For more than 10 years (1994 - 2004), I wrote a self-syndicated column called “Utah Tech Watch” that began as a biweekly column and six months later moved to a weekly schedule.
Over time this column was published by three papers — the Deseret News (now the Deseret Morning News), The Daily Herald (in Provo, Utah) and The Enterprise (Utah’s weekly business paper) — as well as being distributed for free via email to several thousand subscribers.
Each year, one of my most fun and yet difficult self-directed assignments was to identify the top 10 stories of the year.
I plan to resurrect “Utah Tech Watch” as an online media property in 2008, and when I do, I’ll also resurrect its annual Top 10 stories piece. But for now, let me transpose this idea to this SOAR Communications blog with what I propose are the Top 10 Global SOAR Stories of 2007.
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On Sunday, September 16, 2007, after spending two lovely days in northernmost California I was slated to fly on United flight #5575 at 10:39 a.m. (PDT) from Eureka/Arcata (ACV) to San Francisco (SFO) on the first leg of a trip that would take me home to the greater Salt Lake City area.
Since I had only carry-on bags, I was able to bypass the extremely long line at the check-in counter and get my boarding passes electronically through the United ticket kiosk. That was nice.
However, 15-20 minutes later, United ticket counter personnel made a general announcement stating that flight #5575 was delayed due to fog at SFO, with departure now expected at 12:10 p.m. (PDT). Due to the delayed departure, I and others on the flight were warned that we would likely miss our connecting flights and that we should A) get back into line to change our reservations, or B) call the United reservations line (or log onto United.com) to change our reservations.
Given the extremely long line of people waiting at the United ticket counter, I opted to try calling the United reservations phone number. This is where my problems really began.
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