ChuckDoherty.com

I don’t know what sort of manic notion prompted the folks at Bank Newport to “class up” the experience of using their ATMs, but I can confidently say that adding a voice prompt for every step and choosing a voice with an affected-sounding  British accent doesn’t help at all.  I don’t know about you, but I manage to use these gizmos just fine without being told; “Please wait while we process your request…” each time I press a button, spoken by a woman who sounds as though she has been chased around a park by Benny Hill in a humorously sped-up manner while wearing a French maid’s uniform. 

Remember that episode of Star Trek where Kirk and Spock were being beamed down somewhere and there was some sort of space storm or power surge, and the transporter went haywire sending them into this parallel Bizarro universe?  This universe was just like the regular one except nice people were evil and everyone looked just a little different… but not too different.  People might have a unibrow or a goatee when they didn’t normally have one, for instance.  Anyway, there must have been a similar situation at the laundry that does my shirts, because they seem to have sent one of my shirts into an alternate universe and are now trying to substitute my shirt’s doppelganger for the original. But I’m not falling for it.

I have this blue Hawaiian shirt with white flowers that I really love.  It is made from great high-thread cotton and takes a crease you could shave with.  This shirt has had Most Favored Shirt status from the day I bought it, but now I fear that it is being worn by my evil twin.  A week or so ago, I sent this shirt along with several of its brethren to the laundry that picks up and delivers to my apartment building in Baltimore.  A few days later when I picked the shirts up I discovered that ‘ol Blue was missing. I figured that it was just misplaced and I would get it the next time I went down to the front desk. 

The next day I asked at the desk if they had any orphan shirts. The clerk went in back to look, and came back holding a hanger and telling me she had found it.  But what she found was not my shirt. Sure, it was a blue shirt with a flower pattern – the very same pattern as mine in fact.  It was even the same size and the same make as mine. But this shirt was a twisted abomination of what a shirt should be.  It was The Antishirt, size 666 double-evil. Something one might wear while riding The Pale Horse of the Apocalypse.  Where my shirt had bright white flowers, the ones on this were blue and almost as dark as the blue of the background. I thought for a moment that my precious one had fallen victim to some sort of laundry accident and a spilled bottle of blue dye had seeped into its soul, but on closer examination I could see that even the buttons were of a different color. No, this was no accident.  This was an imposter and I could not bring myself to even touch it.

I don’t know how this will all turn out, but my biggest fear right now is that someone in that other universe is wearing my shirt. God knows what sort of mischief he may be getting me involved in.  If you see someone who looks like me but has a moustache or some other difference, and they are doing something terrible, I hope you will understand.

I trust that everyone appreciated what a quite, peaceful Sunday morning this was.  And you know why it was so quiet and peaceful? It was because every screaming baby in North America was crammed into Southwest flight 1226 from Providence to Baltimore, where their caterwauling was safely contained and they could be kept at least 33,000 ft away from the rest of the world for an hour and a half.  Sadly for the rest of you, that idyllic time has ended and they now walk among you once again.

The Press is foaming at the mouth today over reports of a “plot to destroy the Holland Tunnel” that was somehow foiled by the arrest of a suspect in Lebanon. That bellwether of reason and erudition, the New York Daily News, broke the news and reported that this plot called for explosives to be placed in the tunnel and set off, causing the lower part of Manhattan to be “flooded” as a result.  Only one mention of this dangerous plan that I could find even mentioned the fact that someone can’t “flood” a city that is above sea level.

Granted, setting off explosives in the Holland or any other tunnel is a terrible thing to do, and there are probably even warning signs posted at tunnel entrances recommending against it. If not, there should be. And, I am very happy that the plotter(s) were apprehended.  But let’s assume the worst; that someone secreted a huge truck full of explosives into the tunnel and set it all off.  Many people would be killed, and a great deal of damage would be done to the tunnel. But even if the walls of the tunnel were completely breached, and the thick layer of bedrock into which it is dug were to be blown open exposing the mighty Hudson River, all that could possibly happen is that the sections of the tunnel that are below sea level would fill with water. Once it was full, water would stop rushing in, and the good people of New York would be left to deal with some additional traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel and across the GWB while they set about repairing the damage and pumping the tunnel dry again. No matter how badly it was damaged, simple physics prevents water from coming out of it – water does not flow uphill. 

The idea of flooding Manhattan by blowing up a tunnel is as much of a threat as a plot to destroy the city with a glacier caused by leaving every refrigerator door in town open at the same time. This stuff only works in cartoons, and bad cartoons at that.  It is embarrassing to see the papers print it as though it was on the verge of happening. In the heady weeks after the terrorist attacks in New York, every kook with an axe to grind against the US was getting page-one ink by just coming up with a crazed plan, no matter how absurd it was. And when charges were brought against them, as they were against one lunatic whose harebrained scheme was to cut the support cables of the Brooklyn Bridge single-handedly with an acetylene torch, the prosecutors behaved as though they just bagged Lex Luthor.  In the case of the bridge plotter, any reasonably observant police officer would have averted any problem by simply yelling “Hey, get off of there!” from the window of his patrol car had they seen this genius in the act and the world would have been every bit as safe.

I fly Southwest Airlines a great deal since they connect Providence and Baltimore and they are usually quite affordable and convenient.  As good of an airline as they are in many respects, they have a few of the most irrational policies imaginable and their web site appears to have been designed by madmen.

Consider this: when you cancel a reservation for a flight that you paid for using a fully refundable fare, you are given the option to either take a refund or to apply what you paid to something that Southwest calls their “Ticketless Travel Funds.”   This is touted on their web site as some sort of account that will hold your money so that you can apply it to future flights. It sounds straightforward enough, so when I happened to cancel two flights a while back I decided to use this option. I was sure I would use the credit soon and I thought that this would be easier in the long run. Yesterday, I went online to book a flight and planned to use the funds I had put aside to pay for it. You would think this would be easy, but think again.

It turns out that each individual contribution that anyone makes to their account is tracked separately, and referenced by – and ONLY by – the confirmation number of the original reservation. In other words, you need to know the cryptic six-digit confirmation code of the reservation you cancelled (something real easy to remember, like QZB8XT) at the time you put the money in there. So, unless you keep a record of the original confirmation code, not only can’t you access your funds, you can’t even see that you have any in there at all.  In my case, I had two separate lumps of money sitting in Southwest’s pocket and there was no way I could use or even see the money without jumping through hoops and calling to track down the original confirmation codes.  Their phone representative seemed to think that this policy made all the sense in the world, but hey, perhaps this sort of thing is reasonable to some people.  I just don’t want any of them handling my money. Oh, best of all, these Ticketless Travel funds expire in a year, so if you don’t find a way to claim what is yours in time you end up losing it forever.  You sure aren’t going to be reminded to use them when you log in to the web site.

The whole arrangement seems like making a deposit in your savings account and then being told by the bank that you cannot withdraw your money or even see your balance unless you remember the serial numbers of all the bills you deposited.  Honestly, it is getting to the point where every transaction you make with any vendor – even the most legitimate ones – has to be gone over in detail to see if you are getting porked somehow.  You have to watch your hat and coat everywhere you go.