A few weeks ago, my friend Anne Jackson blogged about American Airlines. Her inspired blog post aptly titled “American Airlines is the Devil” drew a lot of comments from weary travelers who had similarly painful experiences with the airline. It took American Airlines a long time to notice and respond to Anne’s post, which is read by thousands of people. Eventually someone from the company acknowledge her complaints and even confessed that AA needs to do a better job managing its online reputation. As far as I’m concerned, they need to do a better job managing their entire business let alone their online reputation. But I’ll leave that discussion for another time. In contrast with the flying woes of AA, I had a WOW experience with Southwest recently. They did something I didn’t expect them to do. Last Wednesday I boarded a Southwest airline flight from Nashville to Hartford and…

Lately I have become an unwilling member of the emergency room frequent guest program. Six weeks ago I spend the better part of an afternoon at ER of centennial hospital after finishing the Nashville Marathon. [I wrote about it here.] This past Saturday I returned to another ER, Williamson Medical Center, with my youngest son, Derek, after he got a small gash on the top of his head during a “friendly sword fight” (official version by his older brother, Marcus). The swords in question were not real swords but hockey sticks that doubled as ninja weapons. However, the whole incident was not as traumatic to the family, including the busted boy, as was our trip to the ER. No wonder our health care system is in such a crisis. Since the cut happened Saturday afternoon, we called the pediatrician’s office to see if we could get the physician on weekend…