Arlo Gilbert’s Blog

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog. 

-Jack London

Recently I have been engaged in working with a charitable organization… this organization provides a superior education to our children at a very reasonable cost but convincing people to give money has been an arduous task.

I think that many people feel that Charity is giving a few dollars to make themselves feel good, but real charity in my opinion is giving so much that you have to either sacrifice something or you have to worry and hope that more money will come your way in the future.

I’m often skeptical of the word “karma” but sometimes, just sometimes things come back on you two-fold and make you say “whoa”.

In the past 6 months the following events surrounding charity have happened to me:

1. I donated a sizable amount of money to a charity, put in time and served on a few comittees. At the same time I was purchasing a new house. The new house was substantially more expensive and left me carrying two mortgages… two VERY BIG mortgages.Literally the day that we closed on our new home purchase, a random family out of the blue contacted us about our existing house (our existing house was not on the market). They had been looking for a home for over a year, drove by our house, fell in love with it and absolutely “had to have it”.

   We paid no brokers and walked away from what could have been a burdensome financial obligation. An amazingly random turn of events. 3 weeks later we closed on our old home at 10% over what we had paid for it only a year prior. In this market, many people would call that a f**king miracle!
    

2. I agreed to donate $200,000  to the same charity… the following morning an extremely wealthy individual whom I had never met or corresponded with contacted me and offered me $300,000 for something that had cost me only a few dollars (a domain name) several years ago.Not only is the donation tax deductible, but the profits on the name are long term capital gains on intangible property which means we get to take advantage of the 15% tax rate on those profits.

   I am not foolish and have received many offers on this particular domain, so I took it. Truly an unbelievable turn of events.

I’ve learned that money is a lousy way of keeping score. 

-Anonymous

Til later…
-Arlo

I’m sitting here at Newark and my plane departs in 20 minutes. The moment they announced boarding everybody rushes to the front as though they are giving away money inside the plane.

This is a 7 hour flight to Vancouver. What is the hurry to get seated? I understand if you have a huge carry-on that you need to get in the overhead, or even if you’re flying first class because you want to chug your first free drink as quickly as possible… but given that coach class is essentially as comfortable as standing in a New York subway during rushhour, why would people possibly want to spend an extra 20 minutes on the aircraft if they don’t absolutely have to?

Herd mentality at it’s best “everybody is in line, I better get in line too, I better hurry!”.

Ok… now they are making final call and me and 3 other smart passengers are walking up to the gate with no line and will spend 20 minutes of our lives doing something more fun like blogging or watching the news.

See you in Canada eh!

Ok I admit it… when I was a teenager I was a video game nerd and my favorite game of all time was Street Fighter 2. The graphics were great for the day and age and my friends and I blew every allowance playing for hours during the pizza buffet at Mr. Gatti’s. There were 6 buttons for the game, 3 variations of punch, 3 variations of kick, and a joystick. The moves were easy enough to learn that within 10 minutes, anybody could be good enough to compete.

Time went by and games got more complicated, by the time I was 25 I felt like an old man trying to learn modern video games, 12 buttons, combinations involved lots of different combinations of buttons and joysticks and gamepads… it was overwhelming and I generally thought “if this is gonna be so much work, why don’t I do something that will actually pay off, like meeting girls?”

Then a few weeks ago, my colleague Andy showed me this video game system that you can buy at x-gaming, it’s a full sized video game (the kind you stand in front of with a friend) and it came with none other than Street Fighter II. I bought it immediately.

It arrived, the delivery guys unpacked it, and in 10 minutes I was playing. What a blast I’ve had down in the basement reliving my younger days, eating pizza and drinking beer… it feels so decadent. In any case, if you’ve been trying to find me on icq or aim but I’ve been unavailable…that’s what I’ve been doing with my free time for the past 3 days!

