Tag: travel

Dispatch from Pakistan #1 – Hitting the Ground

empty tea cupI arrived in Lahore, Pakistan 3:30 AM local time April 13. I’ll be here through April 23. I’m trying to capture my thoughts and experiences in this series of posts. They will be imperfect and fail to convey all the complex truths of this place. Think of this only as a container for my thoughts.

Initial perceptions. When I first traveled to South Africa and Kenya to work with teachers through Education Beyond Borders, all I had as a comparison were neighborhoods evoked by what I saw in those countries. Such is my similar experience here in Pakistan.

An unfair comparison, to be sure, my mind looks for what is similar to other places I’ve been in the world and then tries to puzzle those comparisons together to make sense of the foreign.

It doesn’t do the place justice, and it’s all I have. The more I’m here, the more I can reject the false comparisons in favor of the truths I’ve see here on the ground.

I’m staying with six teachers here to attend the weeklong workshop. Two are from Malaysian schools in the Beaconhouse network. Four are from schools and district offices in Karachi.

All of them are extremely dedicated to doing right by children. They are studying technology. They are enthused about project-based learning, they have been reading up on inquiry-based learning. It’s the same as you would expect from any group of teachers trying to get the mix right in American schools.

And yet it’s a bit different. When we talk about the issue of security in Karachi, the tone changes slightly. The people setting off bombs, the people kidnapping, the people who make fences and checkpoints necessary. “These people are not representative of Pakistan,” everyone I meet here is quick to point out.

From what I’m seeing (and it’s myopically limited based on only 10 days in-country), this is a country much different from what we see on the news. It turns out, only the bad news makes it out of Pakistan to the American media. No one has reported on the peacefulness I’ve seen here. Nor are they interested in the eggs, toast and jam on the table each morning when I come down to breakfast.

These are the pieces of ordinary daily life. The comings and goings of a people that aren’t worthy of report in papers and on the news networks.

It’s a mix of this. It’s the ordinary with the extraordinary. Daily life lives alongside a subtle shadow of actual insecurity. As a visitor, I’m trying to get my mind around it.

Things I Know 201 of 365: When times are tough, service matters the most

Quality in a service or product is not what you put into it. It is what the client or customer gets out of it.

