Archive for December, 2007

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Who Should Go to the Polls?

Over the holiday break, I applied and was accepted to become a precinct captain for the Barack Obama for President campaign. As part of that gig, I am responsible for discerning the leanings of the registered voters in precinct 3861, pursuading undecided voters and getting supporters out to vote for the California primary on Feb. 5.

In discussing get out the vote efforts with a friend of mine who has much more campaign experience than anyone else I know, she made a statement which puzzled me for a while, saying “If I’m working on a campaign and you’re not voting for my candidate, I don’t want you to vote at all.”

In fairness, she later retracted this comment, but it still got me thinking about where the ethical line should be drawn in the promotion of democracy versus the promotion of a candidate. Surely there are limited resources in a campaign and most campaigns and campaign workers would never actively discourage supporters of other candidates (provide wrong date and/or location information).

But there is are gradations, at least in intent, in how campaign workers make the “actively encourage our supporters to vote, ignore everyone else” approach work. At the pro-democracy end, campaign workers genuinely hope for an overwhelming turnout districtwide and that they are able to drive more of their supporters to the polls than their opponents’ campaigns. At the pro-candidate end, campaign workers genuinely hope that supporters of opposing candidates ignore the election and choose not to vote at all.

In the end, the idealistic part of me hopes that the higher-ups in the 2008 presidential campaign organizations ascribe to the former, but realizes that in the heat of battle, such minor differences in intent often get overlooked in the overwhelming effort to beat the other guy (or woman).

As for my friends who are supporting other candidates, while you may not get a prodding phone call from me on February 5, I do hope you go out and cast your ballot. I also do hope that the Obama campaign is committed and organized enough drive enough supporters to the polls to beat the snot out of your candidate at the end of the day.

 • Email This Post

Saturday, December 22nd, 2007

A Missed Opportunity for JetBlue

I ran headfirst into the United States’ ongoing difficulties with air travel delays last night. Scheduled to fly a JetBlue red-eye to Florida, I arrived at the Oakland airport to find the flight already delayed by 2 hours. Twenty minutes later, as soon as I got through security, the flight status board displayed an evil red line reading “cancelled.”

JetBlue has been one of my favorite airlines for many years, having earned that spot through cheap, comfortable and easy flights from Boston to Fort Lauderdale when I was in graduate school. Their cancellation rate is about half of the industry average in October 2007.

Last night, however, those statistics meant nothing. We trudged out past security and started the crazy, wait in an endless line while calling airline customer service on two phones and checking Travelocity and Orbitz on an EVDO-equipped laptop routine.

Jet Blue’s customer service was less than helpful, with superb “answers” such as a 3-minute layover in Dulles, flying through Boston (which is expecting ice) on a Sunday red-eye, or diving to Long Beach and flying via JFK on Monday.

Instead, we cancelled the first leg of our JetBlue trip and found a one-way ticket on USAir on Sunday through Las Vegas, where, conveniently, it never snows. To their credit, JetBlue did stick to their Customer Bill of Rights and gave us the following for our troubles:

• A full refund for our outbound flight that we cancelled
• Two taxi vouchers (one to get home and another to get to the airport on Sunday)
• Travel vouchers equal to the value of our round-trip tickets

Those inducements helped ease the pain, but thinking about the situation last night, JetBlue missed a huge opportunity for a tremendous PR victory during the slow Christmas news cycle.

Here’s how it could have and should have gone:

1. A line manager at Oakland realizes that he has a plane-load of people who are trying to get to Fort Lauderdale, many of them hoping to board cruises or connecting flights to the Caribbean or Latin America.
2. That same manager thinks outside of the box, calls a charter company and books a charter plane to replace the cancelled flight.
3. The manager announces the plan to the angry crowd. The charter flight leaves a few hours late, but JetBlue springs for coffee and donuts at the airport to help passengers pass the time.
4. The manager alerts JetBlue’s corporate PR department, which pitches the story to the South Florida and national media, who is there to meet the plane when it arrives in Fort Lauderdale.
5. The traditional stranded-passengers at Christmas story instead reads as a creative company doing anything for its customers. The ecstatic customers get off the flight and laud JetBlue’s creativity in ensuring that they make their cruises or arrive just in time for their family’s traditional dressing of the Christmas tree.
6. The extra expense for the charter flight is tagged as a marketing expense and the manager who orchestrated the stunt receives a special commendation for being a creative problem-solver. Stories and thank-you notes from passengers continue for months on blogs like these, perpetuating what has now become an urban legend. Customers on the flight are now customers for life.

Alas, last night JetBlue was just your typical airline. While providing generous compensation, there was no creativity and no innovative solution to save Christmas for their passengers.

Southwest, are you paying attention?

 • Email This Post

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007

The Story of (My) Stuff

I received a forwarded e-mail the other day from a good friend of mine a few days ago telling me to check out this great new video called the Story of Stuff. In the video, Annie Leonard does a tremendous job of outlining the problems that come from (developed society’s) desire for consumption.

I watched the video, which was tremendously creative and well-illustrated, even if some of it’s insinuations were a bit leftist even for my liberal soul. What was even more impressive, however, was how the video has crept back into my mind repeatedly over the past week.

On Saturday night, my roommates and I had a holiday party. Before I had seen the video, we thought about renting glassware, plates and other needed items, but chose to head to the party store and buy plastic instead, because it was cheaper and we didn’t have to return anything.

Today, post Story of Stuff, I discovered a tear in my favorite pair of jeans and spent 15 minutes debating with Sunny over getting an iron-on patch to repair the tear. She advocated for a new pair of jeans, which I could completely understand–iron on patches, even on the inside, aren’t quite stylish for the up and coming hipster. We eventually settled on her sewing the hole in the jeans back together–a zero waste (and fantastic girlfriend) solution.

In thinking back about the incident, however, I realized that most people I know would have trudged down to Gap or Old Navy and grabbed a new pair. $40 later, the hole is gone and you get a nice new pair of jeans to boot. Thirty years ago, such a thing would have been laughed at; everyone would have put the jeans on the sewing machine and continued wearing them.

I’m curious to see how The Story of Stuff continues to affect my decision-making. Already, I’m resolved to have either rented glassware and china, or at least biodegradable plasticware, at our next party. I also hope that Leonard’s story continues beyond it’s 15 minutes of fame and earns a consistent place in what we teach future generations.

If you haven’t seen the story of stuff yet, view or download it (or pick up a DVD) and take a look. It’s well worth the investment.

 • Email This Post

Monday, December 3rd, 2007

More Than 5 Trillion Words

This is an amazing video about how we must rethink information in the digital age. While we all live in this time–reading and writing blogs, turning to alternate sources for information–we rarely stop and consider the revolution occurring right under our noses and how easy it is for us to find information using one of the more than 5 trillion keywords in the index of a search engine like Google.

The video is produced by the Digital Ethnography project at Kansas State. They’re involved in an ethnographic study of YouTube, which offers some very interesting perspectives on learning in the 21st Century.

As a former teacher, these types of efforts are critical both at the university and K-12 levels, as most teaching (and learning) that occurs right now is stuck in the decidedly 19th-Century model of lectures, note-taking and exams. Add in a pretty common (at least in the business world) piece of technology, like a laptop computer, and the formula shifts like it has in Maine, where the state has been issuing Apple laptops to all 7th and 8th grade students since 2001.

Teachers become coaches. Students explore, teachers assist and, together, often add to the greater body of knowledge available on the Internet. That’s how we prepare kids for a 21st Century, interconnected world.

 • Email This Post