You Only Live Twice

I've been posting about the big J-Bondo a bit recently.  I'm not obsessed.  I'M NOT.  Although I have recently watched all of the Sean Connery era flicks again, because someone has lent them to me and they are not going to just watch themselves.

You Only Live Twice is one of the stupidest book/movie titles, because I’m pretty sure only about 60% of people get to live twice.  Although stupid titles are always a useful and credible red flag that indicates the ensuing book/movie is going to be shite as well, and this one is no exception.

But it's James Bond and it's Ian Fleming and it's... James Bond, so you just have to cut them some slack and play the hand you're dealt.  There are one thousand and fifty two things I thought were outright ridunkulous in this movie, and here are a few:

All the personnel on the rocket launching pad that was located in the inactive volcano were colour coordinated. Cute.  Speaking of teletubbies, Bond's Japanese ninja friends were all dressed in fifty shades of volcano crater grey, for obvious reasons, and came complete with bonus suction pads.  And it worked a treat, until it didn't, and they all died.  But they did blow a massive crater in the massive crater.

There are a lot of opportunities in life where you can wing it, but I'm pretty sure driving a space rocket is not one of them, James Bond.

The Japanese Bond girl gets about in a white bra and knickers for the majority of the flick but is suddenly and gratiously afforded a (buttonless) shirt by the wardrobe department when all hell breaks loose.  But she still doesn't have any pants.  I don't understand why they can never organise a budget for clothes for the Bond girl.

Later, in the crater, she loses her shirt that she spent all movie working towards, so she's back to her bra and knickers. No clothesure for her then. Bond movies should do a deal with Bonds undies.

At least Sean Connery relinquished his beloved baby blue terrytowelling shorts jumpsuit he so loved wearing in EVERY FILM for this particular movie.  And thank goodness the white boyleg shorts that he wore for nighttime deepsea scuba diving reconnaissance in Thunderball didn't make an appearance.  They were great camouflage under the flourescent light of the moon, and indeed their genius was magnified when combined with an orange leotard.  Yes, an orange leotard.

Thunderball is the movie where the fighter jet doubles as a submarine.  The Australia Defence Forces need to dump the Joint Strike Fighter program and focus on the acquisition of flying submarines.

In You Only Live Twice, Bond's crazy arse bad boy nemesis - who is relentlessly mocked in the Austin Powers flicks - has a nice and cosy base-of-a-volcanic-crater loungeroom made of slate, old lava and traditional volcanic floating floorboards, along with an artfully decorated pond full of piranha.  Like a boss.

Alas, the makers of Austin Powers didn’t really have to dig that deep.

Shut-Up Money - The new airline customer service

I've just started a complaints process against Qantas Airways, following their brilliant fuckup of my lost baggage in July, which left me fairly disgruntled and devoid of underpants for six days.

I was watching the mainstream news the other night and I spied one of the flying red kangaroo tails in a story concerning airline ticket costs or maintenance or unions or missing underpants or something, and I realised that the mere mention or sight of the airline now elicits a novel type of fury. On my pissed-off scale, qantas angry falls only a few places below road rage.

Following those jerks jerking me around for the first few days of my recent overseas jaunt, Qantas have offered me compensation - which more than covers my emergency costs - for losing then failing to deliver my baggage to me. They have also offered to provide me with a letter for my insurance company so I can recoup what I spent on emergency personal effects, such as underpants and the like.

Well there is a catch, of course. To receive the compensation and letter for my insurance company - which I'm pretty sure I'm entitled to anyway - I have to sign a confidentiality agreement. A secret underpants accord, if you will.

This release absolves Qantas and American Airlines, the other carrier involved in the complex, tangled mess, of any accountability or responsibility or answerability or liability for their indefensible customer service. It's been two weeks and I still can't sign the darn thing. I'm not sure I will be able to. 

I imagine that sounds a little ridiculous, because they are offering to cover my expenses more than three-fold, but I'm pretty pissed off that they want to wipe their slate clean, presumably so they can screw over the next passenger, and then the next and the next. 

I do recall that I was sobbing on the phone to their baggage claims call centre at one stage when I was in Florida out of anger and tiredness and desperation and sheer frustration with their customer service.  So I can't just take their shut-up money. I can't do it.

