I’ve received several emails over the past months wondering if I was done blogging. Essentially, no. I haven’t stopped blogging. But I am looking to make a move.

1. I’m moving away from WordPress to a new platform.
2. I’m moving away from the standard blogging/marketing approach that has, in my opinion, ruined a blogosphere I used to love.
3. I’m moving away from how I created blog posts in lieu of more tangible content (books, ebooks, comics, etc) and towards a different attack.

I am still going to blog, but in a different place and a different method.

It’s a work in progress. Stay tuned.

Some of us started to cry. Not because the journey was never ending, but because you can be told that you are not a human being only so many times.
— Gary Shtenyngart, writing about American Airlines: “A Trans-Atlantic Trip Turns Kafkaesque“

When you are traveling, the last thing you want is for your flight to be cancelled.

Do you remember the scene from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” where he and his father think they have made their escape on a blimp only to have it turn around and head back towards the Nazis?

Yes, I dropped the Nazi reference that early in this blog post.

On February 14, 2015, American Airlines celebrated Valentines Day by flying flight 3208 from Dallas enroute to Bismarck halfway, only to turn around an hour into the flight, over Wichita, Kansas. Yes, the airline made it halfway. At 35,000 feet, however, halfway is a useless place to be for passengers.

The pilot initially announced that there was a mechanical issue with the de-icing equipment. This is important. Bismarck, at the time, was getting a few inches of snow. Nothing major, mind you. Other airlines continued to fly in.

@AmericanAir pic.twitter.com/w5wBp035cY

— AjaNyquist (@ajanyquist) February 15, 2015

Heck, even a Piper from UND was giving it a go. My friend, a corporate pilot, checked the TAFS and METARS to see what the weather around Bismarck truly was. It was nothing you would cancel a flight for. One gal on the plane had called her boyfriend in Bismarck when we landed, and he was incredulous because he said, while talking to her, other airlines had landed.

Look here @AmericanAir, Allegiant is landing just fine. What was that about weather? pic.twitter.com/AW7vwqsTH9

— Julie (@julesvern97) February 15, 2015

But American decided to turn around and go back and get their airplane back to their hub for their convenience. Even without de-icing equipment, they could have landed and delivered the plane full of people safely home. They simply could not have taken off again, unless they got their own equipment working, or found a replacement. There is more than one de-icing truck at the Bismarck airport. Arrangements could have been made if American Airlines had had the will to do it.

De-icing equipment is used because of weather, but it is not the weather. Being unable to land because of weather means low visibility, high winds, clouds below minimums, or ice on the runway which prevented braking action. Other airplanes were getting in, so weather was not the problem.

This is important. The weather did not prevent the plane from landing, meaning that normally, American would have to foot the bill for the passengers they chose to strand back in Texas.

We then proceeded to head far west and zigzag back and forth, making the return to Dallas even longer than the flight out. My guess was to burn fuel.

Why turn back a plane full of people?

1. Because you are a sadist.

2. Because you are a sadist fresh out of bankruptcy with an eye on the bottom line.

It was during that return flight when I recalled the marketing email I received from American Airline’s president, detailing all of the wonderful new changes they were going to make…to business and first class. Instead of pouring more perks to the overly perked, why not treat all passengers like humans and actually focus on getting people from point A to point B?

The flight attendant walked down the aisle giving us the 1-800 re-booking number, and tried to alleviate our stress by saying that maybe we could get a flight in to Fargo or Rapid City.

Not exactly an easy drive to Bismarck. She would have been better off not saying anything. At one point she talked about the need to “de-ice the runway” which is a serious lack of understanding of how things work. The folks at the back of the airplane were somewhere between a guffaw and a popped forehead vein.

By the time we landed, the flight attendant informed us via an announcement that she’d been trying to rebook our flights in the air and there was nothing available and that a few would have been automatically rebooked but that some of us might not make it out of Dallas until Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday if at all. And also, because it was a “weather” issue — by the time we landed, American had changed the official story to weather — American would not be providing any assistance. We were on our own. They were not going to give any of the passengers any help beyond “discount partners.”

There were some unhappy people. They asked why American couldn’t send the flight out tomorrow. (Delta had done this for my friend an I last year in a similar situation). Her answer?

