Paradigm shift

I'm going to be on the road interviewing for most of the next eight weeks, so as you can imagine there are a lot of travel arrangements to make. And many of them are a bit complicated: fly into this city, take a train to that one, catch a red-eye from somewhere else in time for the next interview, all with very limited flexibility in times and dates. I've been getting quite frustrated with the interface options at a lot of the travel web sites; for example, today Hertz.com absolutely refused to let me rent a car for one day only.

So I've been doing something I haven't done for a long, long time -- picking up the phone and calling a travel agent. It started when I spent over an hour trying to book a three-leg plane flight with a limited window of takeoff times, and I just couldn't get what I needed online. So I called the local agent, and five minutes and $35 later I had my tickets! A human being and a telephone.... hmm, I wonder if this new technology has a future.