Southern Air, Southern Air
“Southern Air” —- Ray Stevens
Flying high over Dixie
Going where no others dare
Southern Air, we’re Southern Air
Yeah, we’ll take you to your kinfolks
But you better have time to spare
If you ever had the pleasure of flying with the original incarnation of Piedmont Airlines, you could be forgiven for wondering if you’d stepped on board Ray Stevens’ fictional “Southern Air” complete with a screen door and screens for windows as well as very interesting passengers.
It wasn’t uncommon during the days before deregulation to see a passenger hop aboard with their durable shopping bags and then get off a couple of stops later and then they’d be back for the return trip a few hours later as we’d work our way back toward Charlotte.
But the one thing that truly set our beloved “Podunk Air” apart was customer service that was well and truly the gold standard of the airline industry in the 1970s and 1980s as deregulation took hold. Indeed, the “Up and Coming Airline” that was a “Model of How Good an Airline Can Be” which would reach it’s pinnacle when Piedmont would be named the “Airline Of The Year” by Air Transport World in 1984.
Piedmont would end up attracting the notice of US Air who would acquire Piedmont in 1987 and they’d completely merged operations by 1989.
There were plenty of things to not like about that merger but the one intelligent thing they did was keep the Piedmont crews together who would keep alive the spirit of customer service that was founder Thomas H Davis’ legacy.
Piedmont would give you the full can of pop to go with your drink well before the rest of the industry took notice and no flight was too short for a snack or meal service (to this day, I just want the can of ginger ale with no cup or ice and occasionally I might actually get just what I ask for!). Fayetteville to Charlotte rarely took more than 30 minutes in the air but even when they were flying the massive Boeing 727s on that route, you could count on every passenger being served.
If a flight was delayed for any reason that liberally could be construed as under Piedmont’s control, the chief purser was empowered to hand out $100 bills to each and every passenger for the inconvenience. In all the years I flew them, I only heard of that payout happening ONCE and that was because the flight was five minutes late arriving to destination due to a last minute passenger’s luggage being loaded in the cargo hold.
Can you imagine any of today’s airlines treating a customer’s needs during irregular operations or services failures anywhere near as well or graciously?
Piedmont employees from the pilots and cabin crew to the “ramp rats” I used to hang out with were genuinely had the best service in the skies of this country. Only Delta would ever come close to Piedmont’s “setting the pace”.
The reason I mention this is that anyone who ever flew the old Piedmont and remembered their amazing customer service is likely very disappointed by the behaviour of modern corporations who make it clear that they are interested in one thing and one thing only and it certainly isn’t your success or any semblance of convenience.
Take today’s recipient of the “Mr Davis Would Be Awfully Disappointed With These People” Award…Adobe.
OK, I can practically hear the crackling sounds of epic cringe amongst creative types who remember Adobe’s original licencing model being far more customer friendly than the subscription model they’ve effectively forced upon us.
It’s bad enough that we no longer own the software many of us have depended upon for many years for business and creative projects. But the insult to injury is that their subscription model is far more expensive now than the old Master Collection that was often perfectly fine for many years as compared to the yearly update cycles Adobe has put in play these last few years. And now the Adobe tools require software activation of the licence key on Adobe’s servers and they’ve been very big into hoovering up lots of creator copyrighted intellectual property stored in the cloud to train the new artificial intelligence (AI) features without attribution or compensation which they’re currently in litigation.
Adobe will argue that the subscription model allows them to push more frequent updates to the applications but that doesn’t really outweigh allowing the consumer to decide how they want to licence the software legally.
Adobe tools (and Photoshop in particular!) were easily the most pirated software packages before they went all-in on the subscription model. I can only imagine how much worse it is now with the tools for pirating software without accountability being so much better than they were even as recent as ten years ago.
The evil turn Adobe has taken through the years makes switching to cracked versions of their software very tempting but an inconvenient thing called honesty and a prior life as a professional programmer has so far kept me paying the monthly bribe to keep using the tools I’ve depended on for ages.
This tale started when Adobe decided to parachute a fairly noticeable price increase for the full set of tools which would add at least another $10/month to the subscription.
When business is great, most wouldn’t notice and might not even care as it’s a tax write-off.
But when the accounts receivable ain’t receiving like they used to, the last thing we needed was yet another increase on top of everyone else reaching into our pockets.
I understand that new features and innovation costs money and leads to rising prices.
Unfortunately the new features are all sorts of AI tools to do relatively simple things that I was already proficient in doing with the tools I already had. Having finally used one of those AI tools to redact some personal details from the screenshots attached to this post, I’ll confess that I’m more than a little underwhelmed as something that normally would take me a minute or so took closer to 45 before I was finally able to coerce the “artificial intelligence” to cut the offending parts of the images and then get rid of the messed up stuff it generated in it’s place that makes “AI Slop” so easy to detect if you know what you’re looking for!