But it seems shut-up money is the new customer service. I was let down fairly appallingly by a major airline that probably should spend a bit more time providing a level of service to customers that is commensurate with the pricey airfares they expect us to fork out for a seat on a plane that isn't comfortable for ten minutes let alone ten hours.

And when things go wrong, which they invariably do, instead of some type of human empathy, you get a robotic reply from the Qantas Claims office that tells you they are sorry you were inconvenienced, but with no accommpanying explanation for the extensive list of right royal fuckups you experienced while trying to retrieve your baggage.

I suppose I was naive to expect they would bother to look like they care about customer service, but I certainly wasn't expecting a glib, veiled attempt at blackmail. I imagine it is merely a reflection of the litigious era we find ourselves in, so who can blame big business for taking this approach. It's probably standard business practice to them, but it's just more flawed customer service to me.

So I find myself in a bit of a pickle at the moment. I hate when life throws you pickles. Despite my disdain for any type of confrontation, and equal disdain for those who routinely choose to eagerly engage in it, I've decided that I'm going to be morally outraged for a while, push back a little, ask a few more questions about their complaints process, ask Qantas for a review of my complaint and then engage the ombudsman and trade practices people if need be.

What do I want from Qantas?  In a perfect world you'd expect something that vaguely resembles some type of accountability - or some loose explanation - in what appears to be a gaping hole in Qantas policy regarding on-delivery of baggage to cities they don't fly to.  But why would they bother with apologies or explanations when they have shareholders' money to throw at disgruntled customers to keep them quiet.

Am I wasting my time?  I am under no illusion that I won't get stonewalled.  But I can't just sign that thing. 

Airline Seat Reclining Charge

I used to love travelling on a plane when I was in my twenties. The thrill of venturing somewhere new and exploring one random dirty, germ-ridden foreign city after another. The excitement when the air hostess brought around the food trolley so you could spend the next 30 minutes trying to open your teensy weensy plastic cutlery bag.

The cramped spaces didn't inconvenience me at all, the detestable passengers weren't on my radar, the waiting around and queues didn't trouble me that much, the seats were comparatively larger (in my mind only, apparently), and I'm sure that the flight attendants were far more affable than the current crop..

I've just returned from a luxurious and often draining month-long holiday to the United States, leaving a trail of seven domestic and international plane flights, numerous shuttles, many bus trips, a few taxi rides and a couple of ferry rides in my wake.

These days I'm rarely a happy long haul traveller. The most recent flight, from Hawaii to Sydney, was particularly frustrating. Flying Law dictates that the dick sitting in front of you will always thrust back their seat in an attempt to be horizontal, thus rendering your limbs useless for a period of around ten hours. If you are especially blessed, they will leave it that way during meal time.

I have found that these passengers are generally the same self-absorbed, whining, whinging morons who demand the air hostess pays attention to their pathetic little requests on an hourly basis. I'm not really sure how flying economy creates a sense of entitlement, but anyway.

On my recent flight home I had a middle-aged Australian women - let's her call her Princess Bitchface - who thought she was in first class and wound back her seat to a completely unacceptable level.  When I politely asked her - through gritted teeth - to put her seat forward at meal time she argued with me that the seat in front was back and she had no room. I stared at it and then told her it wasn't. So she begrudgingly put it forward.

For the rest of the flight I was enormously tempted to remove my scarf, lean over the chair, and put myself out of my misery. But I deemed the plane too cold, so that plan was put on the backburner until it got a bit warmer.

I could have pulled out the old mile high insanity plea at my arraignment. Or just get a couple of fellow considerate travellers on my jury. I'm pretty sure this is the reason they don't allow weapons on planes; because the sky would be a bloodbath.

Jetstar may be a subsidiary of Qantas but they charge you for everything you do, which is the direction most airlines are moving in. Ka-ching, ka-ching. Blankets cost money, water will incur a charge on your credit card and there is no such thing as a free lunch.

I tell you, I don't mind paying more for a non-budget airline ticket if it creates the illusion of customer service. Frequent Flyers paid for this trip, but I ain't flying Jetstar again internationally.

