We just had the biggest laughs in Turkish lesson history as we explained the meaning of “Thank God It’s Friday.” Our teacher, not religious, pointed out that this phrase might have even more meaning to a Muslim, since Friday is the day of prayer.
It might be better read, “Thank God, It’s Friday.”
We have a TGI Friday’s in the ‘burbs somewhat near us, and we were trying to explain the reason for the name. It will never be the same again.
I really can’t say enough about our people in Manila.
I have a quote here that warmed the cockles of my heart, maybe below the cockles, maybe in the sub-cockle area, maybe in the liver, maybe in the kidneys, maybe even in the colon. I don’t know.
I can’t help channeling Denis Leary, because the impulse is to take on that persona right now.
Pretty strange to think that just a few weeks more than a year ago, we were standing right around pictures 2, 3, and 5. Things can change very quickly…
We have several code numbers that define us here. Some of them are just administrative, and some actually tie in with systems permissions and that type of thing.
I just noticed some guy who actually shares one of these codes with an automated mailbox. That can’t feel good.
I told myself I would have a serene day today, but I didn’t factor in getting immediately screwed by IT and the customer service center as soon as I walked in the door.
The IT thing isn’t a big deal; it will just serve as an introduction to our glorious IT processes for our new hire, who will not have a computer account or laptop when she gets here due to awful management of requests.
(By the way, I read something yesterday where a semicolon was called a “Harvard comma.”)
Conversely, the CSC thing is bad news bears. I created over 2,000 line items yesterday in the system, and some doofus basically went through and mucked them up this morning because they were on an error log (they were on the error log intentionally, by the way).
My mental picture of this is a guy in a straitjacket bouncing around in a padded room occasionally hitting the delete key with his head, but you are free to develop whatever visual concept you like.
He is now on my error log, and I would like to do some serious mucking up of my own. He just cost Manila probably 4 man-hours of manually going through, one by one, canceling the orders he messed up. Then, he cost me over 2 man-hours reuploading everything to a crotchedy old system, before I can do the additional uploading I planned to do today, which probably will not happen at this point. Plus, just under half of the total orders were preserved and went to billing, meaning we have to sort out which are which.
It’s actually a great thing when this kind of situation happens on Friday, though…
Having been directly involved in a successful offshoring implementation (that actually made business sense) makes me very sensitive to piss-poor offshoring performance. A few islands down the road from our Asian Pacific island, we have some operations that are currently causing me trouble.
Most of these interactions are governed by a Service Level Agreement, or SLA, which is basically a contract with a guarantee of maximum wait time for a request and any other important performance metrics to ensure customer satisfaction and efficiency.
Even leveraging some very clever mathematical tactics, my current request is quite overdue, and I have very little foothold to contact anyone to complain. This is pretty much the story with offshoring performance inside the corporate world if the partner or department is not performing well.
The fuzzy math going on is as follows: a request for a new user account is governed by a one-day SLA. I was very excited to see that, because in the past these requests can drag on for weeks. However, they noted that the SLA actually begins not when the request is received, but when approval is received.
I thought, fair enough, why should they be accountable for a slow response from the requesting business? I can get on the ball and make sure I swing an approval as soon as possible. But reviewing the request, it said “Approval Required: No.”
When I checked the status on the web, it said “Under Review” or something like that. Seven hours later, I get an approval request. Shady. So, I get the approval turned around within an hour (I’ve already lost a full day, of course) and start the SLA clock. That was Friday afternoon, so no matter what times they’re working over there, a business day has passed by now.
I wrote an e-mail complaining about the SLA breach, and the SLA response time limit for a complaint e-mail is one business day! I wonder when they will respond to my complaint! I assume they will complete the request and then write back making me look like a jerk for complaining right before the request is completed.
This kind of stuff is maddening. I mean, I feel acutely thankful that a petty handover thing like this is my chief problem right now, but why is this a problem? This is not even a hardware request (that comes after I get the account set up). So, everything is gridlocked until that request goes through.
Just saw this on a banner ad and thought it was illustrative of how hard it is to go outside your native and nearby language families:
YİYEBİLDİĞİNİZ KADAR
You say this yee-yebeel-dee-eeneez kadar.” And make a little whistle on that R if you can do it like Kristin can.
