One of my oldest friends was stricken a few months ago as he walked along an Austin sidewalk on a brisk Saturday afternoon. He suddenly felt as though he was walking uphill into a stiff wind. The feeling got worse through the weekend.
Willie thought he knew what was happening to him, and when he went to see his east Texas doctor Monday morning he found himself being bustled to the hospital for an angiogram. Sure enough, his blood pipes had prodigious blockage. By Tuesday morning he was under the knife, his breastplate cracked and jacked apart, veins from his leg stripped away and reinserted near his heart where they could do more important work. We laymen call it a quadruple bypass.
He's OK now, eating better, exercising, back on the job. Willie's a rural mail carrier, something he's done long enough to see retirement within his grasp. Thank God postal workers have good health coverage. They have some of the best benefits don't they? Thirty days of vacation every 12 months, sick leave and vacation leave that accrues if you don't use it all every year, and health insurance that is unsurpassed.
But you know what Willie has told me since his surgery? That for a few years he had been praying for a minor heart attack. Just enough to trigger his health insurance provider's willingness to pay for the angiogram, the test that would reveal the blockage that was just about to kill him.
He probably didn't quite have the heart attack, but he came very close. Close enough that the USPS insurance arbiters were willing to pay for the test that would save his life. His prayers were answered. Willie is Methodist, in case you wanted to know.
Now, this is funny. A guy praying for a "little" heart attack - not enough to kill him, just enough to alarm his doctor enough to order the test. It's right out of a Jack Benny skit, high humor. Slapstick.
How do we get to that point? I won't pretend to explain how we can perform medical miracles that almost nobody can afford to pay for. It doesn't really matter.
What matters is what we do now.
Me, I like as little government as possible. I like when we count on our government to provide only that which we just can't provide for ourselves. Like building roads. We can't manage that on an individual basis Or, national defense. No, my deer rifle and my Glock won't help me when China lobs a nuclear-tipped missile here from Tamaulipas. You can argue that education, retirement plans and mail delivery should be privatized. How about the criminal justice system, or sewage treatment and electric service? Should that be left up to the individual?
But health care is no less crucial, and it is a commodity that has advanced far beyond the ability of most of us to pay for. I make decent money, but I will never write a check for my own angiogram. I shouldn't have to, any more than I should have to personally swipe a credit card to pave the hundred feet of roadway outside my subdivision.
I'm amazed that we've figured out how to make strips of earth passable by millions of cars for years and years, not to mention the wonders we can perform within the ailing human body. But they both cost way too much.
Of course, we have to eventually pay for road paving, national defense, and health care. But let's pay for them as a group, rather than expecting individuals to figure it out. And please, don't invoke the mantra of evil socialized medicine. It's a political term, nothing more. Nobody rages about socialized road building or socialized national defense.
I really don't want to have to pray for a heart attack.
Friday, June 27, 2008
Sunday, June 15, 2008
Bye Bye LUV
It finally happened. Flying commercially in any state other than misery is a thing of the past.
Traveling inside one of those improbably-airborne metal tubes across the country has always been a mixed value proposition. For the millions of us who didn't fly frequently, jetliner travel was a brush with the good life, a few hours when we were allowed into a slightly more exclusive club than usual. It was just cool to be able to get somewhere far away that fast, and you were willing to put up with a good bit of inconvenience for the slight taste of privilege and the tiny, secret thrill of knowing you were, well, above it all for a while.
Even after 9/11, when the sturdy drones at the TSA elevated the gauntlet of soul-killing bureaucracy to its breathtaking pinnacle, we cut the air travel industry some slack. It was bad, but it was circumstantial, we agreed, and hopefully ephemeral. Kind of like going to the DMV to change a car title - a dull exercise that pointlessly stole hours from our lives, but after it all, flying still gave you the payoff of flying.
The scales have tipped. The pain has grown to the point that the joy of flying can't possibly compensate. In fact, the flying experience itself has taken on a gulag-like tone. Blend the dreadful pre-flight ordeal at the airports with the actual experience in the air today and you live through a symmetrical cycle that feels like it's settled in and is here to stay. Some frightened part of my brain tells me this is truly how it was intended to be all along, and that Satan has at last prevailed.
The really bad news is that I don't think the pendulum will swing back. Ever. Everything prior to this point in time is what we will eventually refer to as the Golden Days of air travel.
I flew round trips from Dallas to Philadelphia and from Dallas to Las Vegas a couple of months ago. It was uncomfortable and tedious, but no more so than it had been for years. Then last week it all changed, and not subtly. I flew from LAX to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Dallas, all on Southwest. This is the only airline making money today. It's also home to fun-loving crews, the innovative and helpful company whose stock symbol is actually LUV.
The delays I've come to expect with every flight were there - longer than usual, an hour on one leg, 90 minutes on the other. The difference is that the ambassadors of LUV have apparently gotten the word that caring a bit about any of their passengers' woes is just not relevant or important anymore.
