JetBlue’s new tagline: “Awesome, but only in the best case scenario.”

Still stuck in the airport for more than 8 hours at this point. Here’s the complaint I sent JetBlue:

While I don’t feel courteous, I’ll be courteous so you can understand my concern. Right now, my flight is delayed at a minimum of eight hours. That, however, is only part of the issue. Sure, I understand weather related things happen, and it’s out of JetBlue’s control, but at some point your operational departments probably should have had a better way of dealing with the situation.

Apparently, our aircraft was delayed out of JFK five hours due to weather (and JFK’s incompetence, which is massive.) At that point, someone back at JetBlue HQ should have been doing the crewmember math and saying “in a worst case scenario, if our crew members are delayed five or more hours, they won’t be legal to fly on the way back due to the FAA’s rest rules.” Instead, I get the feeling the JetBlue people weren’t looking at the worst case scenario. Instead, I’m stuck here at the airport for AT LEAST three additional hours waiting for in-flight crews to take their positions.

If that wasn’t bad enough, I found out there’s a flight out of Burbank taking off in 20 minutes from now, that I might have had a chance of getting on board had someone at JetBlue properly planned for the crew member scenario. I feel like this gross negligence is unacceptable, and calls in to question JetBlue’s reliability as an airline. I’ve always been a big proponent of JetBlue, and frequently recommended the company to friends, but recently it seems the airline is experiencing major growing pains and is incapable of handling flight contingencies. I’m no legacy carrier fan, but I’ve never had this negative of an experience, even with JFK’s moronic / overbooked handling of their tarmac.

If JetBlue had a tagline, it’d be “Awesome, but only in the best case scenario.”

If any JetBlue representative would like to contact me, I’d be more than willing to post a follow up response here on my blog. We’ll see if they really do care about customer service.

Update: Yeah, so still here and it’s 8:45. I called JetBlue, and had a really helpful and empathetic person say “Yeah, a 10+ hour airport stay is awful.” Felt really empathetic. Then she mentioned, “We should be able to get you a voucher or something,” because she understood my side of the “five hour lead time to find a crew should be enough” dillema. She mentioned I should talk to the desk, which i thought was weird, and as I went to hand over the phone, the person was gone. I called back, and, unsurprisingly, the next person on the phone was a lot less empathetic and thought i was batshit insane for even proposing that I’d get a voucher.

To be clear, it’s less about a voucher for me at this point and more for someone just letting me know they care about the situation. JetBlue claims to be different, but stringing me along and then having (apparently less than trained) employees dangle compensation just to have another one rip it away isn’t a very fun scenario.

10 hours of awful. 5 hours by weather, 5 by jetblue.

Slow motion awesomeness

I have a total crush on slow motion videography, and typically I’d leave a post like this to my tumblr (where I post my twitter feed and other random videos / photos) but this is too awesome not to share with everyone I know.

[Via Aaron]

Messaging

I’m no web designer, but feel like one of the most key concepts to any website, print ad or medium, is the amount of messages thrown at a viewer / user with each eye-load. Not sure if anyone’s done any research about this, but I really feel like there’s something to the idea of defining design messages, scientifically. For example, If something is large with text only, it’s sending the “this is important editorial” message, but if it’s rectangular shaped, it sends the “this is an advertisement” message.

Anyone have any leads on scientific research?

Two years ago…

While watching Good Will Hunting yesterday, I started to cry. Not because Matt Damon and Robin Williams are great actors (they are) but because there’s one scene in there that is so true to life, I can’t handle it. It reflected my emotions from two years ago perfectly, and that’s the scary part. There’s a scene when Matt Damon finally comes to grips with his abuse as a child, and Robin Williams encourages him, and then Damon just starts bawling as loud and as hard as he can. I’ve done that three times in my life that I can remember, and one of them was two years ago.

