Jim Carson

In my wild youth, I did a lot of business travel. The "perk" of subjecting myself to the perverse brutality of airports, rental cars, and hotels was the frequent flier miles. I became a Shao-lin master in the ways of hoarding miles.

Then I had a string of bad travel experiences and realized domestic airline travel really sucks. I had accrued nearly a million frequent flier chits, spread across a bunch of airlines, and it was now time to use them. The first trip was in 1999 to take the family on a trip to New Zealand. Even with eight months' notice, I spent nearly two hours on the phone trying to extract the secret code phrase that would enable an itinerary that would get us to New Zealand and back. The best I could do was flying on the elbow of the shoulder season to Wellington via Sydney via Los Angeles, and leaving from Christchurch via Sydney via Los Angeles. The international portion was free, but I still had to buy the Seattle to LA tickets.

An aside: if you've ever flow internationally through LAX, you may have experienced a role model for building a screwed up international transit system. Here's how it works:

1. Fly to LA domestically.
2. Pick up your bags from baggage claim.
3. Exit the airport. Go on, git!
4. Walk along the outside rim to the international terminal in the other concourse. I hope you packed light, because unlike any airport in Europe, you're on your own to find and pay for a cart.
5. Go through security/check in all over again. Bonus points if you can convince the security attendant that you're carrying film not popcorn.
6. Check in again.

Adding to the adventure, Alaska Airlines reassigned our adjacent seating such that my spouse, my 1 1/2 year old (at the time) and I all had assigned seats in different parts of the (full) aircraft. The counter agent deferred responsibility to the gate agent. The gate agent deferred responsibility to the flight crew. The flight crew deferred responsibility to a half-eaten bag of peanuts stuff between the seats. Important lesson learned: it is easy to persuade someone they want to swap seats with you as an alternative to sitting next to a drooling infant.

We had a great time, but I still had a lot of frequent flier miles left. I blew quite a few flying various friends and relatives around the country.

Officially, FF miles have a face value of about $0.02, but that's only for taxation purposes (thankfully, this went away in 2002). If you don't want to travel, you exchange them at even sorrier rates for other travel-related things like a free weekend night at the Chicago Midway Days Inn (located conveniently under the takeoff path for a guaranteed early morning wake-up call), or a dumpster-facing, windowless hut on a Naval Bombing Range (available only during monsoon season), or a free upgrade from an SUV to a behemoth rental car (no other discounts apply). In other words, they're worth ... less.

Then came Milepoint, which trumpeted new and exciting use of accrued miles. Wohoo! ... not quite. They are offering discounts on large-scale purchases like cruises. The only "free" thing you can get is magazines. On the other hand, for the handful of airlines that I have minimal mileage on, it's a way to clear out the accounts.

Initially, I was pissing away scrub miles on magazines that I never heard of. I could try Stuff I wouldn't spend much Time Dwelling on. The magazines change, and are gravitating towards the commoditized and extreme niche publications like Great Lakes Angler.

My Time magazine subscription is up, and about nine months ago they started sending me renewal notices. The "final... and we might really mean it this time" came with a renewal rate of $38.95 for a year. (I'm out of miles.)

I think having a weekly would be good in an election year, but the pricing is wacky. For example, if I login to the time.com web site, they offer me a special bonus online renewal price of $1.25/issue, or ~$68 for a year. Online renewal is not worth $30 extra to me.

I poked around, and found that if I was a new subscriber, the rate is $24.95/year, but they add an auto-renewal "at the current rate," which means cancellation is done by navigating the Heart of Darkness. The randomly-generated subscription price reminds me of my first mortgage when I'd ask the broker what the rate was, he'd open his top right desk drawer, take a peek, and regurgitate a number. I'd change one variable of the equation, he'd repeat the process.

Dear Time Warner/AOL/CNN, I don't have time for this. I'll not be subscribing.