Computers making our lives better

My experience ordering airline tickets online tonight was just awful.

So I open up Travelocity to see about air fares. Usually they have pretty good deals, better than most airlines' sites I suppose. Maybe I've just seen too many of their ads. Anyway, I find a suitable flight to San Diego and go through the booking process, enter my billing information, select all the options, go right up to the "book the flight" step and get dumped back onto the flight selection page. That flight is full, it claims.

A little confused that it continues to show the flight on the flight selection page, I go through the whole process again (and for the fourth time, damn it, I don't want to book a hotel room!) only to end up with the same result. At this point, I decide to try the airline's website, but get scared off by the extra $25 it would take to book it there.

So I try Travelocity one more time as I call their telephone reservation number. This is apparently one of those technology companies that has outsourced its call center to India, so I'm met with an accent that is impossible to interpret for the first few confused seconds of the call. (Apparently he couldn't understand me, either.) So he asks me for all the same information, almost like he's just punching it into the same website I've tried to use only this fare is the $25 more fare. I figure it's not worth struggling to get the price I want at this point, so I just say go for it. We get all the information recorded in, billing info, no I don't want a hotel, yes I know we can't select the seat on JetBlue...and it doesn't let him book it either.

So I'm on hold while the guy in another country tries to fix me up with whatever secondary system they use when JetBlue decides it hates Travelocity (what are you doing, booting a mainframe man? C'mon!) and I start going through JetBlue's website itself. I figure maybe I can make a little more headway than he can going direct, and since the fare's now the same, it can't hurt, right?

Well, he continues to hem and haw getting information put back into system #2 and keeps asking me to wait and hold on; meanwhile I'm selecting what seats I want on the flight. (The hell? $20 for four extra inches of leg room? I'll squeeze, thanks.) So at this point I tell him I'm just going to book through JetBlue, sorry to bother him, thanks for nothing (okay, I was nicer than that), and continue on to enter my billing info into JetBlue.

Well. JetBlue believes in my internet security. Therefore, they use the new Verified by Visa system that routes all the special information (like card security codes) only through the bank and hides it behind a password, which is all a vendor's website will see. While I may doubt the security of this setup, I'm sure that it would, in a perfect world, work. This is, unfortunately, an imperfect world.

So back when the system was introduced I must have registered for it. This may possibly explain why when I tried to recover my password using my current address and card expiration date, it denied me access. Of course, one can never be sure of these things, so I attempted to activate Verified by Visa again, to no avail. Frustrated and forty-five minutes into the airline-ticket-buying experience already, I decided to call Wells Fargo, from whom I get my Visa card.

My flabbergasted explanation of my ticket-shopping woes was enough to get me sent straight to a manager, whose customer interaction voice was somewhat comforting if mildly annoying. She asks me for all the standard credit-card verification stuff and we play "guess a number" with my zip code until I realize the system hasn't updated since my move and I did at some point receive bills at college. Once that was cleared up we got down to why Verified by Visa couldn't verify my identity even given all the correct information.

Of course, it was probably all my fault. You see, when I received my latest credit and ATM cards from Wells Fargo, they came with another new Visa product: "Paywave." They embed a little RFID chip in your card that, presumably, has all the same information as the little magnetic strip on the back. The only difference is that the RFID chip can be read at a distance and, in my mind, without your knowledge. I didn't really want people scanning my credit card through my pockets, so I called when I received the cards and asked them kindly to send me replacements. The credit card never came for some reason, but that didn't stop the ordered (but not shipped) cards from messing up the system.

So my expiration date didn't match up with the Verified by Visa system's expectations. They should be sending me a new card rush-delivery, which I hope will actually get shipped -- third time's a charm? I digress. The point is, the nice manager on the other line had access to some sort of e-switch that allowed my transaction to go through on JetBlue without entering a password. (Imagine if power like this fell into the wrong hands!)

After an hour-long battle with the intertubes and people in places I've probably never heard of, I now have a (relatively) cheap round-trip ticket on JetBlue, a headache, and a non-working credit card. At least it was less stressful than my weekend.