American couldn’t disrupt the travel plans of those who had tickets for the flight tomorrow. “We promised them to fly tomorrow, and we can’t go against that.” But never mind the promise to this plane.

Broke their promise to deliver us to Bismarck? Check.

Lied so they didn’t have to provide vouchers or assistance? Check.

[If you were on this flight, you need to go to this Department of Transportation page to file a complaint against American for the specific reason that they lied about the weather issue to avoid helping passengers financially.]

When we landed and were able to get on our phones, my friend had received an email that said “sorry, we can’t re-accomodate you.” That’s it. There were also no agents at the gate where we arrived. You would think in such a situation there would be employees there ready to help a plane load of passengers. Nope.

No one.

We were all left to run around the airport to find an American employee to help them.

My friend had called the toll free rebooking number when we landed, and he had to press the woman on the end of the line. Her first response?

Can’t do it. Nothing available. Sorry.

He asked again. And again. Find a different airline. Get us back. Try through Minneapolis. He led her, quite forcefully, to possible options.

Finally, she found us a flight on American to Minneapolis the next morning, and then from Minneapolis to Bismarck on Delta. But her initial reaction was “sorry, can’t help, so sorry.” We had to be rude to get anywhere. Being nice and calm did nothing.

My friend then called to see if they wouldn’t provide a voucher for a hotel. He pressed the American employee but because it was attributed to weather, she wouldn’t budge. On Twitter, the most they would say is they cared about our safety, and “anything else” they could help with.

@ajanyquist Your safety is our top priority. Please let us know if there's anything else we can assist you with.

— American Airlines (@AmericanAir) February 15, 2015

The woman on the phone finally told my friend that she would connect us with their discount partners, and promptly forwarded his call to a credit card application department. I guess she had her bit of “screw you customer” fun. He hung up and we ended up getting hotel rooms on Hotels.com.

We had rebooked our flight. We found our own hotel. What about our checked bags?

On the flight, the flight attendant had told us not to get our checked bags, but since we were changing airlines, we were told upon receiving our new printed tickets to get them. By this point, it was quite late, more than an hour after the plane landed. We wandered down to the baggage department office, and the woman there told us that they were dumping the baggage from the plane on carousel B30 (or 39) and we should go get it.

I can tell you that only a handful of the flight were down their claiming the baggage. The rest had been told not to get it, and had been encouraged to not get their bags.

@julesvern97 @AmericanAir No we talked to numerous AA reps who told us not too, wish we would have. Still no idea where our bags are.

— AjaNyquist (@ajanyquist) February 16, 2015

The result?

Those who didn’t get their checked bags that night…lost them.

There sits American Airlines’ Twitter account, silent, not helping on social media (go read the full exchange), no doubt overwhelmed with trying to extract thousands of other customers from the purgatory they have sent them to. Which ring did you send them to, American? Perhaps somewhere in the Eighth Circle, near the schismatics and nowhere near their bags, where otherwise pleasant people are turned into raging beasts as they realize they are getting robbed and have no advocate to truly care and help?

We ran into others down at the baggage claim who had managed to get a flight to Fargo or Jamestown and would have to find a ride to Bismarck. I guess with American, getting you inside the state boundary ought to be good enough. One fellow said he found a flight the next day to Bismarck online on his own using Expedia, but the American Airlines employee couldn’t “see” that flight and so, unless he wanted to pay out of pocket for an expensive one-way ticket, had to take the flight to Fargo that American offered and rent a car on his own dime to drive several hours back to Bismarck.

All American Airlines was thinking about, as they turned that 737 around over Kansas, was probably that keeping the plane in rotation at their hub was the best thing for their airline, rather than risk having it stuck in Bismarck until their de-icing equipment could be repaired. Never mind the lost bags, angry customers, poor social media employees dealing with frustration, and the money spent on hotels and cabs and food. Never mind the people at the other end in Bismarck waiting to take that plane back out to Dallas whose vacation never got started.

That was the kind of decision some ill-equipped manager makes who has an accountant’s view of the world, caring very little for the human beings who in good faith purchased a ticket (on an over-booked flight, even) and were abandoned into the care of rude employees who spread disinformation.