Two years ago, I lived in NYC, worked for AOL and was getting ready for my site to launch on June 15th. I didn’t have much to do with the launch, and to be honest, I didn’t really understand business or anything of the sort so I felt more than underqualified. I was moving headstrong toward that awesome goal of getting our site going, when, bam… it changed.

I was talking to my parents on the phone beneath my ikea loft bed, where I spent most of my time. I had a bunch of computers and the like set up there, and it worked as sort of a home office. My parents were expecting my brother, Ryan, to go to their house. They were an hour or two late, which is totally normal for a family with kids whose bladders aren’t the largest, and who’s stomachs beg for food frequently. Then, my parents had a ring at the door, and said “Oh, there’s Ryan, I’ll talk to you later.”

Five minutes later, they called back. It wasn’t Ryan at the door. It was the Police. Ryan died in a rollover car accident on the way to come see them.

I was devistated. I immediately started crying. I went out of my apartment on 89th street and started running west. I walked to 5th right next to central park and stopped. I couldn’t believe it. How could he be gone? We hadn’t talked in a month, and I looked to him for guidence on most “adult” topics. How could this be over?

My sister died in 1998, which may have helped me prepare for such a hard time. She had Cancer, so it wasn’t the same situation at all, but I was used to grieving. I felt like I had just gotten over Sherilynn’s death, why the hell did I need to start dealing with another family member’s death, and worrying about their family, etc.?

I immediately started making plans to get back to Utah. I called C.K., my boss at the time, and told him I wasn’t going to be able to work. I called him in tears, and I felt like a total tool, but I knew he’d understand. The team at Netscape really helped me out, a lot. I didn’t want to deal with any of the crap I was going through, but they helped pick up my workload.

Now, two years later, I find myself in NYC again, but I think I’m done grieving (or as done as anyone can be.) I still cry. I still miss him. I still have dreams about him. There are times (especially when my career is changing) I want to call him and ask what he thinks. Those are the hard times. The anniversaries? Those are the easy times, at least to remember him. I’m not going through what his wife / kids are going through, and those guys are the ones who need the most support.

(as an aside, I just imported all of my old blog posts here so you can see the archive stretching all the way back to 2003. My writing skills are immeasurably better than they were five or two years ago. Please, keep that in mind.)

Blog turned magazine?

For years, pundits and readers alike have been saying, “the magazine industry is doomed.” I’ve heartily agreed with them, seeing as how I’ve spent my time blogging and the like. Instead of turning over and simply dying, could magazines turn it around by making the magazine supplement a website, instead of the website supplementing the magazine?

The magazine to internet process is tried and true. Magazines like Newsweek, Time or even tech bellwether Wired simply re-purposed the print mag into an online form, often delayed from the original print publication. The natural response of a web-savvy crowd? “Why would we want to read what we’ve already read a month later?”

What if, instead, the often untimely magazine became the repository for the website? I’m not saying simply repurpose blog posts for print, but rather author original in-depth pieces from original blog content.

Say, for instance, a writer is interviewing three or four “experts” about HD-DVD vs BluRay saga. One of them is particularly noteworthy, maybe works at a market research firm and can talk on behalf of the company. If that person says something interesting, instead of holding on to the quote till the whole story is written, the writer excerpts the interview on a blog with some explanation that it’s being worked up for a future blowout story on BluRay’s big victory. The site then might get viral traffic and original content, with an expectation that the full story is yet to be explained. Then, the writer rinses and repeats the process, talking to execs, etc, till finally one day the full story is written.

Finally, after the print mag goes to press, the writer sculpts a blog post that sums up the article, gives links to the background interviews and the post goes live when the magazine hits newsstands. The site also offers an online version of the magazine (PDF and kindle, flavors, etc.) that includes the print ads.

I think you could sell the site at a certain CPM and then the PDF would become a calculated value-add to the print publication’s CPM.

