Random Reviews

So I was in NYC today on business which is great, I like NYC and my customers here. That said, let’s get into travelling on Amtrak.

Generally Amtrak is pretty decent the acela runs are nice albeit ridiculously more expensive ($100 EACH WAY) than the regional runs given the real time savings (about 30 minutes DC to NYC)

However, if you book a train later in the day and have a meeting cancel, it is a HUGE pain to reschedule for an earlier train. You end up waiting in a line at NYP which is ALWAYS insanely long to speak with a representative that always looks like they hate you solely for having the audacity to ask them to do their job.

When you get to the rep they tell you that to change trains you have to pay an extra random dollar amount despite the fact that when you booked online all the prices were the same. Oh, and while you were waiting in line you missed the train you really wanted to take and the one you would have caught next was cancelled. So then you get the warm fuzzy that can only come from waiting in line forever to accomplish absolutely nothing more than reducing the amount of beer you COULD have had if you’d just sucked it up and waited to begin with.

While you’re standing in line you keep looking at the Amtrak kiosk things where you can pick up and purchase tickets and wonder why the hell you can’t change your ticket at those machines without the wait. The kiosks have a printer, a barcode reader and even a credit card reader so what the hell!?! If you’re a turbo nerd like I apparently am, you actually think about how easy it would be to add this function to these machines programmatically and become even more pissed off at the situation. Then you start thinking about how it’s likely some union jerk that does their programming despite his complete and utter lack of qualification because god forbid they get a qualified non-union guy to do something before they spend the government subsidies that Amtrak gets wasting time letting some teamster who is barely qualified to be a janitor have a fair shot at it.

So that’s my amtrak rant… Far less of a review than I normally give but hey, that’s what you get now that I can post in the heat if the moment from the iPhone. Apparently this is going to become Josh RAW.

Tags: trains, travel

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 7th, 2008 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Sucks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.