But I digress.
This could still all fall apart. I could become disconnected, leaving my flight change request in a state of quantum uncertainty. He could irrevocably cancel my current flights and not be able to restore them, stranding me here in Bangalore to become that 7th person in the statistic mentioned above where I'll be disabled, disfigured or killed by a parasite.
Five minutes never seemed longer than this, but in the end, I score success, and even verify the changes online before letting the airline guy off the call.
I love it when a plan comes together.
 |
| Of course, not all who read Mr. Tzu's wisdom are considered worthy representatives thereof. |
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| Stand right, walk left. A more complicated, hard-to-understand rule has yet to be invented by mortal or deity alike. |
Yeah.
Incidentally, a group of the brightest scientists pulled from across many disciplines were recently pulled together for a government-funded study on probability theory. (Ok, this is a slight twist of the truth. The government funding was the PowerBall Lottery. The scientists were all hopeful purchasers of lottery tickets. And the results of this study are found on the internet unattached to the actual scientist names. I think that's what they call peer review these days, so it is totally legitimate.)
This esteemed group of well-educated losers concluded the following:
- You have a 1 in 74,817,414 chance of dying from a meteor strike. (Coincidentally you have 74,817,414 to 1 odds that you will be severely inconvenienced due to a European transportation industry strike at some point in your life. Theoretical physicists call this "supersymmetry.")
- Your odds of being murdered during a trip to the Grand Canyon in the USA are 1 in 8,156,000. Most people know this intuitively. This is why most of you have never visited the Grand Canyon. Holes rarely turn out for the best.
- You have a 1 in 2,215,900 chance of dying from chronic constipation. As is the case with many important mathematical revelations, the group of scientists did not come to this conclusion together, but rather this was the discovery of one of the brighter individuals in their cadre. Sadly, he is not credited with this calculation because another scientist took credit for this discovery, having found it scrawled on the wall of the bathroom stall where the brighter man spent an unusual amount of time before unexpectedly passing away.
- A typical person is likely to be struck by lightning at some point in his or her life with odds of 1 in 1,101,000 against. Ben Franklin, being an out-of-the-box thinker, has suggested some ways to improve your odds for those who deem themselves in need of better luck.
- You have a 1 in 7 chance of being disabled, disfigured or killed by a parasite. I would like to point out that coincidentally 1 out of every 6 people in the world live in India. Statistically 9 out of 10 germophobes will find this to be scary. The 10th person spells it germAphobe and so was not eligible to participate in this study.
 |
| Eleven out of ten of those people will consider themselves as having "above average" intelligence. |
A quick look at their web site allows me to verify that there is indeed a flight @ 9:20pm Friday that gets me into New Delhi @ 11:55pm. It's late but that's not a big deal. I can sleep in a little since my Shanghai flight leaves at 11:40am the next day.
Unfortunately, for reasons not given me on their web site, I cannot make the change online, so I call the airline, prepared to be put on hold for long and anxious minutes. Surprisingly there is no wait time and within mere seconds I find myself talking either to a human being or a sufficiently advanced intelligent machine. It did not ask if I knew Sarah Conner, and so I regrettably must conclude it was a human being. Since I don't like being boxed into conventional options, I therefore reserve the right to suspect extraterrestrials exercising a slow conquest of Earth through phone support centers.
 |
| Everyone knows Dell's technical support fell to the first wave of this invasion a decade or so ago. |
This immediate connection to humanity is in contradiction to universal airline policy (keep the customer as frustrated and helpless as possible), and so I am suspicious. Nonetheless, I describe my request to the airline guy and he seems to understand on the first attempt, and then says he has a few questions he needs to ask to verify my identity and my eligibility to make the change.
Ok, I can accept that.
Fortunately I am not in a rush, doing this late evening before heading off to bed. It takes 30 minutes of repeated cycles of questions, answers and being put on hold while the airline guy verifies information, updates certain data and executes various tasks before I am confirmed eligible to switch my flight.
I imagine that what is really going on is much the same tactic as you would experience going to a car dealer to purchase a car. Everything you say or do will result in the salesman's need to "talk it over with my manager." This manager is always in plain sight sitting in an elevated platform where, like Zeus presiding in Olympus, he can be approached on your behalf only by qualified sales priests and priestesses. You are able to watch the intense discussion between salesman and manager, but are unable to hear what they actually discuss. The manager's brow furrows and you feel despair. The salesman's arm begins wild gesticulations and you feel hope. A shake of the manager's head is able to stir up butterflies lying otherwise dormant in your digestive tract.
This is an ancient game, and the point of this tactic is quite clear: build anxiety and fear. Put the customer (or, in my case, the caller) on the defensive, believing that at any point something might go wrong, and it will be only you (the salesperson, the phone operator) who can rescue the situation on their behalf.
And so when the airline guy tells me that there is going to be a penalty for rescheduling and in addition to that there is a difference in the price of the flight, I get a little worried. I start to think to myself, "how much is removing that stress from my departure worth to me? $200? $300? Maybe as high as $400?"
“Mr. Hamilton, the penalty for changing your non-refundable flight fare is going to cost you five thousand, five hundred…”
My heart sinks. I’m not that desperate and certainly not that rich to pay $5500 to avoid a little exercise.
 |
| That's right. You know how it feels. |
I reply only with stunned silence as the gears turn slowly in my head, processing that last extra bit of critical information. Fortunately I am prepared for this contingency. I have Google all cued up to convert rupees to USD. I begin to feed this new data into Google.
Airline guy: "I am very sorry, sir."
This change was going to cost me a whopping $84.31 to make this change. I know that this is nothing to sneeze at but compared to the damage I would incur running through the airport with a stressed-out heart beating frantically against hope to keep me alive long enough to get to the plane on time, this cost seemed more than sufficiently compensated by the return on that investment.
I clear my throat and, in my best Captain Picard imitation tell him to “Make it so,” He acknowledges the order with a complete absence of trekkie panache and puts me on hold to make the changes. For all I know he had to go discuss it with his manager.
Being on hold at this point is stressful. There is music while I’m on hold that scientists assert is supposed to reduce the stress of those listening but no one knows where those scientists are today because they are all dead and the government is covering it up. But I digress.
This could still all fall apart. I could become disconnected, leaving my flight change request in a state of quantum uncertainty. He could irrevocably cancel my current flights and not be able to restore them, stranding me here in Bangalore to become that 7th person in the statistic mentioned above where I'll be disabled, disfigured or killed by a parasite.
Five minutes never seemed longer than this, but in the end, I score success, and even verify the changes online before letting the airline guy off the call.
I love it when a plan comes together.
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