It wouldn’t be a trip without Delta screwing up, too.

Back in Bismarck, my bag wasn’t on the carousel. I wanted to just bawl. How much hatred can one industry have for its customers?

My friend and I stood 40 minutes at the Delta counter, no employee in sight. One guy walked by and we told him we had a lost bag and had been waiting and he informed us, with that slight bit of glee born out of a loathing for customers, that he had to first close a United flight and the other Delta employees were busy and then he walked away.

My friend started tweeting to Delta help. Eventually Delta Assist called the office behind the counter and we watched through the closed door as an employee answered the phone, hung up, opened the door, and warily walked to the counter.

@DeltaAssist this is unbelievable. How can you have no one here to assist an incoming flight!?!?!?!

— Markus (@MarkTweetless) February 15, 2015

She tried tracking my bag. But it had an American Airlines tracking number. “All we can see is that you checked it,” she said, trying to be helpful.

By this point the first fellow, who was so busy with United, started to walk over, perhaps deeming it safe now that there were a greater number of airport employees that irate customers. Then the manager appeared. He asked how long we’d been waiting, no doubt having been in on the phone call from Delta.

“40 minutes,” my friend said.

“We’ll review the security tapes and see if you really were here that long. If you were, we’ll have to consider some changes,” he said with a smirk, suggesting he didn’t believe us and that he really didn’t care.

That was his reaction: we’ll see if you’re lying. It should have been: we’re sorry and we’ll help.

[Sidebar: This manager’s name is Logan, and he was a snarky ass to me the last time Delta lost my bag. He should be given training on customer service. He is too combative and defensive and makes the situation worse.]

You need someone at the counter when a flight arrives. If you don’t have enough staff to cover an outgoing and incoming flight, you have a problem.

By this point the first fellow was at the counter, and looked at my baggage claim ticket that had been sitting there on the counter all this time. “Oh, your name is Neidlinger?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Just a sec,” he said, and walked through the door into the room behind the counter. He came back with my bag. It had arrived on an earlier flight, he knew it had been there, and yet at no point did anyone bother to do anything until they were good and ready. Nor did they say anything that might reassure me they actually cared. Instead, it was always a flippant “we’ll get to you when we get to you.”

What other supposedly regulated industry can run this way, selling more tickets than available seats, returning a service that isn’t what was paid for, doling out endless fees for merely existing, and allowing employees to be so flippant towards stressed and tired travelers who are concerned about money and plans?

If you are from Bismarck, don’t even consider American Airlines. Just yesterday they cancelled their one flight out of Bismarck, stranding passengers as the airplane sat on the ramp. American is a terrible airline that has no respect for its customers, is known for losing luggage, and is completely unreliable. At least with Delta, you might be able to drive to and from Minneapolis. You can’t do that to Dallas.

I’d have better luck taking a long-haul trip in my dad’s 172 than with American Airlines.

The pen is mightier than the sword, particularly when activated during a small-town city council meeting.

It was several years ago when some friends had asked me to come and take notes at a public meeting. This might seem an odd request, since I lived nowhere near this town, but I had been a newspaper reporter, was familiar with taking notes at city meetings, and they had been in conflict with the city representatives for quite some time.

“Sure,” I said.

This, mind you, happened back in November, 2005, but I recently found my completed nine-page summary of notes and research in some old writing files. I headed over to my old Blogger account, which I now use as a historical database for my older posts that aren’t on this blog, and located the post I wanted. I knew I had blogged about this rather surreal experience.

I suppose you’d like to see that letter I wrote.

I would rather not share it.

This was in my supremely wordy days, you understand, where I saw no good reason to write 10 words when I could squeeze them into 100. Suffice it to say that I was sharp-tongued and lashed the county auditor and newspaper good because of the truly bad meeting minutes that were published. Those minutes read less as a public record and more as a gossip column.

I don’t know if you are familiar with the local newspapers that used to (some probably still do) run the social news in which citizens would write a regular summation of the social activities of the week. They would relay the card parties, the dessert get-togethers, the children who had come home to visit, and which neighbor stopped by to say hello to whom.