Yİ is irregular to start with, but it’s the semi-conjugated stub of the verb “yemek,” which means “to eat.” Yemek also means cooked food, by the way. Uncooked food or food products are termed “yiyecek,” which in this case translates to “that which will be eaten” but can also mean “he/she/it will eat.” This can work as a participle, but in this case it looks like the proper term is “relative clause.”
The next Y lets you add on the EBİL which by logical causation, grace, or luck actually means “able.”
The DİĞ would be DİK if nothing came after it, but since there is another suffix, the K converts to a “soft G,” since a K would stop the word mid-suffix-chain train wreck. In basic usage it makes a verb be fourth person past tense, but it gets you into a non-future participial/relative-clause mood when used mid-verb like this, especially when strung together with an EBİL or something exotic.
So, at this point you have “eat able that which.”
Here’s a fun twist versus English: clauses like this are actually possessed in Turkish. So, İNİZ is actually the respectful second-person possessive suffix. Which puts us with “eat able that which yours sir.”
KADAR is an Arabic word (Arabic often screws up the grammar, provides a lot of the language’s irregularities, and in this word’s case takes on a lot of weird and disjointed purposes). It means “extent” most of the time. If you say “this big,” kadar is in there, but it can also mean “up to.” Thanks, Arabic.
So, even a clever grammarian at this point, without applying any additional context to the situation, would translate to “eat able that which yours sir to an extent.”
To rephrase a little more in English without losing the fun, you have “to the extent of your ability to eat.”
Or, as we might say, “All you can eat.”
Just realized I never tied this story up, and before I forget anything I wanted to get it on the record.
I wrote Part 2 in Leeds on Sunday. We spent one more night in Leeds and got up Monday morning to get onto a bus. The bus took about six hours to roll into Heathrow considering traffic and bad roads.
When we got into Heathrow almost everything was shut down as far as flights go. It was really eerie in there, I described it like the hum in a football stadium when a player is down with an injury.
The general instruction was to leave the terminal and try to either call or get online to “rebook.” It was not extremely clear what it meant to rebook. Earlier, the communcations implied we just needed to wait until the scheduling people found us the proper continuing flight given the disruption. As the chaos scaled up, it became clear everyone was out for themselves, just trying to slip onto an already-full flight to get home as soon as possible.
BA continued to be good to us throughout, with the one exception that they KNEW the phone and internet options were totally hopeless. It unfortunately became more important for them to clear the terminal than it was to provide people with realistic solutions or news. The phones were completely full (you couldn’t even be on hold) and the internet tool just disabled rebooking for all the cancelled flights. This was borderline unethical communication from them, in my view.
BA, at least, was giving out hotel vouchers. This made things very nice, except that the standby lines opened at 4:45 AM the next day (there was no available customer service by the time we got in on Monday). The trains do not run that early, so it was tempting to sleep in the airport to make sure we were in a good position in line.
We opted for the hotel and decided we would catch a taxi to Heathrow early in the morning to get in line. That was a good call, especially since…
There are no lines in Heathrow.
The whole thing was structured to remove the advantage of staying in the terminal overnight. The waiting area was the shape of a wedge, with multiple entrances, essentially preventing any sort of line from forming. A lot of people only found that out when they woke up in the morning and discovered they were not in line.
It’s a good thing we got in early, because – line or not – the flight to Turkey was the first flight that morning to be posted on standby. We were two of the last people to get onto the flight, which allowed us to get back to Turkey and get a nice flight to Houston via Chicago.
So that’s the story!
It was hard to do an update when everything started sucking, which was relatively soon after I wrote Part 1. Now things are looking clearer.
We in fact did not get a flight into Heathrow today, nor did just about anyone else in the world. They may just now start letting a few long-hauls take off. We could have made it to Heathrow via a very expensive train ride directly from Leeds (the station is across the street from our hotel), but my feeling is that those long-hauls taking off today are about clearing the airport rather than fixing our problem.
