Sunday 22 June 2003

Customer service still poor at Aer Lingus I went round to Dulbin Airport this afternoon to pick up my ticket for tomorrow's flight. It turns out that the KLM flight to Amsterdam is actually operated by Aer Lingus and that the national carrier was also the handling agent for KLM. So I went to the Aer Lingus ticketing desk. There was a queue of about 30 people and only one agent on duty handling everything from check-in to ticket sales. (There were another two agents on duty but they were dedicated to the Gold Circle passengers). Based on the first few people on the queue I calculated the agent was taking about 4 minutes to handle each person and that it would take me about 2 hours to be served, at which point I congratulated myself on having the foresight not to leave it until the day I was actually travelling. After about 25 minutes, however, another agent came on duty but instead of sitting at the desk she took the tickets that had been printed out for that day's travellers, put them on a trolley and wheeled it up the queue asking people their name and handing over the tickets. Brilliant, I thought, the people who are here to collect tickets will get them immediately. Or at least that's what I thought. The first person she came to had some sort of problem so she left the trolley where it was and went off to get someone. She was gone for eight minutes at the end of which she came back and told the lady to stay in the queue and her problem would be handled at the desk. She then proceeded down the line and handed out tickets to those waiting for them without any fuss and got everyone sorted in about five minutes. The thing that annoyed me was that all of the people who could have been sorted out in a matter of seconds were delayed for no good reason. As soon as she realised there was a problem with the first lady's ticket, unless it was really urgent, she should have simply told her to remain in the queue and continued sorting out the straightforward cases. In the end I only queued for 45 minutes but it's still indicative of the company's attitude to customers. 6:56:57 PM    comment []  Google It!

Getting Dublin's Big Dig started For those of you who don't know what it is, the Big Dig is Boston's major civil engineering project to put its main roads underground. The Irish link is that a number of CRH subsidiaries are involved in the project. Well the project is now finally winding down and Cory Doctorow over at Boing Boing Blog notes that the project is winding down: Now that the Big Dig -- Boston's ambitious, interminable plan to bury its freeways -- is finally winding down, thousands of workers who have devoted years to the largest earthworks project in human history are receiving pinkslips. For now, though, instead of finding jobs elsewhere in Boston, many former Big Dig employees are eyeing potential, long-term work out of state, such as the proposed Second Avenue subway in New York City, an ambitious light-rail project in Washington state, and an ongoing sewage-overflow project in Providence... ''A lot of craftsmen that have worked here have never been laid off and have worked a ton of overtime,'' said John Pourbaix, executive director of Construction Industries of Massachusetts, a trade association. ''The scary part to me,'' he said, ''is these employees pretty much became accustomed to a lifestyle and paycheck that might be going south.'' Link [Boing Boing Blog] Minister Brennan, take note. There may be a new source of labour for the Metro. 6:13:57 PM    comment []  Google It!

Off to see the Wizard Well not quite, but close enough. Apple is flying the European press to Berlin for a satellite re-broadcast of Steve Jobs' Keynote speech at the Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. I'm flying out tomorrow at 10am and get into Berlin,with a connection at Amsterdam, at about 4pm local time. Just enough time to get to the hotel, check in and then dash off again to the conference centre. It could be worse, they originally had me booked to fly out at 6:40am via Heathrow with an hour for a changeover. The current arrangements are much more civilised. Watch out for my report on Silicon Republic and in print in E-Thursday in the Irish Independent on Thursday. I'll try and update the blog from Berling but since the laptop I've borrowed doesn't have Radio installed, I'l be using the e-mail interface (which explains the message below). 5:40:56 PM    comment []  Google It!

This is a test of the e-mail to Blog facility. 12:30:07 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2003 David Stewart. Last update: 01/07/2003; 17:50:23.