To Whom It May Concern,

I am writing this letter of complaint today following some truly awful customer service experienced at the hands of what I can only describe as your uncaring Sydney ground staff. While it is widely acknowledged that your fleet and operation is much like a creaking, cumbersome, overweight old man who’s best days are well behind him, my experiences today at the hands of your staff stand out for their incredible level of dishonesty and lack of care, even at the hands of United.

The trouble began when I checked in early (at 12:32pm) – something I rarely do – and was told by 12:46pm Sydney time that my flight to San Francisco (UA-870) had been cancelled, and that we would have to be re-routed.

No details to the reason for cancellation were given.

When it was explained that my new route would be Sydney (SYD) > Auckland (AKL) > Los Angeles (LAX) > San Francisco (SFO), instead of my expected SYD > SFO direct, I asked whether it would be possible to be put onto United’s SYD > LAX direct service (UA 840), as the detour all that way to the south in Auckland, and the associated layover, was going to add quite some time to my journey.

I was then told that BOTH United flights out of Sydney, to both Los Angeles and San Francisco, were now cancelled, again without any explanation of why but with the impression the aircraft had gone unserviceable (US).

My first request: I would like to know what caused these flights to be cancelled in Sydney, as so far no one has been able to tell me why. To have all of the flights by the same carrier cancelled at the same time struck me as very strange indeed, and sounds more like bad management than bad luck.

After being given paperwork for the re-routing via Air New Zealand’s Pacific tour and checking my luggage and getting boarding passes from the Air New Zealand couter, I grabbed a bit of lunch and checked some emails before clearing Customs and making my way to the gate. My suspicions that something strange was going on was that I cleared customs alongside what looked like a full United Airlines crew, fully kitted up in uniform.

If both flights were cancelled, what were they doing here? Surely the crew wouldn’t be going home on another carrier in full uniform without their aircraft?

Then I saw the United Airlines girl from check-in who’d told me the flight had been cancelled – she was pushing a wheelchair for someone and when she saw me, the colour drained out of her face and she avoided eye contact like she had something to hide.

Once I got to the gate, at around 2:30pm, it became very clear I’d been misled. The United SYD>LAX direct service was indeed boarding, with the San Francisco flight passengers being told to come back after 3pm, as the gate lounge was shared and there wasn’t enough space there for 2x 747’s worth of passengers waiting to board.

Of course, my I was thinking why the hell are they boarding the LAX service now that was cancelled, and why are they asking people to come back after 3pm for the SFO service that I should have been on, but which I was told had been cancelled?

The staff at the entry to the gate were contract security, and as I didn’t have a UA boarding pass, they explained they could let me in to talk to someone from United, but they promised to go and get someone for me.

I thought when I got a chance to talk to someone from United, I could just get swapped back onto the original UA870 flight: with my SFO flight still over an hour away (15:45), if it had been reinstated, there would be time to get my bags back from AirNZ (which was boarding in about half an hour at the gate next door), and onto my planned flight, saving me the unnecessary detour around the Pacific with AirNZ?

While waiting to see someone from United – it took about 15 minutes – one of the guys, Alex, who was checking in around the same time to SFO, and who got routed similarly via AKL and LAX, wandered over. He was travelling to a conference with a few work colleagues, and he explained that a mate of his – who checked in about 15 minutes after us – was able to get onto our original flight, UA-870, SYD>SFO direct. Alex said he knew the time period between when the flight was cancelled and then uncancelled was short because he only had time to walk down to the money-change service at the end of the concourse after checking in with AirNZ before his friend walked over to meet him after checking in successfully with United on UA-870.

My second request: I would like to know why your staff couldn’t be bothered – with around 3 hours until our UA-870 departure – to page the handful of customers affected by your temporary flight cancellation, and arrange for us to come back and check in properly on the flights we’d booked? This sort of customer service is truly appalling, but unfortunately, it gets worse.