Granted, I realize this idea needs to be baked a little better before it could be implemented, and there are still some user expectations that aren’t met (ie, WHAT?! I have to download a PDF?!) but it seems like a step toward the right direction. Granted, some magazine publisher would have to really take a chance and share revs on the PDF and print versions (or some online publisher needs to add magazine infrastructure, which seems less likely,) but to me it seems worth a shot, especially if the publisher is in the “uh oh, our business is changing” camp.

I’d love to hear some feedback, if you’ve got any. Leave a comment or email contact[at]randallcbennett(dot)com.

(IMG courtesy Flickr User CarbonNYC, although I have a similar, less well photographed, pic.)

Escalate!

Just had the fifth visit from the illustrious Time Warner Cable. The difference between the prior four visits and this visit? A TWC foreman. This guy was on point. He wasn’t leaving till the problem was definitively solved. His solution? Swapped the “new model” Scientific atlanta Explorer 8300HDC with the Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300HD. The lack of cablecard and bad Java-based OS means our cable works for longer than 50 minutes. Hooray! AAAAnnnddd… we got another month free of HBO and Cinemax.

My new tip? If you have two problems with cable people, escalate and make it happen. I called and said “I’ve had four people and the problem still isn’t fixed. I want to talk to a supervisor.” The supervisor put the Foreman on the job, and it’s awesome.

Now, I have HD, faster cable box / guide, and my cable has been working longer than 50 minutes. Hooray!

TV newser… for small markets

I’ve been out of TV news for about a year, and I’m glad I’m no longer involved in that animal. I still relish a well produced newscast, and watch ESPN News more for the producing than the actual sports news (i’ve got a problem, I know) so it’s of little shock to anyone that I’ve found a small time TV news blog that is actually interesting. TV News Grapevine is run by some “agent” that helps small market people find small market talent, or that’s what I gathered from the two seconds of background research I did.

The site features daily story ideas that you can bring to your morning meeting and look smart (if no one else reads the site) and general background and history of TV news on a shoe-string budget. Check out their teasing tips, if you’re one of those producer types.

CBS buys CNET

You know, I doubt it’s a coincidence that CBS announces they’re planning to buy CNET the day after I announce I’m leaving The 404. Without my smiling, charming and awesome persona, CNET can’t survive on its own.

Full email from CEO Neil Ashe follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

Overload of entertainment

Just in case we needed more things to bombard our lives, Traci and I decided to embark on the Netflix journey. 3 DVDs at a time, the whole nine. Simultaneously, I decided we probably should get cable. With our newfound unbroke-ness, I even decided to throw in the “extra” package, and splurge on some extra channels. Not for sure that it’s neccessarily a great idea, but we’ve been media bankrupt since last September, so splurging for the 50″ plasma, the cable and the Netflix makes me feel good.

I also have to pay a buttload in bills now too. I really do feel like an adult… who uses words like buttload to describe how mature he is.

The last year and a half… in a blog post

So, ever since quit my job blogging for a living, I haven’t been the best blogger exactly. Regular readers (if I have any) will remember that I moved back to NYC, got married and now work at CNET producing a few shows. (Loaded and The404) In case, like my nephew, you haven’t talked to me in a few years because you’ve been living in a foreign country (like my other friend) here’s the last 1.5 years of my life boiled down to one blog post.

Fav blog posts of the last year and a half:

2006 retrospect (specifically dealing with my brother.)

2007 goals and the redux, coming soon.

-moved from New York back to Utah
-worked at KSL for 2 weeks and then moved to KUTV and worked on the morning show
-worked at a crappy start up
-started (and killed) my own company
-had 3 seizures (one at my nephew’s house)
-moved to Boston on a whim, partly for health care and partly to escape Utah
-(re)met my wife in Boston
-only stayed in Boston for 3 months
-moved back to New York to work for CNET
-started two new shows on CNET
-got married on Dec. 1st
-her name is Traci and she’s awesome
-Now I caught you up to date, ish.

I’m going to try to fill out the bullet points over the next few days. Sorry, if I don’t do it immediately.