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June 29, 2005

i have discovered my spirit animal

- you've been all over the world, you've hunted just about every kind of game, you've stalked elephant, lions, tigers, polar bears, deer.. you've been within fifteen-twenty yards of the most dangerous game in the world. you've been everywhere. you've been with some of the most famous guides and hunters in the world. what's the biggest thrill that you've ever had out of hunting?

- well i think i can answer that just by, ah, calling attention to the, um LEOPARD CAT, BITCH!

Posted by matti at 09:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 28, 2005

seriously. fuck 'em.

if there's one industry that's even more systematically got a full-on fuck-you approach to customer service than banks do, it's airlines.

a couple of weeks ago it took me two hours to echeckin on SAS, the only like most used feature on their site i'm sure, and it but paraded a staggering array of incomprehensible behaviors such as changing languages at random, popping up windows that self-destruct before they're fully open, giving me mission-critical links that do literally fuck all when you click them and telling me every two minutes that "yo, that's twenty minutes of inactivity on your behalf right there, sir. i've timed myself out out of this session" what, is scandinavian.net on a different time velocity zone from the earth?

like fuckin 'ell. also, the below is what i just sent to KLM:

hi

this is seriously too stupid, i can't believe i'm even writing about this. see, i tried to join the flying blue programme.

first i tried it in firefox, page tried loading for forever so ok i switched to internet explorer. i'm not complaining yet, this is just exposition.

i filled in the first page of questions, i got the second page, filled it in, got a bunch of absolutely RETARDED error messages such as one, that my security question can't contain other characters than alphabets (like a question mark), and two, that my phone numbers must contain country code yet can't contain the standard plus sign; after gradually clearing these and other hurdles in several steps--which task took me way longer than it humanly should, and i'm a professional web designer for crying out loud--and so but the last thing i was stuck with was the--really, get this, this is SO good--"i agree with the conditions" type thing where i was instructed to check the box AND THERE WAS NO BOX TO CHECK. exactly how annoying that is after 10 minutes of absolute waste of time is hard to convey, so please just take my word for it: it was the rough equivalent of a real-life customer service person spitting in your face.

please contact me over this and help me get signed up in a humane manner or i will choose another airline for the flight i'm planning as well as all future flights, i will not subject myself to the web form again.

best regards

matti keltanen

also, i'm still waiting for my kuwait trip miles to appear on my lufthansa frequent flyer programme, and fuck if i know if they're there because for the last couple of days the "my mileage account" link has been leading to the following page (i am copy-pasting the entire source code of the page here for convenience):

Error 404: Error reported: 404

Posted by matti at 02:31 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 19, 2005

travel report, a touch belated

picture a mid-sized to large swath of low, unassuming, matter-of-fact concrete buildings¹ worn out by sand and heat to a jaded desert camo, standing en guard between the supersalinized, desaturated-turquoise gulf water and sand² blanketing by most modern estimates five and a half thousand googolplex bananamillion barrels of crude. to this vista beam from high orbit a collection of gleaming modernist structures in a kind of "playing simcity while high" style zoning plan, as well as a striking seaside installation of three trinkety orbs unevenly skewered two and a half decades ago on as many overlarge sis. add the amir’s disappointingly unadorned, if mind-bogglingly expansive, palatial situation, guard posts at every gate actually armed with unambiguously no-bullshit tripod-mounted machine guns, emphatically not inviting one to—to pick an example at random—walk up and point out "if photography is illegal, how do you justify all those security cameras?" and random maniacally western stuff like doghouse-sized subway sandwich kiosks, marble-glass-and-steel built speckless halogenic post-malls & cet ad n.

welcome to kuwait. please observe, as we trust you have, there is no photography allowed, nor gambling, alcohol or performances of non-arabic music, but also no:
- way you’ll stay alive outside in the sun for two hours. in fact we would like to dare you. sir;
- sense of social solidarity between classes or indeed any ideal of equality³;
- chance you can get anything like a decent connection on your mobile⁴.

on the way outstanding side of the scale, kuwaitis⁵ can put together a mean hotel (..if ours was at all representative), people we worked with at our client company tended to range from cool in my book to nothing short of absolutely wonderful (shouts to gwen, rimi and ravi for pretty much everything, extracurricular assistance in cultural affairs and mind-bending hospitality⁶, respectively), and food (especially indian and lebanese) is on the whole copious, outstanding and often dirt cheap.

i totally want to go back.