Now the United manager on the ground in Sydney came over to talk to us. It became quite clear early into the conversation that now the timing to make any changes was tight – the LAX flight was getting ready to board, and while my flight to SFO was still well over an hour away, the AirNZ flight was getting ready to board, and there were concerns that getting bags out from the AirNZ hold would delay that flight, something AirNZ wouldn’t want to do.

With the new knowledge that the flight was un-cancelled within a few minutes of us being redirected to AirNZ, and given short time frames was now our enemy, I also wanted to know why no-one had paged us back around 1pm when there was plenty of time.

Without getting any form of explanation on this, the United staff member promised us that if the AirNZ staff were able to get our bags out, they would transfer them and us across to the UA-870 flight to SFO, but that unfortunately it was in the hands of the AirNZ staff.

She made a call to the AirNZ manager downstairs, who she said had declined our request. “It’s a manpower issue” she explained, and we couldn’t blame AirNZ for not wanting to delay their own flight: it was United’s fault this was all being contemplated at the last minute…

It was now 2:55pm, and the AirNZ flight was boarding at 3pm.

When it came to the question of why they didn’t page us right back at the beginning and get us back onto the right flights – when there was plenty of time to sort out this baggage stuff – she basically admitted that they couldn’t be bothered to try and fix it. I then put it to her that they’d deliberately held back the information from us in the hope we wouldn’t find out that they couldn’t be bothered to deal with it and didn’t care that their unreliability meant a much longer and delayed journey, increasing the trip from 14 hours to over 21 hours (it turned out being around 24 hours in the end, with more United delays in LAX), and with two layovers instead of a direct service.

She then got defensive and told us that this was costing United money, and we should have felt incredibly grateful that we were leaving the country at all given the poor reliability of the United service.

After copping it on the chin for the time being and fuming at the ineptitude of these United clowns over the previous few hours, I joined the queue to board the NZ118 service to Auckland. The friendly staff were at the front doors of the aircraft and welcoming us aboard, asking us the usual “how are you today” questions. Of course, the answer at this point was very very dark and pissed off – I said something to the effect that “this probably isn’t the right time to be asking” with a wry smile.

The AirNZ Flight Service Manager, Anthony Mayer, was excellent, taking note of our situation and actually giving a damn and taking action, rather than making excuses for screwing people over and being too lazy to fix the problem like the United staff had done.

Anthony then pulled some strings with the ground crew, and within 10 minutes, he’d found the bags of myself and a few other passengers all in the same situation. At this point, UA-870 to SFO was still about 45 mins from boarding, and given the gates and aircraft were right next to each other, this should have allowed plenty of time to move our luggage and get onto the UA flight.

Given the promises the United lady had made in the gate some 10 minutes earlier – if AirNZ would/could find our luggage, then United would take it and we could be moved across to our original flight – we then understandably had the expectation that we’d be changing over to the direct flight.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case.

Once again, United customer service let us down, because while our luggage had been found and was ready to be off-loaded from the AirNZ flight, the United staff refused to take the luggage.

Once again, servicing your customers and making up for your mistakes was too hard.

My third request: I want to know why – with the aircraft next to each other, and my SFO flight still over an hour away from departure and no passengers even boarding it yet – my luggage and then I couldn’t be transferred across to my scheduled and much more convenient flight?

Things didn’t get much better in LAX. After lining up at our third check-in/ticket counter (your staff kept directing us to the wrong place), we finally got some boarding passes, and then the flight to SFO was delayed by another hour.

In conclusion, this whole episode has been an incredibly unpleasant experience caused entirely by wilfully poor levels of customer service by your Sydney staff. It is clear that they couldn’t be stuffed trying to help us after we’d been shunted to AirNZ – a simple paging message, like the ones that ring out through airports thousands of times per day, asking us to come back to the check-in counter when the service was uncancelled – would have done the trick, and we could have had it all resolved by 1pm, almost 3 hours before the UA-870 flight’s departure.