The ticket agents each time notified me that my flight was delayed by an hour with the same degree of concern they once used when telling me which gate to proceed to. By the way, they have stopped providing that information. Wastes oxygen, I guess, and after all, I can read a status monitor as well as they, can’t I?
But the greater change was not in what the agents said to me but to each other. As I stepped to the kiosk to register my boarding pass number on the touchscreen, the agent in front of me happily turned the key in her drawer and proclaimed she was going home, done with her shift. My equivalent of a dog's hackles began to react just a little - and then the payoff, as the lady at the next terminal, turned to my agent and said, "It's four o'clock. My sheet says you're supposed to be here 'til 4:15!" My homebound agent was blissfully unswerved, loudly notifying "Miss Supervisor" that she'd been there since four in the morning, and she was outta there. I watched this interplay - the likes of which I realized I had seen many times before but never at an airline counter - and it began to dawn on me that I was witnessing the end of an era. The level of professionalism at airline ticket counters may never have been what you would expect at say, Nordstrom's, but it's always been reasonable, and better than at most businesses. But this day, watching this spat unfold, I had a powerful déjà vu moment. I imagined for a second that I was standing at a counter in a smelly convenience store with a Slim Jim and a Slurpee in hand, waiting for clerks to stop arguing about what a lousy place it was to work. If that was all, I could write it off to a bad day. But this set the tone for the rest of my day-long odyssey, most of which I’ll skip.On board the attendants let us know right away that there would be no empty seats. I parked in the second-to-last row, aisle seat. Before long the plane was indeed filled, save one seat on the row behind me. The traveler in the middle seat next to me was overjoyed when the door closed. "My friend can get on after all!” he exclaimed.
Turns out his business traveling companion and he had spent all day trying to get to Dallas from the east coast, and weather had caused them to miss one connection after another. My row-mate got shoehorned on to my flight, but his friend had to stay behind because, he was told, the flight had only one open seat. Then he learned the facts - there were two seats open, but one was being saved for an off-duty Southwest employee, flying for free. She was settling into the one open seat - the one he thought his friend would get - and he asked her, "Don't you guys have your own special seats?” Yes, she said, "but this is a lot more comfortable. Those seats they give us have, like, an eighth-inch of padding!"
So the paying passenger, who had lived through a flying nightmare all day, sat in yet another terminal awaiting whatever means might finally get her home.
Once we took off and had drinks served, the three flight attendants gathered in the galley right behind us and began to shriek and cackle at ear-shredding levels. This went on for at least 15 minutes, as passengers up and down the plane craned their necks back to see what in the world was going on.
The day, in sum, was about the same point on the scale as, say, the day before a colonoscopy, when you overdose for hours on three or four kinds of powerful laxatives.
I don’t blame the miserable downward spiral of the commercial flying experience on Southwest. God help us, they may still be one of the best. The entire industry appears riddled with the kind of disease and decay and desperation that must’ve accompanied the passenger train industry to its death decades ago.
Doesn’t matter which airline you’re flying when you gulp and launch yourself into that horror that is the modern security system. It starts the moment that I reach for the first of three plastic tubs from the stack. The frantic self-disassembly, the frenzied rush to retrieve it all and put it back together, and do it without delaying those behind me – it always makes me think of the scene in Schindler’s List in which the trainload of naked Jews run at top speed toward they know not what, screaming and in abject fear, with only one hope – to get somewhere, anywhere, alive. OK, it’s a gross exaggeration, but I still see that scene every time. I can’t help it.
No, the teeth-grinding ordeal that is flying today has been in the works for a long time. The current energy mess seems bound to accelerate the crumbling. No airline can expect in the future to maintain anything close to even the second-rate experience we have come to accept in the last decade.
What I observed is surely the result of overstressed, understaffed teams to whom caring about the customer has become a luxury, not a staple. And it will get worse, soon. I’m glad I got to live through something better.
Traveling inside one of those improbably-airborne metal tubes across the country has always been a mixed value proposition. For the millions of us who didn't fly frequently, jetliner travel was a brush with the good life, a few hours when we were allowed into a slightly more exclusive club than usual. It was just cool to be able to get somewhere far away that fast, and you were willing to put up with a good bit of inconvenience for the slight taste of privilege and the tiny, secret thrill of knowing you were, well, above it all for a while.
Even after 9/11, when the sturdy drones at the TSA elevated the gauntlet of soul-killing bureaucracy to its breathtaking pinnacle, we cut the air travel industry some slack. It was bad, but it was circumstantial, we agreed, and hopefully ephemeral. Kind of like going to the DMV to change a car title - a dull exercise that pointlessly stole hours from our lives, but after it all, flying still gave you the payoff of flying.
