Never Trust a Website!

There are some things in the world that just aren't what they appear to be.  Other things appear to be different things to different people.  The internet, for example, is a serious research tool to most universities, but to my deer hunting buddy Kip it’s little more than a glorious collection of the world's most bizarre pornography. 

As a young programmer right out of college, I worked for the Johnson Space Center in Houston.  When the internet was in its infancy, JSC didn't trust it.  Wide-area e-mail systems and distributed file server networks with any hint of "public" in them gave NASA a serious case of the "Heebie-Jeebies" and probably for good reason.  So… it was smarter for them to load sensitive data onto one or more 3.5" floppy disks, entrust them to one of us, and fly us to Kennedy Space Center so we could spent about 8 minutes downloading the data before being done for the day.  It didn’t take us 20 something single folk to discover the more entertaining aspects of Cocoa Beach either, (The shuffleboard tables at The Outpost saloon were incredible) but I digress (again)…

Today, I have mixed feelings about the internet.  Bringing down the internet could cripple or flat out cause the end of many publicly traded companies. Then again, some companies might just double their productivity since the internet, although helpful, serves as a distraction.  As a frequent traveler, the internet is the life's blood of my calendar, schedule, and travel confirmation numbers.  More and more lately however, I'm learning that most travel based websites have problems.  It's ironic in a way, that I spend my career teaching people how to build and use corporate websites, only to discover that precious few of them operate well and stay timely or current.

Recently I had to fly a dog to Houston and I thought, "I'll just to NWA's website and download the appropriate info."  Little did I know, that everything from the procedures, to the price charts were woefully outdated.  I built a budget out of completely erroneous data and was quite surprised when I finally called to make and pay for the reservation that it cost me almost $100 more than their website said it would.  Several calls later, a customer service lady and I clicked through their website together and she agreed, "We need to do a better job of training our representatives to understand what's out there."  I suggested a different tack, "Why don't you update the website to match what your representatives use to quote prices?"  "That's a different department," she told me.