The Nature of Narrative in the Age of Networks

Or, “I Paid $12.95 to (Try to) Post to My Own Blog”

I’d really like to know how many others out there think GoGoInflight is a no-go, lame-o, rarely-works-o service?

I’ve tried GoGo perhaps 20 times (yeah, I know the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result). Probably 4 times out of 5 it’s been fraught with connectivity issues, “errors occurring when submitting my data” and strange re-directs (it’s like the Winchester Mystery House of ISPs). The only thing that’s worked flawlessly for me is the billing (when it’s able to connect) and the chat to customer support usually works (but didn’t really this time, it kept dumping me from the queue claiming network problems were causing it)… but even the customer service chat doesn’t provide the ability to share a screenshot of what’s happening on my machine. Lame.

Hey, GoGo! The 1990s called. They want their “Internet Service Provider” business back.

Airlines! Why didn’t pit two services against each other. Give me two ISPs on-board. Oh, they’ll get good fast and push each other to get flawless fast, through competition for my dollars. I simply cannot imagine the incremental cost to put two wi-fi systems into the plane is significant. I don’t know what deal you cut with GoGo… but I hope you didn’t pay them.

As a species, we must have a masochistic streak a mile wide, or a technology addiction so acute that we put up with cell phones with lousy coverage, first-generation devices so bug-infested they’d be given Cs by City Health Departments, and airborne ISPs who don’t embody the words “internet,” “service,” and “provider.” I don’t even want to be connected on an airplane… it was pretty much my last vestige of off-the-grid tranquility. So who’s really the lame-o here, eh?

Postscript: Try as I might (like for half the flight), I could not get connected via GoGo, so this blog post had to wait until I got to a more reliable bit of connectivity.