¹ about every three blocks one of the lower buildings would be a beautifully ornate (if externally indistinct color-wise) mosque, bafflingly to a western its minaret often pimped out on bright green neon lights. you sense these towers, usually the equivalent height of a small number of imaginary stories were probably the conspicuous skyline landmarks of a time before the teleportation in of the much larger, moneyed, dwarfing hulks of now. also, the muezzins' prayers freak the unaccustomed foreigner straight out by just being so damn stirring and for the record, some of us more soulless europeans don't like performances in public space that straight up grab you by the heart and go "listen up man, this is serious", thank you very much.

² re sand think frank herbert, except the country is like what, 0.1% the size of russia.

³ for a european brought up in state-sponsored warm fuzz, specifically one from a country of little if any serious old money, absolutely no unstoppable influx of fractional-native-wage immigrant labor or other class distinction contrast boosters, all the hardcore segregation shit is startlingly apparent and imbues one with a subtle insecurity as to what, historically, kuwait is smoking.

⁴ –an extra noodle-boggle in context of how big kuwaitis seem to be on their mobiles

⁵ "kuwaitis" here means, retardedly, "people of questionable nationality and intent, obviously physically stationed at the time in kuwait" but regarding a country where the groups "people" and "citizens" are something like polar opposites, i would like to assume requisite leeway, plead "foreign tool" and get on with it.

⁶ right, hospitality deserves a special mention. it's cool enough to be invited by a resident to go fishing in the weekend, but when it's "bonsai sea-murderer on line one, please hold" and you were by the way swimming there five minutes ago, it's like getting a full set of the fantods for christmas.

Posted by matti at 10:39 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

June 07, 2005

kuwait pics

btw i'm uploading at least the majority of my kuwait pics to flickr, you can see them here. i'll reserve this space for anecdotes and flickr links.

Posted by matti at 12:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

that's roughly what i'm talking about

i'm working from my hotel room today. i'm on the 4th floor; the building has maybe 40 floors. 21 of them are for hotel rooms, anything above that is inaccessible for mortals.

i strolled down to reception and asked if, you know, i they'd have any rooms available higher up in the building that i could, essentially, upgrade to, pref at no cost natch. and fuck if they didn't: i'm moving to the 21st floor as soon as they clean my new pad. "but it's a two-bed room. is that ok with you?"

update: pictures below

room:

lost the sheik size bed--damn!

view from window:

the minibar, however, is still the saddest i've ever seen.

Posted by matti at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

June 05, 2005

hit the deck motherfucker! orange juice, sir?

i have this big "to do" list in life, of which i just crossed out "cause one of those 'is there a doctor on board?' situations".

i thought i was so well rehearsed in hungover travel i'd be impervious to the ill effects of flying after getting absolutely shitfaced and not sleeping. oh but no.

i was half asleep on the plane, started to get all sweaty and woozy. i was too out of it to realize what was happening, i just had a general "shit what is this i've been here before and i just know this sucks" kind of feeling. i got up because i have no idea why, and basically dropped dead there. i was given hindu cow oxygen and basically a full medical: there were tons of eager doctors on board who were brutally elbowing each other to access me to run tests, any tests. over-enthusiastic doctor lady #1 who was seated nearby started by checking my pulse, which was great because i, not being a medical professional, would never have thought that maybe, just maybe, the cause of my fainting was death. turned out my blood pressure is like sixty over five and the german 70's leftover blutglucose hobby kit (something wicked this way comes!) pegged my blood "trocken".

in an unmistakable airline syllogism, because i was suspected of being not alive, me and co-travelling colleague xavier were bumped up to business class. of which he thanked me by asking me to faint before lunch on the next flight.

Posted by matti at 12:51 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

June 02, 2005

here. you throw this away

i got a couple of these flyers with this heart-rending message on them:

"We Seek God's Assistance
Central Bank of Kuwait"

so God, if you read this: you may not know this (oh, actually you probably would. but still), but the central bank of kuwait is so far up shit creek without a paddle that you're the only one who can help them. thanks bye

Posted by matti at 04:58 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack