Ctrl I, F4, Option 1

I’m stranded in the airport after the northeast U.S. was snowed in on Friday and I bought WiFi access today just so I could write this post for you. Don’t you feel special?

After my flight was canceled on Friday, my carrier (the hardly likable U.S. Airways) was left with the task of finding a later flight to put me on. Aside from the usual inconveniences like standing in line for hours and getting shafted by careless agents, I was, at one point, standing in front of a U.S. Airways employee who was attempting to rebook my flight with his 18th century computer terminal.

Now I don’t know what kind of software they had during the Renaissance, but whoever designed these terminals probably thought DOS was easy to use. The process of moving the outbound segments of my round-trip ticket to another flight, I kid you not, went something like this:

Ctrl I... F4... Option 1... Enter... F11... 7... Alt G... etc.....

I would not have been surprised if a couple Ctrl Alt Deletes were thrown in there, and how do I know what was being pressed? Well, because one of the supervisors was saying all of it aloud to the employee typing it in… the employee himself didn’t know how to do this stuff because it was just too cryptic!

It was at this point that something dawned on me… the reason why U.S. Airways is so bad with customer service, and so incapable of managing high volume situations well (like a thousand passengers trying to get rebooked after cancellations) has just about everything to do with the antiquated, user-unfriendly interface system that all of their employees use every day. It begs the question… how much would it cost for them to have a little usability consulting and system redesign, and how much money would it save them in the long run? I have a feeling such a move would be invaluable for them… anything that would prevent another experience like what I had to go through!