-Peter Drucker

Generally speaking, I’m not one for confrontation. Diplomacy is my goto route. If there’s an agreeable way to get what I want and what is fair and just, that’s the way I’ll take. Sometimes, this means taking more time to go through the process than I initially bargain for.
Sometimes, it’s not the advisable route.
Friday, I was scheduled to fly out of LAX to Denver for a three day visit with friends before heading home to Illinois.
I’ve been on the road for over a month, so I was ready to start the trek home.
I entered the sliding glass doors and attempted to pull my mobile ticket up on my phone.
No luck.
An error, my phone told me.
Best to go check in at the counter.
I wound my way to a self-check-in counter, entered my confirmation number and was alerted to the fact my flight had been canceled.
Talk to a person, the screen told me.
I wasn’t sure whom the screen meant, so I asked someone with a name tag.
“You want to be in Line 6,” person with name badge told me.
I looked at Line 6, AKA the Line that Time Forgot.
In my 45 minutes waiting I learned Line 6 was home to those displaced by the cancelation of my flight as well as passengers kicked off another of the airline’s flights.
This was on top of those passengers who needed to redeem paper tickets. Line 6 was their line first. We were just scavengers.
By the time I got up to the counter, I’d done my homework. With the help of friends, I knew every other flight to Denver leaving Friday night on every other airline.
“I’d like to be re-booked on Flight X,” I told the ticketer behind the counter.
Flight full.
We did this same dance four more times before he told me the only other flight available had one seat available in first class, and that was over $1,000.
I took my hotel voucher and headed to the airport hotel.
I was angry in that moment.
It was an anger made more intense when I called the airline’s customer assistance line.
My 3-day trip was cut to two, I told the agent on the line, and I would like to be compensated for the inconvenience.
I would have to send an e-mail to Customer Relations, the agent told me.
Would she just transfer me, I asked.
The agent told me she couldn’t. I needed to e-mail Customer Relations and they would e-mail me back.
I asked for the number of the Customer Relations department.
There isn’t one, said the agent, would I like for her to provide me with the e-mail address?
No, thank you, I can find my way around the Internet.
Here’s what gets me about the hole process. It’s what got me about the process when I got to the airport at 4 the next morning to sit stand-by for a flight I wouldn’t get on.
This is an industry with every incentive to get customer service right.
For almost 10 years, now, the airline industry has been melting away, attempting to claw its way back to soluble ground.
If anyone should want to serve me and every other customer well, it’s the good folks at the airlines.
They had every possible piece of contact information for me a person could have.
My mother doesn’t have so many ways to get ahold of me.
Still, it wasn’t until after the hour+ drive to LAX that I learned my flight had been canceled.
Bad form.
Make it company policy to contact a customer the moment a flight is canceled. I don’t need minute-by-minute play-by-play each time a flight falls behind or jumps ahead of schedule. I’m fine with needing to sign up for those services.
Realizing that I’ve purchased a ticket to get somewhere because I genuinely want to get there and that I would appreciate a heads up if that plan falls through seems the decent thing to do.
While we’re re-writing lines of code in the mainframe of airline thinking, when a flight is canceled, if no other flight to that destination is heading out under the same airline, let me know my options on the other airlines. Perhaps, even be so bold as to make it easy for me to select one of those flights or book a later flight on my original airline.
Yes, it might mean I end up flying on another carrier, and you risk losing me as a customer.
Might I suggest, though, that the current system seems to be set up to try to lose me as a customer the moment anything goes wrong.
Watch Miracle on 34th Street. Macy’s sending customers to Gimble’s. Gimble’s sending customers to Macy’s.
Customers are looking for service.
And, if the service is superior, I’m willing to overlook the problems I understand arise when operating a international transportation company.
If I am treated like a human being, I’ll be more likely to remember my humanity when things go wrong.

Back to Africa (Almost)

I just finished drinking a Coke.

For those who know me, you’ll understand this is somewhat surprising. Then again, I’m sitting in London’s Heathrow Airport, so the Coke here is free of high fructose corn syrup, so I can drink without guilt – mostly.

It’s Day 2 of travel to South Africa.

After an hour’s delay at O’Hare, we boarded our flight.

Then, we sat.

We waited for some piece of cargo or another that was running late on account of multiple deluges that have been battering the Midwest this week.

Once loaded, we pulled away onto the runway.

Then, we sat.

One thing I’ve got to hand to our captain, the dude was forthright with the information.

“Folks, it’s Capt. You’llForgetMyNameLater here on the flight deck. No one seems to be taking our calls at the tower, but we’ll let you know as soon as we know something.”

It went on like this for a couple hours.

The Northern Corridor was shut down, and you know how that goes.

On the plus side, no one was seated near me, so I was able to “stretch out” while watching Leap Year. (If you haven’t, let me save you some time. Everyone ends up happy. Even the bar.)

My body and mind aren’t quite on the same page as to whether I’m tired or hungry or know what day it is. I’m hoping the 11-hour flight to Cape Town will sort that out.

I’m still sorting through my thoughts on the trip as far as expectations go. Most important – I never expected this. In my flurry of e-mails home to let folks know I’d made it through the first leg of the journey safely, I wrote this to a friend:

In other news, I’m going back to Africa – back. That’s crazy, right?

There are these moments when I stop and think about the little and big choices that led to this. I mean, think of all the decisions in my life that have afforded me these opportunities. Three generations ago, my mom’s mom’s mom was born on the banks of a river in the Oklahoma Territory. How’s that for perspective? Whoa.

So, that’s where my brain lives. A taste of this particular moment in my life before I sign off and head to Terminal 5 (I’ve been in the wrong terminal for a few hours now):

I’m sitting in Heathrow watching the World Cup on my way to Cape Town while chatting on Facebook with a friend in Nairobi. Oh, and yesterday morning, I woke up in Springfield, IL.