We live on a relatively short cul-de-sac, with 22 houses and dozens of small kids. For the past few years, most of the parents and kids would trick-or-treat on the street together, with the parents at the upcoming house running ahead to be there to answer the door. While we were all out, we’d leave our trays of candy outside the front door with a sign, in case anyone came by and we missed them. At least 12 of the houses had trays loaded with candy in front of them at some point.

This year, a couple of high-school kids caught on, and almost every single tray on the street was emptied while we were out. As we were all returning from the far end of the street, I overheard another family complain “another house with nobody home and no candy!” I felt terrible as I ran in the back and headed to answer the door, where our tray was completely empty. My 3-year-old was not to happy with me grabbing a handful of her candy to hand out – I had to make a couple hasty promises that I’m sure I’ll regret. Later I raided the kitchen for raisin snack packs to fill the tray, and while most kids were good-natured about it, I’m sure a few won’t be back next year because they didn’t get candy.

Mostly, I’m ticked off. I brag that I live in a neighborhood where the neighbors all know each other and look out for each other, and we can more-or-less leave the door unlocked. When something like this happens, as small as it is, it reminds me that the real world isn’t like that. Bummer.

I was on United 595 from Denver to SFO, departing at 5:54. On the takeoff roll, the plane started to shudder violently, and even the seasoned passengers started to look a bit alarmed. We climbed out successfully, but it was obvious that as the pilots increased power, the vibration returned. Unsurprisingly, about 10 minutes later, the pilot announced that we were returning to Denver.

After deboarding, the craziness began. They had two more flights to SFO that night, but both were pretty full, and both were hours late. They apparently found another (smaller) plane for us, but couldn’t find a crew (it wasn’t a 767, so our crew couldn’t fly it). After several hours of dithering, they finally canceled the flight for the night, and started getting hundreds of people hotel rooms.

I hustled over to Terminal A to see if I could get on the last Frontier flight out, at 9:35pm. They had one seat left, and the gate agent was extremely nice, allowing me to purchase a ticket and managing to get me a great seat. It looked like my colleague Jeff was going to get left behind, but she offered to write down my credit card number, so if they could find him a seat at the last minute he wouldn’t have to be held up by getting the ticket bought first. Sure enough, one of the seats freed up, so they got him on the flight, then processed the purchase of his ticket. That’s going above and beyond.

I appreciate that the United folks had a nightmare on their hands, but they really didn’t handle it very well. So it just highlighted the contrast when the Frontier folks were nice and competent. I will be flying Frontier more often.

I bought a salad in the airport, to eat for dinner on the 5:50pm Frontier flight from DEN to SFO. Unfortunately, I left on the seat next to me at the gate. I remembered it just as I boarded the plane, but the flight attendant refused to let me leave the plane to go get it, citing “security”. WTF?

My salad was about 20 yards away. There was 20 minutes before departure. I and the salad had both passed security screening. What possible security problem could there be? I was stunned. The plane wasn’t even full, there was no backup on the jetway. I even went back to the front after everyone was on, with at least 5 minutes before the door was shut, and was not allowed to get off for the 60 seconds it would have taken to get my salad.

I was hungry and pissed off for the first hour of the flight. I composed the first draft of this blog post, ripping them a new one about “security theatre” and other crap. Then the flight attendant who had refused me dropped a folded note on my tray table (I was working and had headphones on). The note said on the outside “My Apologies”, and inside read:

Sir:

After reviewing the regulations regarding passenger deplaning and reboarding, my interpretation was not correct.

Please accept my apology, and use these free DirecTV coupons to help pay for the dinner you left in Denver.

What’s more, he even signed it with his full name and employee number. Wow! I have to say, I really appreciate when people have enough self esteem to question themselves, do some research, and then own up to being wrong and try to make it right.

I am now a big fan of Frontier Airlines, because not only have they trained their people to provide genuinely good service, but they seem to foster a culture of learning from mistakes. And while in any customer service training course you can read stories like this one, they don’t happen as often in real life as they should, and they should be rewarded. I look forward to flying Frontier again!

Dear Ms Ballard,

Please accept my deepest sympathies for your loss. I do not normally write condolence letters, but “Doctor Bob” had a major influence on me, and I felt compelled to express that to you.

I regret that I never took the time to write to Dr. Perrin to tell him how profoundly he affected my life. I took several classes from him, including relativistic physics, and a special math seminar in advanced algebra with only one other student. He infected me with his love of both physics and math, and along the way gave me tools that I still use today. I have a very clear memory (from over 20 years ago) of him trying several ways of explaining a complex math concept, until I finally cried “Bingo!” as I got it.

Doctor Bob made a substantial difference in not only my attitude towards these sciences, but also for literally generations of students. The world needs more like him. He will be sorely missed.

Sincerely,

Tom Shields, Andover ‘85

Robert Perrin Obituary

To add to the craziness, this year they decided to put in a new computer system with complete customer tracking. Since nobody had been trained on the system, the end result was complete chaos and crazy lines. They never did find the reservations for ski school that we made, so we got entered into the system twice. The ski school snacks were missing, so our kids got a cup of water for snack. They also had eliminated some of the discounts, like savings for having your own equipment, and a 10-pack deal for ski school.

So, I called Sugar Bowl to register my unhappiness. I talked to a couple of the more experienced folks: Laurie at the ski school, and Kate in special tickets. They both were unfailingly helpful, apologetic, and informative about what was going on. They gave me a discount on my next ski school trip, and gave me a bunch of tips on navigating the system. One was to get my ski school reservation number so they can more easily find it.