My needs generally don’t need the latest and greatest features all of the time. I’m still using a non-subscription version of Microsoft Office 2010 that does pretty much everything I’d want without the additional bloat or subscription screwing of Office 365!
I’d have been more than happy to stay on Quickbooks 2010 Pro to do my accounting and accounting for my clients. Intuit is also shoving all sorts of “AI” features into Quickbooks Online and constantly changing the bloody interface whether I want it or not.
So I found myself in May having to cut monthly costs to the bone which just happened to coincide with the rate increase where my choice was to downgrade the Creative Cloud plan or just accept the screwing. I ended up downgrading to Creative Cloud Standard which was the same price I’d been paying the last few years and didn’t think much more about it.
A couple of months later, we’re having to get even more creative about finding monthly savings and that’s when I discovered that Adobe had managed to convert my month-to-month subscription to an annual contract and I didn’t realise it amongst all of the stress of having to wave a magical wand to try to slay the financial dragons.
I was always of the mind that Adobe was a necessary evil but generally the evil wasn’t necessarily by design but rather the fact that they are pretty much a monopoly in all the bad ways you can imagine. There are alternative tools to Adobe’s but if you spend any amount of time working on photos or cutting video or rocking Acrobat for PDF files, the other alternatives are nowhere near as polished or easy to use.
The forced change to the subscription model was the first instance I’d experienced where I was thinking the evil being done to the consumers was very much intentional on their part.
If you look at the screenshots, you will see a couple of places where they do mention the annual plan commitment but compared to how visible and highlighted other elements on the various pages of the subscription wizard are compared to the much smaller font of the elements that call out “annual contract incoming!”, you can see they’re clearly downplaying that aspect of the transaction hoping you won’t notice it until it’s too late.
That’s the very essence of “spider web marketing” where the corporation hopes their victim blunders into the web and gets stuck and drained of all that is vital by the corporation.
I’ll confess I was right pissed when I realised what had happened mostly at myself for having missed that they were locking me up for another year minimum.
Even though Lightroom and Photoshop are used in The Nerdery on a daily basis (and Acrobat just about as much), I was so angry at having been fooled by them that I was genuinely ready to chuck Adobe in the ditch and just suck it up in learning a new tool set.
You can imagine how horrified I was when I saw the next page where Adobe wanted to royally screw me for outright canceling what I genuinely had no idea at the time was an annual commitment with a huge breakup fee!
So much for the previous screen saying “they get it” when it comes time to going our separate ways… 🙁
Fortunately, two things worked in my favour:
- I still wanted Lightroom and Photoshop as they are the most efficient way for me to catalog and cull photos (particularly on the iPad though I discovered that a feature of being able to crop and adjust white balance/contrast on RAW images on the iPad I’ve had for several years is now been put behind an additional paywall by those bastards at Adobe. Things like that really make them easy to dislike intensely… 🙁
- There is a much cheaper plan with just those two tools that bypasses the “royally screw the customer for canceling” fee if I go ahead and change the current plan to that plan and agree to reset the annual contract clock to a new year.
If I really wanted to chuck Adobe in the bin, changing to that cheaper plan and then canceling that new plan a day or so later (as long as it’s before the date they mention on the screens where they’ll once again apply their ruthless cancellation policy) allows you to cancel your plan completely without the fee.
That workaround has been out there long enough that I’m genuinely surprised Adobe hasn’t closed that loophole but I imagine that they haven’t mainly to use as a mitigating factor as they were previously smacked hard by the Federal Trade Commission for making it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription with them.
As it is, it takes a bit of creativity and a few extra steps but it can be done.
But given how many other people have fallen into that same trap of having an annual contract slipped in on them and then having to go through hell (especially if you ring up the people they laughingly call “customer service”) to update or cancel the subscription, it still seems to me that Adobe is engaging in deceptive trade practises and the FTC could do more to reign in their more evil tendencies.
With the current administration being totally on board with corporations (as well as the government itself) giving the consumers a full rogering in a very uncomfortable location, good luck with that!
As for me, I’ve still got a much cheaper subscription than I had (though I’d be shocked if it doesn’t get a price increase or two during the term of this agreement they’ve foisted upon me) and I’ll be learning Davinci Resolve (for video production to replace Adobe Premiere Pro) and PDF24 (to replace most of Acrobat’s functionality with the only thing I’m truly going to miss being the Bates numbering stamp feature to identify exhibits and attachments to documents I occasionally have to generate for clients).
It just would have been lovely if I didn’t have to go through hell to get here!
