My bad luck with air travel

I'm at Incheon airport again, awaiting a flight to Daegu. The trip back from Massachusetts has been thankfully uneventful. The trip there was another story. I got a call from Korean airlines on Saturday night telling me that my flight from Daegu to Seoul was cancelled due to weather. It had been raining nonstop. I was frankly relieved. It's quite easy to get from Daegu to Incheon, especially one that there's an express train from the airport to Seoul station. My travel office is rigid about me flying to and from Daegu for some reason, so I always end up getting up early so that I can it around Incheon airport for four hours. There are worse places to be, but I'd rather sleep a little longer. Right now I am waiting four hours for a flight when I could be home in three on the train.

So I took the train to Incheon, trying out the new air express for the first time. It was spotless and efficient, with several smiling attendants to help me. I always want to ask these nice, English speaking customer service reps to come work for me. The Korean customer service I see in the travel industry hasn't made it to the Korean army civilians yet.

So I flew from Incheon to Narita, Japan with no problems. When I got to the gate at Narita, there was a plane at the gate. Always a good sign. Well, after our boarding time came and went, the captain got on the intercom and told us that there was an undiagnosed electrical problem with the plane, which would be delayed for some period of time. It turned out to be an hour delay, which put me in trouble for my connector. Shortly after we took off, I discovered that the screen on my aisle seat didn't work, and reluctantly moved to the back middle seat. I was next to a basketball-player-sized guy whose elbows wouldn't fit inside of his own seat area. Sigh.

When we landed in Chicago, attendants rushed me through customs and to the baggage rechecking area. Someone spent a long time scanning my bag, then sent me to the counter, where they told me my flight was cancelled due to equipment failure. There were a few more flights to Boston that day, so I decided to go on standby for one of them.

As it turned out, there were three flights cancelled for equipment problems, all United. Standby was a free-for-all, with people going from gate to gate hoping to catch a flight. I was number 38 on the standby list for an overbooked flight. I decided to cut my losses and take my confirmed flight for the following day, complete with free hotel room.

The next day, I went to the gate early to reconfirm my seat. There was no plane at the gate! I know that means trouble. Sure enough, the plane was late. A severe thunderstorm passed through and shut down air traffic for awhile. After an hour delay, we boarded. The captain told us we were twentieth in line to take off. After awhile, the engines shut off. The captain told us that a central air traffic control station was evacuated due to the weather, which had gone east, and that we were on the tarmac until further notice. About an hour later, we left.

I got to the conference in time for dinner, which was fine with me. The conference was fun, as far as conferences go. I met some fantastic people and learned a lot from them. We were in session all day, and would have had no time to see Boston if we were there instead of an hour away in Southbridge. We suggested to the bigwigs that we at least get a half day off to do some library related touring in the city next time. Library bigwigs tend not to be like other bigwigs, so perhaps they listened.

On my flight from San Francisco to Boston, the electronics in my window seat didn't work. I decided to suffer through a twelve hour flight with no movies rather than give up my seat. United really needs to overhaul their fleet.

The Patterson Problem

I have been aggressively weeding the adult fiction collection at Walker Library. Weeding is one of the more misunderstood tasks of my profession. It involves removing perfectly good books from our collection, which causes book lovers to squeal in horror. I do it to make space for new books, and in this case, to make space to move our young adult collection out of the children's room where it is withering. Young adults do not consider themselves children, and spend a lot of time trying to convince us of that. Entering the children's room to retrieve a copy of Twilight is capitulation, and they prefer not to do it.

Anyways, I have a few criteria for what books I will remove. If it has been checked out in the past year, it gets to stay. Today I did the M-P shelves, which unfortunately put me face to face with James Patterson. I probably spend 1/10 of my book budget on this man. He writes at least a book a month, and they all make it to the bestseller list. I quail to think of what will happen when he decides to write kid's picture books as well. We'll have to rename it James Patterson library.  Needless to say, Mr. Patterson has a couple of shelves to himself.  When I got to his section, I got a little excited about how many books I would be able to remove, but to my dismay, almost every Patterson book has been checked out in the past year!!

I strongly believe that "whatever gets you through the night, it's alright" (thanks, John Lennon). I have learned that people believe all sorts of things, and that there's not really one way to think about anything. I especially believe this about reading. If you read, you're cool to me. I don't care if it's Danielle Steele or Thomas Pynchon. That being said, come on! I can't believe this guy can crank out books like a factory and people devour them!  And now the Walker collection will be an even bigger percent Patterson because, while other authors who perhaps don't use ghostwriters are banished from the shelves, Jamie moneybags keeps his shelf space. Sometimes life isn't fair.

My first foray into ebook land

I have been working with books for about ten years now.  When I started, people were screaming about how ebooks were going to make paper books obsolete.  I remember my not-so-tech-savvy manager asking me if I could find textbooks on ipod back when the ipod only played music.  We had dusty ereaders at my old library system that nobody checked out.  For a long time, I felt like people were getting needlessly worked up over technology that was no match for an ink-and-paper book.

Ten years later,  think we have finally reached the tipping point where ebooks will surpass paper books.  Most of my friends have Kindles or Nooks, and they like them as much as their paper counterparts.  My old library system, which is broke but very forward thinking, offers several titles in ebook format, most of which are checked out.  As usual, the Army toddles behind (I think they switched to online catalogs in the late '90's), offering an embarrassingly small package of unpopular ebooks that are incredibly hard to find.

It's going to be hard to get me to convert before libraries start lending ebooks regularly.  It's hard to beat our prices. Today, however, I was faced with an emergency situation.  I have my first book club meeting in less than two weeks, and Amazon has still not delivered the book I ordered three weeks ago.  Expediency demanded that I order an ebook.  Being me, first I checked my old library system (I still have my card number memorized), followed by the Army's paltry selection.  All copies were checked out or not there to begin with.  I am partial to the Nook because you can read library downloads on it, so I downloaded a Nook app to my ipod and tried to buy the ebook.  Barnes and Nobles, may they get what they deserve, does not offer ebooks to anyone with an out-of-US billing address. I finally found success with Amazon, and will begrudgingly read as much of the book as I can manage on my ipod this weekend.  I don't think many people think the ipod is an ideal medium for reading.

I think I'll stick to ink and paper a little while longer.

Shouting at the wall

Reason #550 why it is frustrating to run an English speaking library in Korea:  Having to delegate some of my more unpleasant duties

Here's what I mean: This morning, the internet didn't work at our Carroll branch.  Our commercial internet is run by an outside company, so I had to ask one of my staff to contact them.  After a short conversation, he came back and told me that the company suggested that we restart the router, and if it didn't work they would stop by tomorrow.  They do not do work at Camp Carroll on Fridays, they said.  As anyone who works in a library with public internet knows, this is not an answer my staff can give to our patrons.

Koreans by and large get exceptional customer service, but they do not demand it.  It made one of my employees very uncomfortable to ask for a return on an item I bought in error.  At this point in our internet saga, I would normally put on my manager pants and muscle the company into fulfilling their duty.  Instead, I had to ask my employee to call back and be pushy for me.  I hated putting him outside of his comfort zone to do my job, but he was gracious about it.  Lo and behold, a few phone calls later and we got a repairman.

Living in a country where I do not speak the native language makes me feel impotent.  Ironic, since I do wear the manager pants for the first time in my life.  Much has been written about the power of language; I am not in the mood to wax philosophical nor do I have anything brilliant to add to this conversation.  But yes, words are a weapon I wield competently in my own world, and without them, I am disarmed.  Rats.