We then went one more time to Sugar Bowl, and had a wonderful experience. The lesson here is that the provided great customer service, and a commitment to address the problems and continue to improve. I think Sugar Bowl will end up far better with the new system despite the startup problems. And I will continue to go there. Kudos to them.

The Ultimate Blog Post

Louisa began looking in earnest in late 2005, and quickly figured out that to have the lot size we wanted we’d have to move to Hillsborough. But, most of Hillsborough has narrow, windy roads with no sidewalks or streetlights, so there is no neighborhood feel. Also, we wouldn’t feel comfortable with our kids riding their bikes on the street, nor could we walk down to the coffee shop on a Saturday morning. After a while, though, we discovered that there were a few streets in the flats near downtown San Mateo that were cul-de-sacs and might be similar to our block in Burlingame.

We spent the next 6 months focused on just these few streets, driving them, talking to people we knew on them, and looking them up on Zillow. Close friends of ours on one of these streets were always talking up how great their neighbors were, so when they told us that one of their neighbor’s houses was on the market, we eagerly looked up the address to see which lot it was. Unfortunately, it seemed to be a small lot, and the one we really wanted was the one next door.

Three weeks later, Louisa was browsing listings the day before we were going out of town for a week. She came across a house on “our” street that had just been reduced in price. It didn’t show up on our search, because we had specified 4 bedrooms, and it only had 3. And it turns out to be the one that our friends had mentioned, only they told us the wrong address. It was the one with the big lot!

We had just enough time before we headed to the airport to drive by the house and peek in the backyard. Then we called our agent from the airport and told her we were interested.

Over the weekend we contacted friends who had seen the place and got their feedback. Then we had another friend go and take cellphone pictures, and email them to me. As we got more serious, we set up a time for one of our best friends to walk through the house while on her cellphone with us, describing everything she sees. We also had our contractor walk through. All said the same thing: the house is old but serviceable, and the lot is absolutely magical. So, we wrote an offer, sight unseen.

Spending multi-millions on a house you have never seen is pretty scary. Doing it while on a family reunion vacation with 8 kids under 5 is nuts. We negotiated the final deal while out to dinner, running outside to answer the phone and asking the restaurant if we could use their fax. We finally got the deal at 11:30pm EST, and went to bed too exhausted to be elated.

Tom’s family already knew we were crazy, and that impression was confirmed the next day, as Tom monopolized both house lines for several hours to get the mortgage negotiated. With a 15 day close and no contingencies, we didn’t have much time, so the rest of the week was a whirlwind of insurance, title company nonsense, and other closing minutiae. We also had to get our old house on the market ASAP, because owning two homes in the 94010 area code is pretty scary, not to mention expensive.

We flew home Sunday, and headed right over for our first look at our new house. We were delighted that it was exactly what we expected: a serviceable house with an incredible backyard, on a fabulous street.

We visited the house just once more before the close, and spent the week signing documents, catching up at work, and starting to prepare our old house for sale. Over the weekend we started packing in earnest, while also cleaning and fixing problems. The next week we replaced the microwave (3 times!), repainted everything, re-stuccoed the back, re-sodded the front lawn, and replaced the carpet in the master bedroom. Every night we were up past midnight, packing our stuff for the move on Friday. We closed on Tuesday, but we hardly noticed, except to get the locks replaced, talk to the gardener, and have a fence guy estimate a new fence along the stream.

Friday July 28 was among the most stressful days of our lives. The movers arrived at 8, and the stagers at 8:30. We were running around directing traffic, packing remaining items, and getting stuff out of the way so the stagers could make the house look lived in, but not cluttered. The stagers had decided to use most of our furniture in the staging, so the move was mostly boxes.

Exactly 3 stress-filled weeks from the day we found out about the house, we moved in. In the early afternoon, we arrived with the moving truck, a bunch of boxes, and almost no furniture. We set up air mattresses for ourselves and the kids (we had one bed), and unpacked a selection of clothes onto the floors of the closets. Then we stacked the rest of the boxes in the garage, ate some pizza for dinner, and headed up to Tahoe for the weekend.

The weekend was just what we needed, and we started to relax a little. Sunday night we headed back, and had our first night in the new house. We still had a lot of crazy details to take care of to get our old house on the market by Tuesday, but somehow we made it. Now we are hoping to get a good offer soon.

We moved from a new house with a great layout, but no room for improvement, to a smaller house with a crazy layout, but the opportunity to build our dream house on the perfect lot. Now we need to figure out how best to make use of that awesome potential.

Another major issue is dealing with email. I found the below article useful in thinking about this problem.

Critical Section – The Tyranny of Email

A couple of interesting points:

Having observed winning pairs at play, Dr. Galantucci says that communication is established as soon as one player decides to copy the symbols proposed by his co-player, rather than impose his own. At that point, the pair’s chances of finding each other jump. As soon as there is imitation, he says, there is common currency.

And the best one, in my opinion:

One strength of Dr. Galantucci’s experiment that does not exist in the real world, however, is that he is able to interview his subjects afterwards. What is striking, he says, is that a pair can be successful even if a symbol represents something quite different in the virtual world to each player – as long as they agree on what they should do when confronted by it. In other words, people only need to convey a small amount of information to communicate effectively, and they can do so while holding fundamentally different ideas about how their language describes the world.

Economist article (pay required)