Monthly Archives: November 2006

Politics

Welcome to America – Now Take off your Shoes

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Last night I got back from my flying visit to the United States, and my first experience of the latest level of security measures.

Ever since the US decided to introduce a security system that allowed their staff to search checked baggage meaning that the baggage has to be left unlocked I’ve not been keen on putting any checked baggage through – quite apart from the baggage security issues (see here, here, here, here and here for examples) the checks will sometimes result in the baggage not actually making it onto an onward flight. As a result I did this trip entirely with hand baggage – having said that it did mean that I came under the new liquid rules.

What is interesting is the rules are not consistent, so for example on my trip over my hand baggage was searched twice, once in the UK, and again when I had cleared customs at Washington and was changing over to a domestic flight. Heathrow was relatively straightforward in that aside from having to take out the plastic bag containing any liquids (all in containers under 100ml) security was much the same as usual. At Washington they additionally required the liquids to go through the x-ray totally separately, and that everybody take off their shoes. (It is worth mentioning that a man sat next to me on the plane back said that when he had gone out through Heathrow everybody had been putting through their shoes.) Hand baggage was strictly limited to one item only. Coming back was different, my hand baggage was checked once at Altanta, and not at all at Washington. People were allowed to carry on one piece of hand baggage plus a ‘personal item’ which could be a briefcase. The sharp objects rules were also apparently not as tight going back, as there were a couple of people on our plane knitting for most of the flight.

There are also a selection of other new rules that I hadn’t come across before, for example passengers are not allowed to congregate around the toilets. The other new one is that the TSA in the US has decreed that passengers should remain in their own cabin during the flight – and that includes the toilets. On the 767 I flew on this produces an odd situation where the block of toilets halfway down the plane is allocated to the business cabin, so the economy passengers sat right next to them have to walk all the way to the toilets at the back. Indeed a pensioner on our flight back, who was sat at the front of the economy cabin and a person travelling with him had a quite heated debate with the cabin staff over why he couldn’t go into the toilet. Quite what the purpose of the rule is I don’t know – I can’t think that someone serious about hijacking a plane is seriously going to be stopped by not being allowed to go into another cabin.

Having said that, the impression I get is that the security measures are there as much to try and reassure passengers over security, rather than actually make flying any more secure in reality. This was actually a discussion I had with a US based colleague, who was bemoaning the fact that people of the future will have an airport system very different from the one he grew up with, and than in reality it probably wouldn’t be that much safer anyway. If you have a read of this Register article which I’ve previously mentioned the liquid threat has more to do with Hollywood than reality – something that is largely true for a number of the previous threats – but somebody serious even within the current rules is still able to bring enough on a flight to destroy it if they wanted. However when you look at the description you realise that to ban the items they would need would be too much of a disruption.

By the end of that article I’d pretty well come to the conclusion that the only real way to be safe as a passengers in the air is not to fly on a commercial jet at all. Of course for most people whilst train is a possibility in Europe, or driving, flying is still safer than the car, and nothing beats it for speed. For going to North America there is really no alternative, so I suspect for the foreseeable future we’ll have a regular cycle of security threat, followed by massive tightening of security, and people will put up with it. Of course for those who can afford it, the private jet industry is probably rubbing their hands with glee…

Politics

The Revenge of Ned Flanders?

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222px-c-flanders.png

This morning I listened to A Point of View on Radio 4, which today was Tim Egan talking about this weeks spectacular election results for the Democrats in the US mid-term elections. Part way through the programme he described the election as being ‘The Revenge of Ned Flanders‘, which I thought was an interesting description.

Like a lot of people outside the US, I was quite amazed that Bush was returned two years ago, which I think is a lot to do with how Bush is seen in the rest of the world, compared to how he was seen at that time by Americans. Egan highlights how Bush won re-election two years ago – the Republicans managed to mobilise a large group of mostly conservative Christians, who wouldn’t usually have voted, using the issue of moral values. This time around it was exactly the same issue that caused Bush to loose – indeed the issue came ahead of the war in Iraq as the number one issue. Since 2004 there have been a number of high profile news stories highlighting corrupt politicians. More than that, Reverend Ted Haggard, a well known Christian with a hotline to the White House – head of the National Association of Evangelicals, and widely credited with mobilising the Christian vote – had a rather spectacular fall from grace just days before the election. Essentially by courting the Christian vote as they did, the Republicans had set themselves up as a party of superior morality. Ted Haggard had previous said that if the evangelicals vote, they determine the election, which they did – both times. Having set themselves up as the party of morality, in barely two years the voters had discovered that they weren’t as superior as they were saying, and this was the backlash. Ironically right up until the end Bush was confident of victory, but ‘Ned Flanders’ voted for the other guy, all across the country. Having built a house on a foundation of morality, with that gone, the house, and the majorities just crumbled away.

