Boycott Amtrak!

I had the worst experience with Amtrak on my way home from New York.

I lost my ticket in my hotel room. I realized this about an hour before my train was to depart. I called the hotel, and they said that they did not find it. Then, I called Amtrak to ask if anything could be done. I had bought my ticket over the internet, and the prevailing opinion among the people I had talked to was that they would just be able to reissue the ticket. The lady on the phone informed me that Amtrak's policy, as of Oct. 31, was that if a ticket was lost, a new ticket had to be purchased. If, after 5 months, the original ticket had not been found, there was possibility of a refund, less a $75 processing fee. These tickets are like $100. I think this policy is ridicules, not to mention unfair, and in bad faith. Anyway, I got to the train station, and I had to wait in a line for like 40 minutes. I only got to a ticket window about 5 minutes before the train was supposed to leave. Luckily for me, the train left late.

I sent a nasty complaint letter to Amtrak, saying that I thought their policy was grossly unfair, and that I felt they had failed as a service provider. Their service was just as much, if not more, than a plane. Their service took longer than a plane (I had thought it might be less, between getting to the airport, needing to arrive and hour early, and taking a taxi from the airport.) Their service was just as much hassle as a plane. And, the thing that made me maddest, was that they did not respond in a way I felt was fair when I had a problem. If I had lost my boarding pass, an airline would simply have reissued it. I have absolutely no intention of ever taking Amtrak again. Which is unfortunate, because I think people should take more trains.

Compounding this, I felt very crummy after this whole ordeal. Michael and I had agreed to meet at a train stop about three quarters of the way up the green line. Because I felt crummy, I didn't want to spend another hour on the train to get all the way home. Michael didn't want to come to get me because he was afraid of getting lost. I pressed him, and he agreed. I didn't know how to give him directions to South Station, so I told him to go to Back Bay, and I gave him directions there. He check the email I had sent and saw that my train was supposed to go to South Station. He tells me he had a very traumatic journey to South Station, which involved being afraid of needing to retreive his car the next day. Starting at like 7, I am calling him like every 15 minutes to tell him when my train is getting in. After an hour, I figure that we had miscommunicated, and he had already gone to the train station. I am just about to get off the train when my phone rings. It is poor Michael and he is very upset after his ordeal. So in conclusion, it was a pretty bad day for transportation yesterday.

Anyway.

The interview at Google went reasonably well. I had three interviews in the morning, and then in the afternoon they gave us lunch and ice cream. In my interviews, I had three things to do, one for each. One of the questions was to write a program to implement the game of life. This was not too bad. Another problem was to find the minimum string in a document that contained all words of a search query. This had to run in time linear with the number of words in the query, and the length of the document. The last problem was to help the user with typing on the phone. If the user wanted to enter 'C', you wouldn't want them to have to press '222'. You want to take in a string on numbers, and then provide a list of all possible words that could be represented by that string of numbers. This had to run in constant time. yikes.

Anyway, I got to the solutions, or near the solutions in all the cases, so I hope I did okay.

Last night, I found that I had gotten an email from Yahoo asking me to finish some things up. I don't think I would accept an offer from Yahoo, but I am very interested to see what the offer would be like.

I got another email from 21st century technologies. I'm not sure what they had done. They said that they were still very interested in me personally. And that made me feel good. They are in Texas, so working for them is all but out. But, I still felt good.