Category Archives: Entertaining

Questions that need answering: When stranded overnight without your bags, what do you use for hair gel?

Posted on by

Jen did some swat web research on this and it turns out that lotion and shaving gel are both good substitutes that will get the job done if all you have to work with is hotel amenities.

So far, the lotion in my hair is working quite well, maybe I’ll switch…

Dear friendly United Airlines rep from Seattle… (we just sent this, will see what happens)

Posted on by

Hi xxx,

I’m hoping you remember me and my wife from this morning when we checked in for our flight to Buenos Aires from Seattle at ~5:30am–we are the newlyweds (Jen and Ryan) that quit our consulting jobs recently, got married and are/were headed to Buenos Aires for the next 6 months.  You were very friendly to us and also left us your contact information, so I was hoping that maybe you could help us or at least advise us on what we should do given how poorly United handled our LAX-IAD-EZE flight.  Here is what happened:

We arrived in LAX on time at ~9am and saw on the connection board that our flight to Buenos Aires (flight 847 with one stop in Washington DC) was delayed and they were expecting it to leave at 1pm instead of 12:48pm.  Obviously a 12 minute delay is no big deal, but as we got closer to 1pm, they moved it back to 1:40, and then 2:40 and then 3:40pm.  All they told us was that an aircraft was coming in from SFO and was delayed, no other info was given despite repeated questioning by us and other passengers.  The flight from SFO finally arrived at ~3:15pm and only had a handful of united crew members and no other passengers, so this was clearly not a normal flight.

As they continued to move back the departure time, they came on the intercom once and said that they were working on connecting flights.  We were initially told that we would have no problem because we were continuing on the same flight (#847) to Buenos Aires, so we should be fine regardless of how delayed we were.  Later we were told that there was actually a plane change for the Buenos Aires portion of the flight, so they weren’t sure whether or not we’d make it and were unwilling/unable to tell us more until we arrived in Dulles.  Throughout this process, the gate agents made it fairly clear that they really didn’t care at all how things went.

When we finally landed in Dulles at ~10:25pm, they came on the intercom and said that all connections had been missed and that anyone connecting should check with customer service for overnight accommodations and rebooking.  Our flight from Dulles to Buenos Aires was scheduled to depart IAD at 10:07 under the same flight number, but apparently it left before our leg of flight 847 landed by ~15 minutes.

The customer service reps rebooked us on the only available next flight which is not until 10:07pm tomorrow night (24 hours later), gave us a hotel voucher and a $15/person meal voucher and told us that we could not get our bags back.  On top of that, they apparently didn’t call the hotel that they had booked us and all of the many other travelers who got stuck here, so after waiting outside for the shuttle, when it finally arrived we were told that there was no room and that it was the last shuttle (and the hotel is 20-30 minutes away from the airport).  So, we had to go back into the airport, wait in line again to get taxi vouchers and barely made it the hotel by midnight (which is when they stopped serving food).

So, we are now sitting in a hotel somewhere in Virginia with none of our baggage (e.g., no clean clothes) and are stuck for 24 hours with only $15 in compensation from united for a 24 hour plus delay on two ~$1250 flights.  The united reps in LAX and IAD all were completely apathetic and did not seem to care one way or another that this had happened (let alone on our honeymoon, let alone that I am a premier exec and Jen is a premier).

Suffice to say, I’m quite shocked that it has been handled this poorly.

I absolutely understand that this is not your problem at all, but am wondering if you have any advice on how we should proceed?  At this point I’m not even sure who to complain to, but it doesn’t seem appropriate that we should be stuck for this long without our baggage and forced to spend quite a bit of money on clothes/laundry and food to get us through tomorrow, does it?  Please let us know what you think and if there is anything you can do to help us, or even just advise us on who we should call or write to.  We have both been quite loyal united business travelers for a long time and this day has been absolutely horrible 🙁

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide,

Ryan and Jen

Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn (say what?!)

Posted on by

Sadly, we’re not staying in a Holiday Inn, but we’ve got the hotel (last night – Red Lion) and motel (Travelodge) covered so far.  Nothing but the best for our honeymoon!

