A Bit About Me

This is long and self-centered. You probably don’t want to read it.

1. I value my time. Like, a lot. I’m pretty busy. From August through December last year I worked on average about 60 hours a week at Meebo, and somewhere between 5 and 10 hours a week on Pidgin (a lot of time was spent migrating to our new servers and reconfiguring services). I spent about 5 hours a week rock climbing and maybe 40 minutes running. I spent the rest of my free time relaxing with Emily, and I really value that time.
2. I care about people, my country, and this planet.

These two themes affect my feelings on a lot of other things:

• I despise spam. You have no idea. In my life I’ve spent hundreds of hours deleting spam email and configuring spam detection and filtering on mail servers and mail clients (thankfully gmail takes this burden away from me).

  Think of everyone else in the world who deals with spam on a daily basis. People clicking “delete” on spam in their inbox. Companies who sell spam filtering software and hardware. Companies who buy spam filtering software and hardware. IT staff who install and configure spam filtering software and hardware. Surely a significantly greater amount of money is spent trying to block spam than is earned by the people who send spam. People who send spam are parasites of society. They cause countless man hours to be wasted for their own gain. Think of what could be accomplished if all this time and energy was spent doing something worthwhile.

• I don’t like wasting other people’s time. I try to be on time. I try not to ask other people to do things that I could easily do myself. I try to be as fast as possible whenever I’m in line at a retail store, bank, restaurant, etc.
• I don’t like it when other people waste my time. Being late for meetings, being slow, being lazy, etc. Obviously some things are out of your control, and you really can’t hold those against people.

On Emily and my flight back from Raleigh to San Francisco on New Years Day we missed our connection in Atlanta because our flight was late leaving Raleigh. We were forced to spend the night in Atlanta, which ended up making us about 15 hours late getting home. There were 7 people total who missed the flight by only a few minutes.

But the annoying thing is that we could have been on the plane. We ran from our arrival gate to our departure gate. Three of us were there 5 minutes before the schedule take off time of the plane, and the other 4 weren’t much later. We saw the plane sit at the gate for maybe 10 minutes before it pushed back. Our luggage made it onto that plane, but because the gate attendants had already closed the door and were no where in sight, we couldn’t board.

That’s 7 people who were delayed 15 hours. No only that, the flight we were on the next morning was now oversold. Which means 7 other people were delayed. The airline paid for our dinner, a hotel, and breakfast the next morning. All in all that’s thousands of dollars wasted because the Delta employees working in the terminals in the Atlanta airport didn’t wait for the passengers who they should have known were coming. Ridiculous.

To say I was livid is an understatement. We waited in line for maybe 20 minutes to talk to the customer service lady to get our flight rescheduled and to get meal and hotel vouchers. There were 3 Delta employees in the area, but only 1 seemed to actually be doing anything. In fact, while we were talking with the employee who was actually useful, one of the other employees came over and complained about how long the line was. WTF?

I know the entire airline industry is doing pretty poorly, and part of me feels bad, but another part of me is like, “oh, no wonder.” Your uselessness is costing the airline industry money. And that trickles down to everyone. You may not have noticed but the US economy isn’t in real great shape. Maybe you should actually do some work?