It was clear the objective of the United staff was to deceive and keep us, the customer, in the dark, in the hope we wouldn’t realised we’d been screwed over by getting routed all over the Pacific unnecessarily.

Unfortunately for the woeful United staff who thought they could just deceive us so they didn’t have to do the right thing by us, the Departure gates for the UA-870 and NZ-118 flights were next to each other, and I happen to know quite a bit about the industry (many of my good friends and a relative are in the industry as pilots and cabin crew).

My final request: While the airline business is subject to numerous external factors like weather and mechanical issues, I feel in this case the problem was purely wilful and deceptive customer service by your Sydney ground staff. In light of this, expect to be compensated for the lost time and massive inconvenience (I’ve now missed a couple of important meetings in San Francisco which I’d planned to make on the Saturday afternoon). I’ll be flying home to Sydney on Friday the 23^rd of October on UA-863, which would give you an opportunity to start to address this unpleasant experience at the hands of your Sydney staff through an upgrade.

The bright light in this whole experience was Air New Zealand. While the extra time was a bit hassle, AirNZ’s staff, service, aircraft and everything else were absolutely outstanding. I’d always thought of Singapore Airlines as the outfit with the nicest planes, best in-flight entertainment and highest quality service, especially for economy travellers. AirNZ have just trumped them in my mind, big time – well done everyone at Air New Zealand.

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So it was funny to have my girlfriend, who’s feeling a bit under the weather at the moment, ask me how I know I’m happy, and ask me to break down how I spend my week. She was basically saying “you work a lot – don’t you need some time that isn’t working, reading the paper, watching interesting stuff on TV, studying and the like to know you’re happy?”

It got me thinking. Am I lucky because my work is my hobby and the challenges of every day are (mostly) exciting? Or am I just deluded: I’m nothing more than a work-a-holic.

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments…

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I didn’t know the details until I read them on TechCrunch, but I knew something was up when I messaged him to let him know I was going to be in the Valley for a couple of weeks in November. To my surprise, he told me he was going to be out of the state, at his parents place, and this was with months of advance warning. The Mike Arrington I know doesn’t make many plans that far in advance, and he’ll the first to admit that being right in the middle of Silicon Valley has as much to do with Techcrunch’s success as the many other factors. Being out of town – and the state – for months didn’t seem right.

I thought it might have been family stuff – I knew where he told me he was going to be was his parent’s place – and was hoping it wasn’t bad news or health stuff with him or his folks, and instead that he just needed to get out of the Valley to get out of the echo chamber for a while.

Of course, little did I know it was work related, and he was trying to get away from it, but instead of another Vulture piece from ValleyWag or a hatched job from the clearly jealous and much less talented writer, Betsy Schiffman, it turns out someone with a felony, and gun and an axe to grind was stalking Mike and his staff.

I’ve lived as a house-guest of Mike’s on a number of occasions, initially for 3 month stint in early 2006, when TechCrunch was less than 6 months old, and during that time I felt like I got to know the guy really well. We chatted about times before Techcrunch, women and relationships, lessons from previous business ventures and more. Those were personal conversations, and they’re going to stay that way.

My point is, however, that I got to get to know a person, a man I regard as my friend, thankfully for me at a time when he still “assumed most people were essentially good, and assumed that an individual was trustworthy until proven otherwise”. I saw someone who’d always take a contrarian position and get you to justify it. I’d watch – and cop – him taking the piss out of people, but we’d give as good as we got. I reckon he’s got more than a small potential to become an honourary Aussie: he didn’t care for status/authority, is direct, and loved to stick it to the man, which in his industry, is the incumbent media outlets. Pure Aussie in my books.

I also saw up close just some of the untrustworthy people, the types who lie even when the truth will do just as good a job, who’ve tainted his perspective. I’ve been frankly stunned that such an insightful and intelligent guy could be so trusting of people who’ve since screwed him over. And still he didn’t raise a finger in anger or retribution using his extensive online influence.