We’re gaining an understanding of just how different San Francisco (and Chicago, and Boston, and Tokyo . . .) is from just about everywhere else in the country, even elsewhere in Northern California.  For example, we got into Redding last night and thought we’d go for pizza – sounds simple enough, right?

The first place we visited had strong ratings on Yelp . . . and a pizza buffet that looked like it had been sitting out since our last day of work (which was now over a week ago).  After some additional Yelp research, we decided to go big by visiting the Upper Crust – reviews that said its prices were too high but we were willing to pay up if that meant good food and a decent atmosphere.  Turns out half of that was right – food was good, as long as we weren’t run over by screaming toddlers (at least a dozen of them) running back and forth to the video game room on our way to our table.  Breakfast at IHOP wasn’t much different.  But one thing Redding has going for it – everybody was extremely friendly, even if they drive ridiculous trucks (see below; more to come in an upcoming post) and eat 2000+ calories at every meal.

Homeless, unemployed and MARRIED (a trifecta of sorts)

Posted on by

Well…

Yesterday was a big day.  The Sonoma county clerk’s office is actually pretty busy at 9:30am–who knew?

Sonoma wedding image

Just after the ceremony

We are pretty psyched about being newly married AND newly unemployed AND newly homeless–we highly recommend it.

After a day of celebrating in Healdsburg we are now headed up the coast on our eventual way to Seattle prior to flying out to Buenos Aires on Wednesday.  We’ll see if United upgrades honeymooners–Hotel Healdsburg does NOT it turns out.

Stay tuned…

Our consulting problem

Posted on by

We are Ryan and Jen.  We finally admitted that we had a problem; now we are in rehab.  This is our story…

We both went to top MBA programs (Kellogg and Harvard to be exact) and excitedly took  jobs at one the most elite consulting firms in the world.  The job was incredibly difficult to get, so that means it must be good.

All of our business school friends went on to similarly intense and high profile jobs, but we shared a common bond with the other consultants–with few exceptions, we knew we worked longer hours and faced tougher problems than anyone else.  Somehow we had decided that this was a good thing.

There is no doubt that we learned a lot over the years.  The constant learning and the perception of rapid career advancement was the justification used to keep going–just one more year… one more year…  Jen did ~2.5 years, Ryan did ~4.

Over time we started to notice that our non-consulting friends seemed to be quite happy people despite their lack of premier airline status.  This seemed strange.

The “good” news was that each year we had fewer and fewer non-consulting friends, so we didn’t have to worry too much about it.  Occasionally, we would run into an old friend and they would talk about going home at 6pm and doing weird things like “going to the gym” or “relaxing,” but we would smile and nod and then later laugh about how strange their priorities were–clearly they didn’t realize that their jobs were boring, didn’t pay that well, required them to deal with endless corporate bureaucracy, had limited advancement opportunities and were the same thing day after day.  We figured that they would probably enjoy their jobs way less if they knew what we knew–the partners at our firm assured us that this was true.

There were times when we were sitting in the office at 3am for the 3rd night in a row when we would occasionally wonder if things really were as great as they seemed, but then we’d move onto a new project and do something completely different and exciting (e.g., make slides using different colors), so we were happy–we knew our non-consulting friends simply didn’t get this kind of awesome variation in their work lives.

…(more stories to come)…

Eventually, we began to question our situation more and more.  Finally, we admitted that we had a problem. It wasn’t the job that was the problem, it was us.  We are now going into an intensive form of rehab:  Moving to South America for 6+ months with literally nothing planned, no meeting objectives, no bullet points, no business cards and not even a copy of Powerpoint.  I’m sure that we’ll have relapses… we’ll probably wake up at 6am and grope around for our Blackberries for a few months and sometimes wake up on Sundays with an impending sense of doom.

We will approach our rehabilitation with the same intensity that we approached our consulting careers.  We can only guess what impact this rehabilitation will have on our lives and our careers.  There are many possibilities for when we are ready to re-enter society…  We could end up deciding to travel forever.  We could end up settling down somewhere and finding less intense jobs.  We could even end up deciding that we miss consulting (as there is plenty of good to counter-balance the bad).  Only time will tell.

Join us as we chronicle the adventure and work through our “issues.”

For more information about us, check out our Frequently Asked Questions