This town’s meeting minutes read something like that, but with acidic edges and not even a scant nod towards either ascending or descending order of discussion as it happened in the meeting. It disgusted me as a newspaper reporter and a citizen, because this was the documentation that the community was relying on to understand what the city was doing.

Not only did I attend the public meetings with a few folks displeased I was there, but I also reviewed many hours of taped public meetings, compared them to the minutes published in the newspaper, and interviewed the family who had asked me to get involved. They told a story that was, at first, convoluted and confusing. The more I listened, however, the more pieces I had started to fit into place. There were connections to murder, drugs, sexual assault, neglect, and the famous Eddie Peltier/Richard Lafuente case, all wrapped up into the seemingly innocuous events of this small town.

With a school notebook full of notes, clippings, photocopied documents and other evidence, I compiled all of these notes into a nine-page report and gave it to the family. In a sense, I documented their situation into one logically organized voice so that they were better able to share it with others.

All of this to say, note-taking is a viable and valuable skill for a writer, and not just for reporters. (See what I mean by squeezing 10 words into 100?) Find someone to interview, or eavesdrop on a nearby conversation. You will learn surprising things about human nature. You will find dialogue, you will find motivation, you will find a plot and villain and a story.

Sitting in on a public meeting in a small town, especially, is somewhere between the mundane and the sacred, that place where the small deals with the devil sometimes lead to the big news story or the understanding of how human souls get sold in a piecemeal fashion. This is where you find those intricate plots that lurk beneath the daily chores of getting up and going to work and shopping and murder. It’s how you get a real look at that infamous slippery slope, and how you understand the “banality of evil” in the everyday human.

If you are able to observe what is happening all around you, you can learn to take notes. And with those notes you can piece together connections and find the story. And if you get the chance to dive in head first with pen and paper as someone’s hired gun, as their scribe, do it.

Historian, investigator, psychiatrist, reporter — just let others talk, and take notes.

It is unlikely I will ever understand or get over the security badge procedure at the Bismarck Airport by which employees, pilots, and anyone who needs to have access to the general aviation and public airport, a.k.a. Airport Operations Area (AOA), are given permission to do so.

First, let me give you my naive assumptions on security:

• You want to know who is on your property.
• You want to keep records that are accurate and easily accessible.
• You want to encourage the “boots on the ground” public to participate.
• Your ultimate goal is to make sure people don’t harm people and property in your geographical area.

Something like that.

As a private pilot and because of an aviation organization I am in, as well as the fact that I have an airplane out on the ramp, I need an access badge. Each December, everyone has to renew their badge. It doesn’t matter if you got your badge fresh and new in July. When December comes, it’s time to renew.

You get an ID with your photo, name, a colored background to indicate if you can go in the Super Secure areas, and an additional access badge to open the gates to enter the AOA. The security badges provided by the U.S. Government for the TSA employees are not acceptable here and cannot be displayed. Everyone on the AOA must display the Bismarck badges.

The procedure involves going to the airport fire department, whose time, I can only imagine, might better be served by being on alert for possible fires and related activities instead of monitoring a roomful of people watching a rather poor “safety” video.

#1. Fire department, responsible for safety, spends time watching people watch a safety video.

You sit down at a table and watch a DVD which shows evidence of it possibly being copied from a worn VHS tape. An airport employee appears first, reading the complex rules of the security program to you. You are responsible to adhere to these rules, but you are not allowed a printed copy nor are you permitted to, in any form, take a copy of these rules off of the premises. (I know this, because my friend inquired a few years back and was artlessly rebuffed).

#2. You are required to follow the rules, and are punished accordingly, but cannot have a reference copy of the rules.

Then a spliced video appears on the TV screen in which Harrison Ford, a private pilot, greets you. The remainder of the video focuses on how to drive a vehicle safely on the airport, including talking to tower and what the signs and markings mean.

#3. The safety and security program for pilots is based around a video for people driving vehicles.

I wonder why, for a security program, this is the video we are shown.

For a while, I worked at a coffee shop in the airport and needed Super Security because I had to go through the baggage area to take the garbage to the dumpster. Wouldn’t a video on how to recognize suspicious behavior have been more helpful rather than how to alert ATC if my truck’s radio died out on taxiway Charlie? And why would you show a video about taxiway/runway markings and radio usage to pilots, who are obviously tested by the FAA on such things?

