So I'm trying to get to Philly this weekend to see my cousin get married, and life being what it is -- can you say 60-hour work week? -- I've left my travel arrangements to the last minute. I'm looking around for a flight, and everything's looking expensive, so I go search travelocity (which I haven't used in ages) and lo and behold there's a last minute deal that's comparatively pretty sweet.

I jump on it. Only problem is, when I get the confirmation email back, I realize the dates of travel are two weeks too late. Oh man. So I call the 800 number, which instructs me to send an email.

That's annoying, but I send it. I get a response back in a couple hours giving the standard line about terms & conditions and all payments being final, and it's impossible for the system to switch the dates and blah blah blah. In the mean time, I've looked around and found no other deals, so I go back through travelocity and watch the whole thing like a hawk and I get the deal I want for close to the times I want, so at least I'm going to the wedding.

Still, I don't want to pay for travel I'm not going to use, and the line that "it's impossible for the system to switch dates" seemed a little suspect. I send them another email explaining and asking for a refund on the first purchase.

I also decide to do some investigating, and I come up with two interesting cached browser pages, which I take screenshots of:

Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 3:

Can you spot where it went wrong? In hindsight I can too, but in the moment, I trusted the travelocity web application, and I didn't painstakingly review my itinerary before clicking confirm. I looked and made sure the times were right as I was booking an overnight flight, but since I have no reason to even suspect that the travel dates had changed I didn't think to closely examine them.

You see, I trusted the machine. I had no reason to believe it was programmed to screw me, and no reason to believe a major player like Travelocity would deploy buggy software. I now have reasons to believe.

And so it comes out that they'll cancel my order, but they're going to stiff me on $100 penalty they pass on from the airline and the car rental place. There's an unsatisfying call with their customer service department, but no movement on this fee. Bottom line: because of a bug in their software (pretty clear something's fucked with their system), I got a switcharoo put on me, and because I didn't catch it, I'm out $100.

Ok, allright, fine. Legally, I think they're probably in the clear. Their customer service people need an attitude tune-up, but what else is new. The point is, if this is standard operating procedure for corporations getting online, this has pretty bad implications for the future of e-commerce. Essentially it means that the user (me) can place no trust in the systems put in place by the service provider, and that I should assume that even though I'm dealing with a machine, that the machine will attempt to screw me over.

That's not good mojo to be spreading around the net. The ultimate irony being that I just watched Terminator 3 the other day, and I aught to know better than to trust a fucking machine.