Qantas have said that their reclining seats are here to stay, so I think it is time that they start to impose a seat reclining charge system. Perhaps an electric shock for customers when they push their seat beyond a reasonable level, or a timing system, or a $500 charge on their credit card when they keep it back during dinner time. Welcome to Australia! I friggin' love this idea.

Royals, Ears and Vertigo

It's been a wee week since I blogged about all the trivial, superficial stuff that happens in my life, or the general vicissitudes of being remarkable in a world replete with commonfolk, or the fools that cross my path on a daily basis, exposing me to their veggie garden variety trashbagness.

To be honest, I think the only explanation for the way the interweb blogosphere has been able to cope with my lack of prose is the blanket media coverage given to the Annus Diamondus Jubilius celebratus. Well, no need to fret any longer.

I don't have anything even vaguely fascinating to write about, but that never stopped me creating this blog thing in the first place, in the hopes that it might be mistaken for some type of scholary work.  I just make it up as I go along, as they used to say at NASA's Mission Control Centre.  Speaking of  NASA, I will be visting them very shortly.  Oh wait, the Obama Messiah got rid of it... That is a bloody bummer.

I'm not counting but my anti-winter, pro-summer holiday is possibly a mere 36 days away. I may or may not be going up to the moon on a turbo-charged space jet plane from Cape Canaveral.  It's going to be quite the expaarrience, although it's all a bit to be advised at the moment.

Speaking of jet planes, I very recently took one to sunny, warm Brissie, completely forgetting that the last time I flew a small distance on a jet plane I discovered that I have a Eustachean Tube Dysfunction.  I can't be arsed explaining it again on here, but it's all to do with stupid ears and air pressure and flying and what not. Suffice to say, I now have stupid vertigo. 

Admittedly, it is the cool type of stupid vertigo, involving the sensation of riding massive ocean swells and roller coasters - like the ones that have screamin' and thunder and death machine in their name, rather than the type of vertigo that gives rise to spinning, nausea and vomiting.  Last time it only lasted a few days, so I will use this time wisely to prep for Disney World, whose rides are more expensive and less fun than my vertigo adventures.  

It's all very exciting, bobbing up and down on a virtual ocean while sitting at your desk at work, gripping anything and everything on the white-knuckle ride into pseudo-LSD weirdness, but it is a tad awkward and embarrassing when one has to hold onto filing cabinets while walking down the corridor, mumbling that the ground is kind of rolling and the walls are sort of bouncing about and so forth.  It was all great fun.

That is all. Good day.

Note to self: Best not go to the gym when you have vertigo. It is a bit of a VBI (Very Bad Idea) 

Hear yee, hear yee

The other day I was sitting at my desk at work when the ground began to rock, as if I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean.  Some of the peaks of the swells were so high that I had to hold onto my desk until they passed.  It was like a free P&O cruise.

When the swells went away, I was simply bobbing up and down.  It was really quite exciting, but evidently not particularly healthy.  Apparently I was suffering from unsteadiness brought about my vertigo, as a complication of Eustachian Tube Dysfunction. 

By the time I went to the doc that afternoon, I had lost some of my hearing and everything sounded quite tinny.  The doc told me to expect more deafness and spinning and dizziness, which fortunately didn't eventuate.  This Eustachian Tube connects the ears to the throat and mine was stuck open when it should have been closed, or vice versa.

All external sounds are a bit muffled and internal sounds are sort of amplified. But when I hear a loud noise it bounces between my ear drums and is amplified 10 fold. It is so very strange.  The first night I could hear my heartbeat when I was trying to go to sleep which was very disconcerting.

You can imagine all the jokes at work - evidently there are many many songs related to sailing and shipping and oceans.  It feels like the sensation that you get just before your ears pop on a plane - except it is constant.  And there seems to be a droning air conditioner in my head.  Apparently my condition is caused by flying on a plane, which I did last week, on a five-hour flight.  My ears didn't pop when I landed on Sunday so that might be related too.  This build of pressure in my ears is a new probem and might explain my new claustrophobia on flights. 

Anyway, my 'earing is mostly good as new now, but I guess I'll be wearing ear plugs for future flying adventures.