The scales have tipped. The pain has grown to the point that the joy of flying can't possibly compensate. In fact, the flying experience itself has taken on a gulag-like tone. Blend the dreadful pre-flight ordeal at the airports with the actual experience in the air today and you live through a symmetrical cycle that feels like it's settled in and is here to stay. Some frightened part of my brain tells me this is truly how it was intended to be all along, and that Satan has at last prevailed.
The really bad news is that I don't think the pendulum will swing back. Ever. Everything prior to this point in time is what we will eventually refer to as the Golden Days of air travel.
I flew round trips from Dallas to Philadelphia and from Dallas to Las Vegas a couple of months ago. It was uncomfortable and tedious, but no more so than it had been for years. Then last week it all changed, and not subtly. I flew from LAX to Chicago, and then from Chicago to Dallas, all on Southwest. This is the only airline making money today. It's also home to fun-loving crews, the innovative and helpful company whose stock symbol is actually LUV.
The delays I've come to expect with every flight were there - longer than usual, an hour on one leg, 90 minutes on the other. The difference is that the ambassadors of LUV have apparently gotten the word that caring a bit about any of their passengers' woes is just not relevant or important anymore.
The ticket agents each time notified me that my flight was delayed by an hour with the same degree of concern they once used when telling me which gate to proceed to. By the way, they have stopped providing that information. Wastes oxygen, I guess, and after all, I can read a status monitor as well as they, can’t I?
But the greater change was not in what the agents said to me but to each other. As I stepped to the kiosk to register my boarding pass number on the touchscreen, the agent in front of me happily turned the key in her drawer and proclaimed she was going home, done with her shift. My equivalent of a dog's hackles began to react just a little - and then the payoff, as the lady at the next terminal, turned to my agent and said, "It's four o'clock. My sheet says you're supposed to be here 'til 4:15!" My homebound agent was blissfully unswerved, loudly notifying "Miss Supervisor" that she'd been there since four in the morning, and she was outta there. I watched this interplay - the likes of which I realized I had seen many times before but never at an airline counter - and it began to dawn on me that I was witnessing the end of an era. The level of professionalism at airline ticket counters may never have been what you would expect at say, Nordstrom's, but it's always been reasonable, and better than at most businesses. But this day, watching this spat unfold, I had a powerful déjà vu moment. I imagined for a second that I was standing at a counter in a smelly convenience store with a Slim Jim and a Slurpee in hand, waiting for clerks to stop arguing about what a lousy place it was to work. If that was all, I could write it off to a bad day. But this set the tone for the rest of my day-long odyssey, most of which I’ll skip.On board the attendants let us know right away that there would be no empty seats. I parked in the second-to-last row, aisle seat. Before long the plane was indeed filled, save one seat on the row behind me. The traveler in the middle seat next to me was overjoyed when the door closed. "My friend can get on after all!” he exclaimed.
Turns out his business traveling companion and he had spent all day trying to get to Dallas from the east coast, and weather had caused them to miss one connection after another. My row-mate got shoehorned on to my flight, but his friend had to stay behind because, he was told, the flight had only one open seat. Then he learned the facts - there were two seats open, but one was being saved for an off-duty Southwest employee, flying for free. She was settling into the one open seat - the one he thought his friend would get - and he asked her, "Don't you guys have your own special seats?” Yes, she said, "but this is a lot more comfortable. Those seats they give us have, like, an eighth-inch of padding!"
So the paying passenger, who had lived through a flying nightmare all day, sat in yet another terminal awaiting whatever means might finally get her home.
Once we took off and had drinks served, the three flight attendants gathered in the galley right behind us and began to shriek and cackle at ear-shredding levels. This went on for at least 15 minutes, as passengers up and down the plane craned their necks back to see what in the world was going on.
The day, in sum, was about the same point on the scale as, say, the day before a colonoscopy, when you overdose for hours on three or four kinds of powerful laxatives.
I don’t blame the miserable downward spiral of the commercial flying experience on Southwest. God help us, they may still be one of the best. The entire industry appears riddled with the kind of disease and decay and desperation that must’ve accompanied the passenger train industry to its death decades ago.
Doesn’t matter which airline you’re flying when you gulp and launch yourself into that horror that is the modern security system. It starts the moment that I reach for the first of three plastic tubs from the stack. The frantic self-disassembly, the frenzied rush to retrieve it all and put it back together, and do it without delaying those behind me – it always makes me think of the scene in Schindler’s List in which the trainload of naked Jews run at top speed toward they know not what, screaming and in abject fear, with only one hope – to get somewhere, anywhere, alive. OK, it’s a gross exaggeration, but I still see that scene every time. I can’t help it.
No, the teeth-grinding ordeal that is flying today has been in the works for a long time. The current energy mess seems bound to accelerate the crumbling. No airline can expect in the future to maintain anything close to even the second-rate experience we have come to accept in the last decade.
What I observed is surely the result of overstressed, understaffed teams to whom caring about the customer has become a luxury, not a staple. And it will get worse, soon. I’m glad I got to live through something better.
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