Month: May 2017

Bad news for Southwest Airlines frequent flyers

This morning I discovered that the new SWA reservation system automatically cancels you if you book two flights out of the same city on the same day. For example, I’m going to be on the west coast in July but don’t know whether I am coming home directly or continuing on to SNA. So I booked flights for both and now SWA has cancelled my return to ALB because it was the more expensive ticket. After 30 minutes on the phone with customer relations, the SFO-ALB leg has been reinstated and the SFO-SNA cancelled. I will now book the latter on another airline.

I was notified of the cancellation by an automated email, no explanation, which arrived in the middle of the night with a new mystery confirmation number. The long conversation and time on hold has produced the above information, which the rep says has always been in the contract but is only now being enforced. She says the people most affected are “tiered” passengers (frequent flyers) who often make multiple reservations and later cancel one. Exactly.

This flexibility is the precise reason I have been flying SWA. I am paying for the ticket and I understand if I forget to cancel the money is gone. It seems like a fair and straight up business transaction. I pointed out to the agent that I am one of the lucky ones because I took the trouble to research this; a lot of folks are going to show up at the airport and discover they don’t have a ticket because they thought the automated email was an error, they didn’t see the email, or they didn’t make the reservation on the web.

Any recommendations on a carrier with lots of coast-to-coast itineraries out of ALB?

Does ScoreIt teach you to write like Stephen King?

Food for thought: I recently received an email from Bowker, a service that provides ISBN numbers to self-published authors. They have a new product that allows you to compare your prose to that of successful published writers and find out who has a style and genre close to yours. The software is ScoreIt, and it has a hefty price tag of $99. If they’d let me do one match for free I might have tried it but as it is I will just opine about something I know nothing about.

Let’s say ScoreIt tells me I write like Stephen King, and that my story of teenage mishaps is closest to his horror works. What am I supposed to do with that information? I suppose I could advertise my work with phrases such as “if you liked Carrie, you’ll love Teen Troubles!” And certainly I can use it for the elevator pitch to prospective agents in which you tell them your writing is like Stephen King crossed with Herman Melville (for argument’s sake I’m presuming that’s a secondary match). Is either of these worth $99?

What I’m worried about is that ScoreIt is going to make writers try to train themselves to write more like Stephen King. They’ll pore over his books (and the reports from ScoreIt which I presume have granular detail on shared vocabulary, sentence structure etc). And it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Instead of developing their own voice, they will indeed write more and more like someone else.

Of course, I used Stephen King as my straw man for a very good reason. He has a completely different voice from book to book, depending on topic and presumed audience. And he explains his craft and technique quite fully in On Writing, a standard textbook in college writing courses. The $10 or so that costs you on Amazon would be a better investment, methinks.

What the pool guy can teach us about selling freelance creative

I’ve recently moved into a house which, two owners ago, was tricked out with all the bells and whistles available in the early 1990s. Most of these tchotchkes have fallen into disrepair and must either be abandoned (like the in-wall coax cabling throughout the house) or gussied up. This has caused visits by a stream of spa guys, pool guys and sprinkler guys and I’ve noticed something interesting and consistent in the way they address my wife and me which can help in selling freelance creative.

“See the three holes in the top of that sprinkler head?” says the sprinkler guy. “That’s a Toro. They require a special tool to open the head, so you have to call a service to do it for you. I’ll replace all those with Rainbirds you can adjust yourself.”

“This is junk,” says the pool guy as he turns the handle on the filter tank. “$125 for a new one.” Water starts to ooze out. “Look at that.” As the gaskets become saturated, the leaks stop. “Well, maybe it’s good for one more season. But keep an eye on it. If you lose your prime [which for some reason is what they call pressure in the system] then your pool will become filled with algae.”

What’s happening in both these instances is that the contractor is sharing a do-it-yourself tip to make me, the client, feel in control while simultaneously instill fears, uncertainties and doubts that I’ll actually be able to do it.

“Write like you talk,” you might tell a client who thinks they can do their own copywriting. “Short sentences, no more than 10 words on average but break those up with an occasional one- or two-word sentence. Paragraphs no longer than five lines, but break them up with an occasional one-line or even one-word paragraph. And your vocabulary should be plain English. No words over ten characters if possible.”

Now who’s going to remember all that? The guy is going to dutifully write it down, and possibly try it, but will quickly abandon the effort and call you. And you may well be able to ease your estimate a bit higher because they now have more appreciation of your craft.

This is why I shake my head at creatives who present their work as a black box and refuse to open the kimono and explain what they’re doing. The more you tell them, the more they will respect and trust you, and the more likely they are to hire you to do it for them. Now I’ve got to go down in the basement, because the last owner loved to tinker with his sprinklers and I’m pretty sure he had one of those special Toro tools.