Ok, i’ll join the hundreds and thousands of people who have blogged about what a rip off Spirit airlines is.. so here is my story:

In January 2007, I purchased four round trip first class tickets for my family on Spirit airlines to the Grand Cayman’s for a vacation from February 9th thru February 17th. I purchased the scam trip insurance from Travel Guard (accidentally).

Due to weather we were unable to get to the airport for our departure. We tried to call, along with many other unfortunate Spirit customers. After several hours and many attempts to call and receiving the usual “we’re sorry, all customer service reps are busy with other customers”. At this point I decided that getting my family there was more important than getting them there on Spirit so I chartered a private jet.

Great vacation, good times.

The morning of our return home I go online to do online checkin with Spirit, but spirit says our tickets have been cancelled. Drats, ok well they must have cancelled them because we maissed the first leg. Lesson learned. Their web site indicates however that we have a credit with them that we can use (because we paid 6k for tickets that we didnt use). 

Their web site keeps having server errors while i’m trying to redeem these vouchers… no luck. Eventually I try calling Spirit customer service and *suprise* I get an hour of “we’re sorry, all customer service reps are too busy to help you”… so once again I get to choose between taking Spirit airlines to get home or getting home.

I bought tickets on American to get us home and we survived the trip.

I begin my weekly ritual of trying to call Spirit customer service to get a refund or at least get functioning credits with them for a future flight… and for about 3 months we continue to be unable to get in touch with a human being.

At my wits end I decide to call American Express, after all I am one of those lucky people with the card that everybody talks about (weee lucky me)… I figure that I am an important person so they will help me… and they try.

Spirit tells them they will call me… so Amex closes the dispute. Spirit never calls.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit says they will take care of the issue…. so Amex closes the dispute.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit says they tried calling me and will try again… so Amex closes the dispute.
I re-initiate the dispute… Spirit asks for me to send them a formal letter explaining the issue, I do… Amex closes the dispute.
Spirit claims they never got the letter.
This goes on a few more times. Frustrated but kind Amex reps continually spend hours trying to reach human beings in the customer service department at Spirit… they realize how hard it is.

During this entire time I have continued my weekly ritual of trying to reach a human at Spirit.. never once since the day I placed my order online did I reach a human being from Spirit… until today.

Spirit customer service rep Niurka Paulino (who can be reached at 954-447-7965 x 1711) she goes by the name “Nikki” (and seems ready to “rumble” from her loving demeanor) finds my account, puts me on hold to “talk to her manager” and advises me that these non-refundable tickets cant be refunded and that spirit wont issue me a voucher for use on a future Spirit flight… 

SCRREEEECCCH… wait, did you just tell me that you are going to take my $6000 and you’re not going to even let me reschedule the flights for a different time? Yep, sure did. I guess this is how they stay profitable, taking the money and not providing any services in exchange for the money.

She was however kind enough to remind me that I had been suckered into paying $20 dollars (or something like that) for “Travel Insurance” through Travel Guard and gave me their number. Travel gaurd of course advised me that there was nothing they could do because it was my fault that I had missed the flight. The fact that Spirit couldnt actually be contacted seems to be beyond everybody’s care.

Perhaps Google in all their infinite wisdom will pick up this blog entry and link to it.

But don’t worry my dear readers, I’m not done, now I’m just going to find another way to get my money back from them.. many people have won claims against spirit for this type of practice.

I pretty much plan on doing the following:
1) Filing a complaint with the BBB
2) Filing a complaint with the Connecticut consumer affairs department (they are actually really helpful).
2) Making friends and family aware that they should avoid Spirit Airlines.
3) Blogging about it (here) so that the occassional stranger will know to avoid them.
4) Keeping a really really close eye on the skies with my binoculars in the tri-state area and making sure to report any altitude violations I see to the FAA.
5) I may file a series of small claims against them which will force them to spend some time and money defending this rip-off practice, I’m not sure.
6) I may just waste 50k suing them for fraud. I have lots of good lawyers who are always happy to to get new work.

If anything happens I will update you!

As always,
-Arlo Gilbert