#4. The FAA instruction and testing on proper airport usage and behavior is not good enough here.

After the video, you take a test. It’s the same test every year. It’s an open book test, so you can flip through the FAA pamphlet and identify signage and airport markings, and the aviation alphabet. If you’d like to contest the taking of the test, you have to…take the test without access to the pamphlet.

Remember, this is all part of a security program.

#5. You will take the test, dammit. Just memorize the answers from year to year.

The test is graded, hopefully you pass, and you get an identical reprint of the previous badge and photo with a new date on it. And hopefully, you paid five dollars up at the airport administration office ahead of time, which is not within walking distance of the fire department.

As is procedure, they have made color photo copies of your two ID’s (passport, driver’s license, or social security card) and tucked that in your file each year.

I don’t know about you, but the more copies of my IDs that I can get out in the world and the more eyes that can see these important numbers, the happier I am.

Remember, this is a security program.

#6. You will pay $5 for your badge.

Let’s talk about those badges.

You must have a badge for every reason you need to be on the ramp, and I do mean every reason. My friend probably has the most badges. One for being a private pilot, one for the aviation organization, one for work — there was a time when he had four.

Each badge costs $5. If you lose it, it costs $40. There are some more Byzantine penalties if you keep losing them, but I can’t recall them exactly since we don’t get a copy of the rules that we are supposed to adhere to.

#7. If you lose your badge, the most important thing is that you’ll pay for a new one.

I can see where this is going.

The more badges you have out there, the more chance for opportunities to make money. This is practically a fundraiser. It certainly can’t be about security, because having multiple badges per person only increases the chances that one will get lost, floating around being used for access by who knows, and that won’t be discovered until the following December because if you have four badges you’re probably just going to use one and forget about the other three until December arrives.

#8. Mo badges, mo badges, mo badges.

Now, you might think that the individual badges is ridiculous. I sure do. It makes the entire program less secure. Because the current system is, frankly, like having a different driver’s license for every reason you might use the public highway, or for every vehicle you drive.

But even worse is that each individual badge has its own database entry.

John Doe doesn’t have one entry for himself, and a listing of badge reasons under it. Nope. He is in the database as many times as he needs a badge. I know this because my friend had one of his four badges come back one year with the wrong name while the other three had the correct name. Same photo. Wrong name. Different database entries.

Imagine the database bloat and potential for errors you will have when you can’t just search for John Doe to see if he is breaking a rule, but you have to search for every version of John Doe.

I wonder if they aren’t aware that you can have additional fields in the database to indicate all the reasons a person should have a badge? And, if the reasoning is that there are different levels of security for each of those badges, I suggest that if they are cleared for Super Security for one badge but not another, the point is that the person has been cleared. Are we defending the AOA from bad people or from improperly used badges?

A cleared person is a cleared person. One badge. Security could look up, in the database, why they are on the AOA.

#9. As big, bloated, and error-ridden a database as you can go.

Remember, this is about security. Nothing is as secure as database bloat and errors when it comes time to quickly access information and verify something in an emergency.

But it gets better.

If you are an itinerant pilot, i.e. not “based” in Bismarck, you don’t need any of this security nonsense. You’re free to come and go as you please.

Yes, you heard me right. If you are a stranger, you’re free to fly in and out and access the ramp without a badge.

#10. Let strangers roam about, but get medieval on the pilots you know pretty well.

It is only the pilots who are from Bismarck–i.e. known locally and by the local FBO with whom they do business–that are required to adhere to the program. Consider that for a moment.

The pilots you know the least about are able to avoid the “security” program, while the known pilots who have an airplane out on the ramp and are spending money on fuel and maintenance and have a vested interest in not being a terrorist or jackass are the ones jumping through hoops proving that they could someday drive a Mack truck around on the taxiway or something.

But this is all about security.

