From a distance

This is a funny story where any of us could be the one making the mistake. In this case, though, the mistake comes from the fact that an airline company (like many other companies) has moved their reservations center to a foreign country (India in this case). They do this to decrease the costs of maintaining the service. I guess.

One of the guys in our office was planning a family ski vacation to Colorado. He had reservations to fly from Boston, Massachusetts to Denver, Colorado and then, making a connection by a smaller airline,  to a smaller, local airport in the mountains of Colorado. But a storm is coming and he wanted to change his reservations to leave a day earlier. It was a last minute change and he expected problems. But the reservation agents were having real trouble getting the connections to match. It looked like he was going to have to spend a night in Denver and then take the local flight the next day. In an attempt to be helpful, the agent in India suggested that perhaps he could drive from Boston to Denver and then the airline could fly him the rest of the way by plane!

This joke may be lost on anyone outside the United State so I've put a map here to explain the joke. As you can see, the majority of the distance of the trip is from Boston to Denver (1767 mi or 2844 km). The distance the airline offered to fly him (approximately 150 mi or 240 km) is less than a tenth the distance they asked him to drive. To people in India, I suppose, once you're in the United States, everything is close. Of course, you would hope that the airline would have provided their agents in India with a map so they could check these types of problems but, apparently, the airline was really trying to cut costs and decided a map was too extravagant. From a small map, though, it might look like the two cities are are really close. Like the song From a Distance. From a distance, all of our differences, seem small.

So, before we laugh, imagine if someone asked us if it was better to drive from Mumbai to Kalyan (both in India) or from Mumbai to Bengaluru. Yeah, I wouldn't know, either.