I’ve watched from afar as one storm or another has erupted online as people struggle to realise that just because its easier to click a mouse button, it doesn’t make it any less of a fight, and reflected that, with the exception of the stouch with DEMO, none of those fights were of his making. Sure, he’s no shrinking violet – he’s an attorney who loves a fight as much as the next lawyer, but more for the challenge than for the desire to stand upon the head of a lifeless opponent – but frankly, the vast, vast majority of the attacks and abuse levelled at Mike over the last couple of years have been way off base.

So, what’s the deal with these attacks? Given we’re talking about real world threats and attacks, its really worth having a look at them, and potentially shining a bit of light on the attackers. I believe they fall into one of three categories:

1. Jelousy and Self-Interest - this one is the de rigueur attack motivation for the journalists out there covering tech. Many of them represent old-media, who see the competitive pressure of TechCrunch to be more than a little intimidating. The story I read on SMH today over lunch almost made me choke: headlined “Tony Soprano of Bloggers Faces Death Threats“, and in a piece that characteristically didn’t link to its sources, feature quotes taking shots at Arrington, including the one used in the headline, from other traditional, dead-tree media, who’ve got a pretty clear self-interest in taking him down. I thought this was a bit rich given most tech stories I’ve seen in SMH Tech News lately have been rehashes of TechCrunch pieces with a 12 hour delay and no links to sources. Moving away from traditional media to the other tech bloggers, a decent amount of the attacks are motivated by jealousy. And in the cases where they’re really legitimate differences of opinion, rather than just hit jobs, things are resolved amicably, and mostly in person. I enjoyed lunch with Mike and Dave Winer not two months after this comment’s little dust up, and there were no hard feelings at all around the table in Palo Alto.
2. Bitterness of Rejection - there’s been a few recent posts about how stupid it is for startups to pin all their hopes on success, interest from VC’s and the implicit legitimacy of a positive review on Techcrunch. I can see how a want-re-preneur might get angry and upset about getting passed over, but if their key to success was a favourable Techcrunch post, I’d argue they don’t really have a business, just a fantasy of rock-star success and a Tesla in every garage. This sort of bitterness is just sour grapes (ok, enough taste metaphors already). The guy who did the spitting might have been responding to the bitterness of rejection, or he could have just be someone acting out the next point…
3. Tall Poppy Syndrome - anyone who’s spent any time with Mike knows he isn’t a geek, programmer or deep technologist. To my knowledge, he’s never pretended to be. He does business analysis of businesses that just happen to be in the tech scene. Most of the flames I see posted in comments are either from people bitter after being rejected, or just pissed off that some guy who doesn’t know Perl from Python commands so much attention in the tech world. If you’re some random hater who’s rejoycing that Arrington is ‘out’ because you don’t think he knows tech enough, my suggestion is to think about what you’re going to do when you get pink-slipped because the business bit that pays for your lifestyle doesn’t work out, and hope that XKCD remains free so you can at least have some humour.

Anyway, the key point I’m trying to make here is that Mike’s a great guy: within 10 mins of meeting me and my business partner in Palo Alto, he offered us his house for as long as we needed it. All this stuff about Tony Soprano is just plain bullshit peddled by people with their own agenda, and if we let the bitter, jealous and tall poppy types continue with their baseless tirades without any accountability, we’re going to loose more and more good people.

Lets hope the serious stuff of the stalking ends, and for personally, I hope those enjoying the specatle of watching one of their biggest competitive threats bow out (hopefully temporarily) wake up with a nasty hangover tomorrow when they realise their rehashed and late stories, with little analysis, depth, opinion and conviction, supported by a business model more conflicted that Arrington’s ever was, is crumbling around them.

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Telstra, the largest telco in the country, apparently didn’t like the concept that some Govt money in the process might mean the new network actually involves competition between the network, wholesale and retail divisions of the value chain: one network with cost recovery, then a number of wholesalers, and then lots of retailers. You know, competition on a utility.

Anyway, they submitted an incomplete report, and the Govt kicked them out of the process for non-compliance. Their share price then copped a hiding, double digit losses even in a rising market, since it is pretty clear this new network is going to be “where its at” for the next generation of Australian fixed-line internet access. The government will need to legislate to ensure the successful builder gets access to the copper and other Telstra infrastructure, and it would have been much better for them to have been in the game. But they had a dummy spit, and now the pressure has been on for them to explain their incompetence to their shareholders, including yours truly.

Here’s the letter. A lot of talk, but no explaination. What a disappointment.

Dear Shareholder

As you would be aware, on December 14, the Federal Government’s Expert Panel overseeing the National Broadband Network Request for Proposals (RFP), made a decision to exclude Telstra from participating in the process, even though we believe we are the only ones to have made a material financial commitment.

While Telstra disagrees with the decision and reserves its rights in respect of the matter, the Company will move on.

For months, Telstra has been saying that the NBN carries very significant risks and the costs of the NBN have increased with the global financial crisis. From day one, we have held firm to our principle of not taking on these risks on behalf of our shareholders without the necessary certainty around outcomes.

This week’s decision by the Expert Panel has no impact on our overall business strategy and the execution of our transformation plan. Telstra’s enviable financial position and strong fundamentals are no different today than they were last week before the Expert Panel made its decision.

Importantly, there is no change to our financial guidance as a result of the Expert Panel’s decision. We continue to execute on our transformation strategy according to plan. With the platforms we already have in place, we will continue to compete and innovate very effectively.

Next G™, with over 4 million customers, is the world’s largest and fastest wireless national broadband network, which we will continue to upgrade. Early in 2009, Next G™ will offer peak network speeds of 21Mbps with a clear roadmap to 42Mbps and beyond.

Our fixed line broadband network delivers ADSL from exchanges serving 92% of the population, with ADSL2+ providing speeds up to 20Mbps from exchanges that serve 81% of the population.

Our Hybrid Fibre Co-axial (HFC) cable broadband network passes over 2.5 million capital city premises. Big Pond Cable Extreme is available to more than 1.8 million Sydney and Melbourne homes and businesses in the HFC footprint at speeds up to 30Mbps, with speeds up to 17Mbps in all other parts of the HFC network. We are in a position to roll-out technology that is being deployed in Europe and the US, which will enable the HFC to deliver speeds of up to 100Mbps.

Next IPâ„¢, together with Next Gâ„¢, is the largest, fully integrated, national IP broadband network in the world, enabling delivery of reliable, secure and high performance IP-based services to businesses.

Regardless of what happens with the NBN, Telstra’s transformation and strong financial position mean we will continue to deliver world-leading services to our customers and strong returns to our 1.4 million shareholders.

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So, if you’re reading my blog for the first time, and wonder what the hell happened between early 2006 and now, a couple of weeks from the end of 2008, that’s it: no coma, no abduction by North Korea – just busy and priorities.

Hopefully you enjoy browsing, and feel free to contribute to the discussion: my twitter handle is @geoffmcqueen or you can catch me on Skype (chat preferred to phone calls) at geoffmcqueen.

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i had lunch with mike yesterday, so I’m going to claim 1 degree of separation from the richest man in the world.

as for mike, i’ve got now idea how he pulled this off. i’ll be sure to ask him about it when he gets back to the crunchhouse.

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so, at the end of this first post, with nothing more than an introduction to claim, i’d like to finish with a welcome, and the hope that you enjoy the show. of course, comments are welcome at all times, and you can catch me via email at info@geoffmcqueen.com – just remember to confirm your message by replying to the challenge if it is the first time you’ve got in touch.

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