The BA website’s flight status suggests an early-morning flight to Heathrow tomorrow morning (based on prior experience the website gives a “best case” view that the crew/hotel/support is generally not willing to offer to the real people). I think it’s reasonable to foresee a morning to mid-afternoon flight to Heathrow, a shot at a long-haul in the evening, or a strong possibility of escaping Heathrow Tuesday that we can probably hang our hats on.
We’ll see…
Let’s start by saying I am writing this using Free WiFi at a very nice 3-star hotel in Leeds, Merry Olde England.
“Kar geldi,” as the Turks might say, the snow came.
For cost and timing reasons, we actually broke our Star Alliance fealty and flew with British Airways. The captain knew we were hosed, but there was still hope we would catch a window and land in Heathrow. We were a little late getting off the tarmac in Istanbul (but hey, it’s Istanbul).
Breakfast was a little “dodgy” (let’s switch to British now). That’s not complaining; it’s part of the story.
We did a holding pattern near Heathrow until the fuel situation got impractical, then we dog-legged up to Newcastle-upon-Tyne and landed. Newcastle’s airport is pretty small, but there were several Emirates and BA 777 jumbo jets parked on the tarmac, doing what we did. The airport filled up with parked airplanes shortly thereafter.
We sat on the tarmac for six hours.
This was originally a trans-European flight to the hub, so that dodgy breakfast was the only food the crew had available. We were already coming in a bit late, so lunch came and went.
Here’s where the heroism started. First, the captain lobbied and got permission to let people leave the plane and terminate their trip at Newcastle. Checked baggage was a problem, so the captain offered to climb into the hold and extract baggage, a proposal eventually signed off by the security/customs people at the airport.
People were getting hungry. The captain informed us that catering was not much of a possibility, since the other jumbos would have cleaned them out by now, and planes normally carry round-trip provisions when heading to Newcastle because it’s so small.
The captain left the plane again and completely bought everything available in the shop at the airport. Incredible. He picked up around 100 sandwiches, little finger cake things they call flapjacks, trail mix, apples, chips, etc. We were randomly one of the last rows served, so they were out of sandwiches, but we still got a decent snack thanks to the captain taking time to care.
We had a few kids on board, who heroically didn’t cause a fuss the whole time.
The captain lobbied hard first for one of the coveted slots to land in Heathrow that afternoon (if there were any at all), then they tried to set up coaches for a convoy to London, but the roads to Heathrow might have been worse than the runways.
The crew requested an extension of every non-legal restriction on their service time, but we were up against a hard 9:30 PM legal stop-work for the crew. There were no available hotel rooms in Newcastle for us, so the captain announced we would fly to Leeds. This far north, the sun goes down around 4:15 PM or so, so this was a night flight. I can’t remember exactly the timings at this point, but we were in the 7:00 PM range when we took off, I think.
Short flight to Leeds, then more tarmac time to rally the ground troops. They lined up two nice coaches at arrivals (everyone including the Turks had to go through border control, including those without visas; not sure how that worked, maybe they had transit visas) and bussed us to this great hotel.
Dinner was served at 10:15 PM. Roasted turkey, roasted potatoes, vegetables, and gravy. They set up a little buffet in the airport lounge restaurant. We didn’t have our camera, but there was this great “WELCOME PASSENGERS OF CANCELED BA FLIGHT” sign outside. We got two complementary cokes, and I’m sure a lot of our fellow passengers went up to the 13th floor Sky Bar and helped them recover whatever cost they didn’t get back from BA.
We’re about to go down to breakfast now, which is also complementary. As of right now (a trademark phrase), we have a 2:00 PM flight to Heathrow according to the website. Unless we’re on another airplane later on, tonight might not be as good of a night. They are starting to cancel “new” outbound flights, including the “Sunday version” of our Houston flight yesterday scheduled on 2:20 PM. Maybe that’s to help clear the way to let some of these backlogged passengers out. BBC News is saying “few” flights will leave today, but I think that may be partly to manage people’s expectations.
BA’s transfer desk will help us find our new itinerary. Snow seems to be abating, and I trust they will do as right by us today as they have done so far.
Let me heartily recommend BA, post-strike, post-cloud, as a stellar, top-notch airline. I doubt we could find this kind of generosity from another airline.