What is interesting from my point of view is the idea that people will dutifully go an vote for whoever the Church tells them to vote for. Church of England clergy are generally supposed to not get involved in party politics. Indeed, I can think of only one priest who was politically active – telling his congregation that Jesus would vote Labour. However it didn’t seem to make much difference to the local result, people in the Church voted for who they believed they should vote for. It is much the same in our Church. We have the full spectrum of political affiliations, and even some members of the Church sitting on the Parish Council, but in our Church politics doesn’t really figure, indeed the British as a whole really don’t like it when the Church starts dabbling too deeply in politics.

I guess the real question will be whether the Republicans can turn it around in time for 2008 – can they bring the evangelical vote back on side? Maybe, but I am sure it won’t be the last time that the Republicans, or any other party in democracies across the world portrays itself as something to the voters, who then later discover that that’s not what they were at all.

You can read the full text of Tim Egans talk on the BBC News site here.

General

Big Company, Small Company

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It’s interesting some of the things you miss about a big company when you go back for working at a small company. I came across one of those things this last week, the Travel Desk.

In SSE, any corporate travel goes through a team based at head office, who sort out flights, hotels and hire cars for you. You very rarely have to pay for anything on expenses – the hotels bill the company directly, and flights and cars you pretty well just turn up.

It’s a bit different at a small company. Our US office needed a techie to go along on a customer visit, about 100 miles from Atlanta, and on this occasion I was the person selected for the trip. A date was booked for the visit – a Thursday – and since it was their project, the US office started to make arrangements for the trip.

The first issue was when an e-mail came across saying that they were booking my return flight for the Sunday. Now if you’ve looked at airline price structures you’ll realise why – going home on Sunday meant that I was in the US over a Saturday night and it would about halve the cost of the flight, which was being paid by the US office. However it would also rack up a load of hotel expenses for the extra two nights, and I’d also not be working on the Monday, which would also cost the company money. The UK project manager scotched that idea.

The next issue was the planned routing. Our US office is in North Carolina, and the customer was paying expenses for two staff to fly from there. So the US office proposed to fly me to and from North Carolina, and then from there to Altanta, despite the fact that there are two airlines that fly direct from London to Atlanta. That idea was scotched too, and I looked up flights into Atlanta going over on the Wednesday, and back on the Friday, getting back to London by 10pm on the Friday.

Our US office then attempted to book the flights, but apparently had problems, and came back with return flights that were fine, but a seventeen hour epic journey over. At this point my UK manager got somewhat fed up, and got one of the UK staff to phone United reservations to sort out the flight going over – this he did relatively easily.

However then we had one final problem – the credit card. The ticket was booked on the company credit card in the US, and United, in common with most other airlines only allows you to book a ticket online on the condition that you can produce it at check-in. If it is booked elsewhere, the rule doesn’t apply, only direct with United. According to the revised schedule that United e-mailed, the change had resulted in us now having to show the credit card something we couldn’t do. The best suggestion we could come up with at this point was to cancel the whole lot, and rebook on my credit card, and then claim the whole thing back on expenses – however by that point there were no available seats on any flight back at all on the Friday, and the cost of the whole ticket was more than double the price we’d been quoted in the UK before the US office tried to organise it.

What I wanted to do at this point is talk to somebody at United at Heathrow to get a definitive statement as to whether they’d let me check in – not a chance – there appear to be no published numbers for United at Heathrow, or anywhere – everybody refers you to their call centre number, which is based in India, and can’t agree on the policy. We did finally get someone who went away to check the policy and claimed that we should be okay as we originally didn’t book with United. I’ve got the original e-ticket receipt which doesn’t state that I need the credit card, plus a revised booking, that isn’t an e-ticket receipt (I still need the original) which does say I need the card. On top of this I have the name of the person in United Customer Service who was adamant that I wouldn’t need the card. So it remains to see if I’ll actually manage to get to the US at all – have to keep my credit card handy just in case I suspect.

So although it was tedious and bureaucratic at times getting travel sorted at SSE, at least it wasn’t as much of a hassle as all of this!