Rottenchester

Broadband Internet: Frontier DSL. I had RoadRunner for five years, but it just got worse every year. I switched to DSL a few months ago, and I'm surprised at how much better it is. Frontier has cleaned up their act in the last few years, and RoadRunner has never been as good as it was during its first few years in Roch.

Cell Phone: Verizon, unfortunately. Sprint's coverage fades outside of cities. The Cingular people I talk with are always breaking up. T Mobile is worse. The downside of Verizion is the limited phone selection and their desire to charge a lot extra for bandwidth that isn't used for voice calls.

Residential Phone: Frontier - I still can't see disconnecting my land line, and how could you use Time Warner when their service goes off whenever the power does?

TV: Dish Network. Time Warner's DVR (tivo) is a miserable device, and their "digital" cable is a bit clearer but still not nearly as good as Dish. Dish makes their own DVRs and they're pretty decent. The reception on Dish is noticeably better than Time Warner's cable, and Dish is cheaper. The downside is that you're at the mercy of the installer, but there are some good ones out there.

Your site is fully of sparkly goodness. I use it frequently to book travel from my beloved ROC to other wonderful places in this incomparable nation of ours. In fact, I so enjoy using your site that I have recommended it to friends and family members, all of whom are loyal Northwest flyers.

And therein, my cyber-friends, lies the reason for my letter. My mother, who is 68 and a pretty smart lady, has decided that it is no longer acceptable for her children to schedule all of her airline travel. No, even though we're happy to do so, she feels that she's missing out on an important part of the travel experience by letting us do her booking for her.

So Mom went on your site yesterday to book her ticket.

Now, a word about Mom. She's most familiar with this piece of technology:

Granted, this might seem like an antique to you, but Mom can really get one of these flying. And when Mom is cranking along on her typewriter, which she still uses, the third line of an address looks like this:

However, on your site, and on every other site on the Internet, an address looks like this:

And that really, really confuses Mom. Because, since the first time she touched a typewriter, she's been told that there's a comma between city, state and zip code. And it kills her to leave it out.

So, Mom tries this:

But your system tells her "Only alphanumeric characters are allowed in the address" and rejects it. And then Mom says, who has typed thousands, if not millions, of addresses like this since before you and I were born, says "WTF?"* and calls one of her kids (me) for help.

So, guys, I hope you can see my problem here. Mom's trying her best, and you're not. If you can see that the address has bad characters in it, why don't you just remove those characters and give the address a shot?

If you're not going to do it for me, do it for your Mom, or for Moms everywhere.

Thanks,

Your Internet Pal,

Rottenchester