United Breaks Guitars

It's sad that I can tell stories to people who have only started flying more recently about the old days of air travel. Back when the stewardesses still pretended to be nice to you. Back when you still got a snack on pretty much any flight, and a meal on every flight more than three hours. Back before the airlines had even taken the pillows and blankets off of most planes. But these certainly aren't the halcyon days of air travel. The airlines have taken everything and the kitchen sink out of planes, and the people who still work for airlines, be they stewardesses, the check in people, or the Indian's you talk to on the phone, basically hate you for have the audacity to patronize their business. When I came back to China this time I came back on a frequent flier ticket, now normally this really shouldn't make any difference, you can't book the return more than a few months out usually but you can change it later. When the tickets was booked my dad booked the ticket he even asked them to make sure that I could move it to a more appropriate date later in the year. So the other day I called up United to move my ticket to the middle of July. The very confused guy from India after first informing me that there were no tickets at all in the month of July said instead that I could only book the return flight within one year of when the ticket was issued instead of the much more sensible policy of within one year of when the first flight was.

This he said was true despite the fact that you can book tickets something like nine months in advance. On normal tickets it's the date of the flight not when the tickets was issued, but United makes a special effort to screw any customer who has the gall to use them enough to accrue a decent number of frequent flier tickets. So basically United screwed me. By telling me one thing on the phone the first time and then refusing to take any responsibility for it they made my return flight totally worthless. The only good thing to come out of this was that while getting a new return tickets with American Airlines there was some promotion going on so for less frequent flier miles than United would have charged for a one way ticket I ended up with a business class ticket. Now that's how you reward a frequent flier. You may have already seen these but about a year ago this guy who had his guitar smashed on a United flight made a hilarious video and song about it and posted it on YouTube. Now it has more than 8 million hits and there are two more songs to boot. So here is "United Breaks Guitars" and it's two follow up songs, trust me if you haven't seen them they are very much worth watching.