Monday 31 October 2011

Where did my week go?

On October 20th I became unemployed (hopefully for a short time), so I decided to waste some time by writing down for a whole week where my time was being spent. The corresponding chart is below:





The biggest consumer of time was sleeping, and despite that fact, I still feel tired most of the time! Next, (not surprising being a father of two small children), was house duties (preparing food, help children with homework, clothes washing, etc.). Family time (basically during the weekend) is also high in the chart, and then my two main activities at the time: reading and playing the guitar. Obviously the data will change quite a bit when I start working again.

I also wrote down the car computer statistics: in this week I drove for 08:02 hours and 226.8 Kilometers (which gives an average speed of 28.35 Km/hour, not bad for the city), and petrol usage was 6.9l/100Km (which shows that I spent around 15.7 € to bring the kids and myself around the town for the whole week).

Keeping track of all the time spent in each activity was done with Org-Mode.

Thursday 27 October 2011

David vs. Goliath (Ángel vs. Spanair)

The letter below is in Spanish, but it basically says that Spanair agrees to pay 400€ due to a delay of nearly 4 hours in a flight from Madrid to Tenerife. This delay was very annoying, since they didn't even bother to offer us drinks or a decent meal. I was quite upset by this, so I decided to fight and found that the 400€ compensation is the responsibility of the airline, according to the European passenger rights (http://ec.europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/travel/passenger-rights/air/index_en.htm), but as mentioned in this article "[...] airlines are notorious for trying to wriggle out of their responsibilities and you may have to insist on your rights".

And indeed they try to wriggle... In my first formal complain to them, they just offered a one-leg national flight (not including taxes and administration charges) to be used in six months. This is a very poor form of compensation, since they are actually trying to make you buy another air-ticket with them, but with some discount.  As an individual it would probably be a bit cumbersome to get beyond this, but being a member of the Consumer Association OCU (http://www.ocu.org/), I forwarded the case to them, who offered to act as an intermediary, and in no time I got the letter below.