If this program is defining “security” as “everyone on the airport is safe” I could possibly see what they are trying to do: create a safety program (though one video on how to drive a vehicle on the AOA is stupidly lacking for a comprehensive safety program). I might question their dedication to aviation safety by the requirement of having the badge clearly visible on outside clothing, since there’s nothing I’d rather not do than have a lanyard and badge around my neck while preflighting and prepping an airplane. At the very least, it could fall off and create a tidy bit of FOD for the next airplane to chew up.

However, by requiring their badges to supersede the federally issued TSA badges (who are there for security, not safety), it suggests that they are considering it to be about security (not safety) in the traditional sense: no terrorists, criminals, or ne’er-do-wells are running amuck on the AOA. In that case, this whole program is a joke.

Have they run security clearances on each person getting a badge? Have they made sure there are no felons? Are they checking no-fly lists and other similar background checks? I’m not aware of it. I had more security clearance and background checks working for the postal service and teaching in a public school.

It’s fair to require airport employers–such as the FBOs or the airport terminal–to verify their employees, but all this “security” program does is extract $5 from every private pilot or citizen who has a reason to be on the airport. Anyone who passes the test is good to go…as long as they have five bucks on them.

Not secure. Barely safe.

Several years ago, I made a video of my frustration with this security program that went “viral” among the local pilot population.

To this day, when an email is sent out to the aviation group I’m a part of, alerting them to the need to renew their airport access badges, the overwhelming response is “we have staff for that!” In fact, “we have staff for that” and cracks about “$5″ have become a euphemism for ridiculous red tape and inefficiency for those of us who have had to go through this security program.

I don’t know the circumstances under which the current program was put into place. I’m assuming there was a grant, and that someone higher up had to develop a security program to secure the money. I can’t imagine there was much thought put into it. Everyone I’ve talked to has rolled their eyes and called it a joke.

I can’t blame them for thinking that way.

Half the time I’ve been given the test while the video is running so we can just take it and be out of there as quickly as possible. This year, the three airport employee yahoos sitting next to me during the video/test arrived late, were obnoxiously joking about drinking and getting wasted and having a hangover at work, wanted to pause the video so the one could get something from his car, and talked about how one was wearing Guardians Of The Galaxy underwear. And yet they have their brand new badges.

So you can see it’s really a serious thing, this security program.

I’ve often heard of the TSA screenings referred to as “security theater”, offering little in terms of actual security (and sometimes hampering it), but reassuring the public because we like to seem uniformed people digging through the underwear in our carry-on baggage.

The annual badge renewal at the Bismarck airport isn’t security theater. It’s security farce.

From The Black Stallion series I learned, as a child, about furlongs and weighted saddles and Alec Ramsey. And I learned about the different kinds of horses.

There are cold bloods, warm bloods, and hot bloods.

The cold bloods get the job done, steady and faithful, without the flash. They take up a lot of space; they’re bulky and slow. They plod along in fields, pulling plows and wagons. If they’re lucky, they get to pull a beer wagon and make people feel nostalgic when watching the commercial. These are the horses that pulled weapons of war before the combustion engine, the horses that changed the map and changed history, ground up and blown up in the mud and trenches.

The hot bloods are all flash and energy and they move quickly and are high-strung. They pull at the bit and toss their head and battle to own the moment, pivoting and pacing and moving sideways. The race like the wind and move over the ground quickly. Some of these hot bloods need a pony to escort them out to the race track because they are too nervous and antsy and at war in themselves that they need the calming effect of that pony to make it to the gate and stay still long enough to start correctly. When the gate opens, they burst forth and run splendidly in a hot burn and get all the recognition for their performance and the pony gets nothing.

There are people that are like hot bloods and people that are like cold bloods.

The hotbloods talk quickly and loudly. They interrupt, take charge, assert and own the show. The coldbloods are slow to talk, pushing their energy down inside to prepare to do the work.

People write books about hot bloods.

People don’t write books about cold bloods.

But while a hot blood is running like the wind, moving from point A to point B as fast as he can, that cold blood is actually moving point A and point B.

I’ve seen people penalized from jobs and opportunities because they weren’t quick to talk, nor talk profusely. They worked hard internally, pulling their weight and more, behind the scenes. They were labeled as slow or not confident or dumb.

Have some patience for those who move a bit more slowly. They aren’t just moving themselves, after all, but the whole world.