I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport, near the Andale Mexican restaurant. My laptop power is dwindling, even with the screen brightness set so low I’m thinking I am developing glaucoma. I’m down to one more bite-size Baby Ruth candy bar and thankful the Internet connection is free.
This isn’t what I thought I would be doing at 7p Eastern. By now, I should be landing in Minneapolis and trying to make my connecting flight home. But a funny thing happened on the way to the concourse …
Do you know the way from San Jose? …
Brian, the head UED guy at Kosmix, dropped me off a couple hours before my flight was to leave San Jose. I breezily walked up to the Delta desk to get myself a boarding pass only to discover I was at the wrong airline. It was an easy mistake to make, given my paper ticket had “Delta Airlines” printed on it. I was directed by a very friendly guy to the Northwest counter where a very long queue of passengers was waiting. There were actually two lines, one for the 12:10p flight to Minneapolis (the one I needed) and another flight to Minneapolis that was supposed to take off at 6:30a. Mechanical problems there forced them to reprocess all of those passengers, a process that was proceeding very slowly. I was directed to a line—confirming with other passengers that we were on the same flight—and waited.
An hour later, I had barely moved. The 87-year-old Taiwanese grandmother ahead of me, who was going to see her grandson’s graduation from U. of Minnesota Sunday morning, would nudge her suitcase forward a few feet and then kick up her dogs sitting in a row of nearby seats. The line seemed to move, but only because passengers with e-tickets were discovering that the self-serve boarding pass machines were working. Names started to be called out, and like winners of some lottery for seats people checked their bags and left. The long line behind me disappeared by the time we got to within a half hour of takeoff, still with a half dozen people ahead of me.
When it became apparent that the NWA staff weren’t paying attention to the number of people who were waiting to be processed for a flight leaving in 15 minutes, someone helped them make the connection. Given assurances that the plane would be held until we arrived, we handed over our luggage and proceeded to security by our departing gate.
Of course, anyone reading Chris’s blog would know that the airlines and the Transportation Security Administration don’t communicate with each other. The TSA people, just doing their job (as we were reminded a few times), didn’t care that a plane was taking off behind them or that the people they were scrutinizing were trying to catch it. Nor did the NWA clerk who gave me my boarding pass with the many SSSS—indicating being flagged for more in-depth security screening—comprehend that the trip through security would take longer than the window until the plane was supposed to leave. That is standard practice for late boarders, a rule that presumes it was the passengers intent or own circumstance that made them late. Two of our small crew of latecomers actually did arrive within the last hour, but the others and myself had been there quite a while.
As the TSA guard was busy wiping down the inside of my bookbag and rearranging the swag I’m bringing back to the boys, I asked if he or someone could find out if my plane was still around. I tried to get this information a few times, but was rebuffed. “You can’t fly until I check all this stuff,” he told me after my first official pat-down. Then, with a straight face, he suggested that maybe I should have shown up earlier. The moment I got my approved boarding pass, I had to follow my fellow snubbed travelers to go back, past the security booth I had just cleared, to the NWA desk to start over again.
At least the lines were shorter this visit.
My Asian Grandmother
The lines were shorter, but they weren’t any faster. The flight we missed was the last flight to Minneapolis by Northwest Airlines for the day. Even if they had another, I was aiming for Indianapolis anyway, hoping to catch up with my luggage. The airlines don’t look for alternate transportation, such as trains or buses, so the only hope was that some other airline or nearby airport would provide the winning combination home.
With me was a woman headed to Hartford who had expected a first-class expedited registration and had been dropped off well over an hour into my own wait. The end of the line was very short by that point, and she fell in behind. There was a friendly man heading to St. Cloud and an international businessman trying to get to a meeting in Amsterdam the next day. “I paid $7000 for these tickets, and you made me miss my flight,” he yelled at one of the clerks who had been serving the first-class line in our previous attempt. Then there was the Taiwanese grandmother, her broken English just well enough to be understood.
Since I had no need to go to Minneapolis now, I took an overnight flight to allow me to spend some of mother’s day with the mother of my sons. (Although now, it looks like I won’t see her until about 4p Sunday and will likely be exhausted.) I waited in the shuttle to San Francisco for other passengers to load up. The grandmother was one of them. She asked to use my cell phone to call her daughter, who was expecting her around 6p. There was some confusion with technology, language and mostly the cryptic airline ticketing system to figure out where she was heading. For some reason, they stuck her on a Frontier flight with one stop rather than the non-stop NWA flight leaving later and arriving sooner. I liked Frontier on the way here, so maybe she’ll be better for it.
Her daughter called back to make sure she was getting on the plane, and to confirm when and where she was heading. I stayed with her while she checked in and arranged for someone to come in a wheelchair to make sure she got on the plane (and through security, since I see she had another all-S boarding pass). While we waited, she told me she used to be a professor of accounting at the national university in Taiwan, having retired some 21 years ago. For my trouble—which at this point, facing an 8-hour layover until my own flight left, was minimal—she gave me some food from her bag: a peeled orange, a re-wrapped Danish and cookie, and four Baby Ruth candy bars. I think there was also an attempt to save my soul by accepting Jesus Christ into my heart, but it was short-lived and something I took as a compliment—I was worth saving.
What’s an HCI-er to do?
The lack of communication throughout the process is staggering. We’ll set aside the security aspects Chris already got into federal trouble describing. Just look at all of the places where some better communication choices, both at an individual and systemic level, could have helped:
- A traffic cop could have greeted new people heading into the NWA door to let them know why there was a huge line, and directing them to the proper place to go.
- Since they were understaffed, perhaps one of the seven NWA workers we saw roaming the area could have taken a couple minutes to go up and down the long, immovable lines and confirm who was waiting for what
- Hey, how about some signs that re-label the lines for their current use? “First class” certainly wasn’t this morning.
- There was an ability, although late, to communicate between the gate and the desk, but TSA wasn’t in the loop. Maybe these professionals would know when the drop-dead point has arrived where people don’t stand a chance of making it on the plane, and could use that information to prioritize processing for those passengers.
- TSA could have awareness of which flight the people coming through security are looking to catch. I have a feeling I could have been spared the extra security check just by the initial screener telling me that the plane was locked and loaded.
- The return to the NWA desk had fewer people to deal with—and thankfully, no later flights to process—but it was still a one-at-a-time mentality. Perhaps a group inquiry that just sought to divide us into related destination and need would have helped expedite matters.
- How about leveraging the collective knowledge? I got more information out of the other passengers than I did anyone from NWA or TSA. Just not enough to tell me, a rather inexperienced traveler, when to become aggressive in getting checked in.
Some of these problems could benefit from tech, of course, but I’m amazed by how much of that could be solved with some good old fashioned human conversation and rational thought.
My Baby Ruth and my laptop power are finally gone. See you on the other side.
