In Country select, there is an option named "Tibet". That hurts we Chinese very much.

As all we know, Tibet is a province of China. It CANNOT be singled out as an individual COUNTRY.

The situation is not the same as Taiwan.

Tibet must be removed from the list.

I ordered a ticket from Travelocity. I refused to use Expedia when they were part of Microsoft, and now they're not Microsoft but they still have the Microsoft Attitude; Orbitz uses pop-up ads and doesn't book international flights. Travelocity has finally (years after the Internet and decades after it became technically possible) added a feature where you can see all (or rather, some) of the relevant fares; you then pick a fare and it shows you a calendar covering a few months, indicating the days for which that fare is available. It still has some glitches - picking a starting day usually causes most of the available return days to disappear - but those are glitches of the underlying system, not the web site. This system gives more visibility to the buyer, and while it still has a long way to go at least it's progress.

Speaking of progress. Or not. Travelocity wouldn't issue an e-ticket; they insisted on paper delivery. Which is fine, but they charged me 25 bucks for FedEx 2nd day. Package delivery gives me the heebie-jeebies, because I've had three or four consecutive UPS nightmares. They have several delivery options - they can leave stuff, they can let somebody else sign for it, they can let you let somebody else sign for it, they can let you sign to let them leave stuff, or they can insist that you sign in person. They refuse to specify even to the nearest day when they plan to deliver a package, so the sign-in-person option is pretty early-20th-century. The option that says you have to sign for it is worded similarly to the option that says you can sign the notice and have them leave it next time, so when I tried that once I got a second notice with a vigorous underlining of the relevant word or two differentiating the options. Since then, I've been careful to tell vendors to tell UPS to let me sign to have them leave it. This request has been ignored every time by UPS. UPS can rot in hell as far as I'm concerned.

Expecting more of the same, I put in my current workplace as the delivery destination for FedEx.

Two weeks later, on May 14th 2003 if you want to be exact, and I do because this time I've caught on early to the fact that I'm in the middle of a developing not-my-responsibility clusterfuck where the best possible outcome is merely losing a bit of money and wasting a few hours on the phone, and the worst possible outcome a $800 loss and serious jeopardy to my travel plans (having read the airline deregulation book, I'm now aware that airlines can basically take your money at will, and delivering a service such as the safe translocation of your corporeal form is done at their discretion if at all), I went to Travelocity to find out where my ticket was. I found the FedEx tracking number, and looked it up, only to find it had been delivered to an address in Bellevue (a suburb of Seattle) and signed for by a P. Curtis. Further detective work on Travelocity's site revealed that they had my ticket delivery address as the apartment complex where I used to live. A place where the office cheerfully signs for residents' packages. And perhaps, former residents?

I called them and left a message; they left a message in return saying that they had indeed signed for it, and then delivered it to the current resident of my old apartment, who eventually returned it to the complex office, where they returned it to FedEx. Nobody in the sequence apparently thought to try and contact me. (Salt in the wound: I visited friends at the same complex right in the middle of this sequence of events. I remember walking down the railroad tracks and realizing I hadn't even looked towards my old apartment.)

So I called FedEx and got a computer system that was very eager to interpret voice commands. I use hands-free headset when I know I'm going to be waiting a long time and thus need not one but both hands free for, for example, plotting the demise of my enemies, such as the inventor of voice mail. The combination of a sensitive microphone and a computer system as inventive as the Door in the Heart of Gold - well, it's a bad combination. When I reached the inevitable point of saying, "fuck you," it said, "I think what you said is, 'I want to enter another package number.'" Ultimately it hung up on me when I sighed loudly.

I called back and held my breath until I was transferred to a Mister Joey Iacovelli, who was able to give me a new fact not present on the web site: the package was in Issaquah, due to be returned to sender as of May 14 (today, for those keeping score at home). Nothing, he said, could be done.

I then called Travelocity (888-709-5983). Their voicemail was more polite and slightly more helpful, and when I said "help" it said, "I think what you said is 'help'." I was able to identify some of the Muzak, including Groovy Kind of Love, and Marvin Gaye's classic Piece of Clay. Not that the Muzak version was very classic, or classy, so I pulled up the real thing to listen to while I waited. And waited. And waited. They were experiencing unusual call volume, you see.

Eventually, Ronnie, Agent Sign ARW, came on the line. He insisted that I had typed the three-year-old address into the web site when I ordered the ticket and was not willing to entertain the notion that their web site might theoretically be at fault. When he made it clear that I would be paying the $19.95 charge to have the ticket sent a second time, I made it clear that I would try much harder to find palatable alternative vendors for future travel purchases. Ronnie asked if there was anything else he could help me with. I thanked him for his attentive service and twenty-three minute hold time. He apologized for the hold time. I then asked if they anticipated going out of business in the next six months or if they thought SABRE would kick in more money. Ronnie said that he wasn't a fortune teller. It's possible that may have been a sore spot for him.

So it looks like Travelocity's website bug (okay, to be fair it's only about 80 percent likely that it's their bug. It's possible that I only intended to have the ticket delivered to my current workplace, though that wouldn't explain my memory of digging online for the zip code. It's also possible that they just used the old address on file and never showed it to me, though I would consider that a bug as well. From Steve and Jessie's horror stories about the internal workings of Expedia, an outright bug where an address is gathered and then discarded would be unexceptional for the industry.) will end up costing me an extra $20 and an hour of hypertension. Why is designing a working computer so damned difficult? Clearly this species has access to technology that it's not yet mature enough to use. Anyway, now I can start worrying about visas and work permits. And how much fatter I'll get with steady access to Danishes. But they don't call them Danishes there, says Lonely Planet. Come to think of it, I'll bet they don't call hot dogs Hebrew Nationals in Israel. And never mind British-owned French's Mustard, made in the USA. But the USPS, bless their testicle-cancer-survivor-sponsoring souls, left my grandmother's latest package of chocolate on the doorstep, so if you'll excuse me, it's time for some food therapy. Next week we'll nationalize the airlines - I bet Halliburton wouldn't mind the work.

Lord Renton: My Lords, will the Minister explain how it is that an inedible tinned food that lasted for ever and was supplied to those on active service can become an unsolicited e-mail, bearing in mind that some of us wish to be protected from having an e-mail?

Lord Sainsbury of Turville: My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to find out why the term "spam" is used, but that is the meaning it now has. It is a matter that should be taken very seriously because it not only clutters up computers but involves a great deal of very unpleasant advertising to do with easy credit, pornography and miracle diets. That is offensive to people, and we should try to reduce it.

Lord Faulkner of Worcester: My Lords, I can help the Minister with the origin of the word. It comes from aficionados of Monty Python, and the famous song, "Spam, spam, spam, spam". It has been picked up by the Internet community and is used as a description of rubbish on the Internet.

More seriously, is the Minister aware that up to 85,000 pieces of unsolicited e-mail are received by the Parliamentary Communications Directorate each month? Will he join me in congratulating the directorate on its valiant efforts to filter out that menace, given that a high proportion of it is rubbish advertising from the United States and that some of it consists of profane material? The directorate is battling against a rising tide; the Government's assistance is needed in combating it.

...

Lady Saltoun of Abernethy: My Lords, do the Government have any plans to restrict unsolicited faxes? My fax paper is always being wasted by people who send me faxes I do not want. I do not know whether they could be called "corned beef" or something, but I have had enough of them.