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#51
September 4th 05, 01:47 AM
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The Real Bev wrote:
If you go during the week and get there early enough to be one of the first up, correct. There are NO lines at first, so there's no particular reason to stop. Ok, so for the first run, you loose maybe 10 seconds. I can't rest unless I'm sitting down. Standing with bent knees is rapidly exhausting. Hmmm.. bummer. try spending those ten seconds you save to find some better equipment. The smarter ones recognize me after a few runs -- there aren't that many grown-up (don't even think of using any other word) women skiing fast and alone on old skis. Then they just wave and say "Come on out." You have smart lifties? And you still just queue up in line. Do a google search on queuing theory. I have a resident expert. While theory is generally good, sometimes observation is sufficient. Then, observe what happens once the chairs fill up. If the observation doesn't fit the theory, you could have quite a windfall by publishing it. You could rock the mathematics world. I won't hold my breath. The liftie can see the color of the passes or even remember that she's already passed some people. At some point I think they just stop caring. The liftie part is easy and takes no time. You must have honest people in CA. Here in gang infested Utah, most resorts check each and every time, most actually scanning a bar code on the ticket. Takes several seconds, but again, when you have a 15 minute line, doesn't really mater. What's annoying is having to stop, trudge along in a line to get through the rotating knives, turn a sharp corner without bashing the people around you with your skis or poles, trudge along (frequently a bit uphill for some ungodly reason) to the next sharp turn (repeating avoidance manoeuvres) then insert yourself into a group of 3 boarders (maybe 6 lines, but who's counting?) who are afraid to let you in even though they collectively outweigh you by 200 pounds or allow you to join and then hang back at the last minute, allowing you to ride in solitary splendor to the top. Well, the way they arranged their queue has nothing to do with how they scan tickets. Just sounds inept to me. They even use infrared sensors on the cats here to assure that the queue is level. What mostly annoys me is things that get in my way because they're designed stupidly. If I lived in NO I'd be really ****ed that the damn levees broke because the people we pay to take care of things like that were asleep at the switch. Yup, yet we'll vote them back in for a second term. Where I live it ****es me off that freeway on-ramps with metering signals default to red; even when there's nobody in line you have to stop at the signal and wait for it to turn green. Over days, weeks, months and years that wastes a tremendous amount of time, gas, brake lining, etc. If it defaulted to green and then turned red for n seconds after the sensor informed it that a car had passed by everybody would be a lot better off. There is NO downside. That's how they work here. Since I do not drive during rush hour, the light is always green and I don't even have to slow down. People don't get grouchy because they get older, they get grouchy because they've seen so much **** like that that they're no longer willing to cut any slack at all for idiots because they've already used up their supply. But somehow they are willing to cut slack for idiots in office. ; Ducking -klaus 
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#52
September 4th 05, 03:21 AM
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klaus wrote:
Walt wrote: As long as you don't mind the indignity of humping the turnstile every time you want to get on to the lift. Do you guys wear lead clothes or something? um...no. I guess it's just that the turnstile won't open until the pass is in close proximity to the reader. And I'm impatient. Seriously - you've probably never skied laps on a man made molehill in the midwest. A round trip - take the lift up, ski down - takes under three minutes. Ten seconds waiting for the the turnstile to open is an *eternity*. The only way to get in any sort of vert is to start timing your turns about 2/3 of the way down to get in synch with the lift so that you can ski right up to the loading area at the precise time that the chair arrives. Anything else is just wasteful. Yes, it makes no sense to ski like this on a real mountain, but habits die hard. Especially when one has flown across the continent and knows that it's only physically possibly to ski X runs between 9am and 4pm each day before flying back to the flatlands. Each second is precious. AND knowing that winters in North America are cruelly short, passing by in the blink of an eye, seconds waiting for the turnstile to open will haunt one all summer, lamenting what could have been: If only I had humped a bit more efficiently, I could have gotten in two more runs last February. Is it winter yet? -- // Walt // // There is no Turnstile Humping Conspiracy
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#53
September 4th 05, 03:35 AM
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klaus wrote:
The Real Bev wrote: If you go during the week and get there early enough to be one of the first up, correct. There are NO lines at first, so there's no particular reason to stop. Ok, so for the first run, you loose maybe 10 seconds. I can't rest unless I'm sitting down. Standing with bent knees is rapidly exhausting. Hmmm.. bummer. try spending those ten seconds you save to find some better equipment. You only get one good set of body parts. Sometimes you can buy a few replacements that don't work as well as the originals but they're damn expensive... The smarter ones recognize me after a few runs -- there aren't that many grown-up (don't even think of using any other word) women skiing fast and alone on old skis. Then they just wave and say "Come on out." You have smart lifties? For very small values of 'smart', yes. And you still just queue up in line. Do a google search on queuing theory. I have a resident expert. While theory is generally good, sometimes observation is sufficient. Then, observe what happens once the chairs fill up. If the observation doesn't fit the theory, you could have quite a windfall by publishing it. You could rock the mathematics world. I won't hold my breath. Good plan. Once the chairs fill up and the lines move slowly, it doesn't much matter anyway. By that time it's starting to get slushy and I'm starting to get tired. The liftie can see the color of the passes or even remember that she's already passed some people. At some point I think they just stop caring. The liftie part is easy and takes no time. You must have honest people in CA. Here in gang infested Utah, most resorts check each and every time, most actually scanning a bar code on the ticket. Takes several seconds, but again, when you have a 15 minute line, doesn't really mater. They have barcode readers, but they don't use them on every ticket. I can't imagine that the louts on boards are any more honest than anyone else, but it's easy to check the color of the pass and the date is printed on one side (why not two and save a lot of flipping?). I would guess that most of the patrons are day-trippers and unlikely to have collected a full set of colors, and the date would easily reaveal a fraud. What's annoying is having to stop, trudge along in a line to get through the rotating knives, turn a sharp corner without bashing the people around you with your skis or poles, trudge along (frequently a bit uphill for some ungodly reason) to the next sharp turn (repeating avoidance manoeuvres) then insert yourself into a group of 3 boarders (maybe 6 lines, but who's counting?) who are afraid to let you in even though they collectively outweigh you by 200 pounds or allow you to join and then hang back at the last minute, allowing you to ride in solitary splendor to the top. Well, the way they arranged their queue has nothing to do with how they scan tickets. Just sounds inept to me. They even use infrared sensors on the cats here to assure that the queue is level. That's why I said their system was as screwed up as everything else there. What mostly annoys me is things that get in my way because they're designed stupidly. If I lived in NO I'd be really ****ed that the damn levees broke because the people we pay to take care of things like that were asleep at the switch. Yup, yet we'll vote them back in for a second term. Who knew? I think we've had this discussion before... I would hope that the long-term civil service people, the ones who would be in charge of doing useful things, would have something more than a nice smile and a firm handshake to recommend them. Who's really responsible for the levees? The Corps of Engineers? The Mayor of NO? The NO Minister of Public Works? Sally the Secretary? Where I live it ****es me off that freeway on-ramps with metering signals default to red; even when there's nobody in line you have to stop at the signal and wait for it to turn green. Over days, weeks, months and years that wastes a tremendous amount of time, gas, brake lining, etc. If it defaulted to green and then turned red for n seconds after the sensor informed it that a car had passed by everybody would be a lot better off. There is NO downside. That's how they work here. Since I do not drive during rush hour, the light is always green and I don't even have to slow down. During non-rush hour they turn them off. During rush hour (and they don't know about weekends for some reason)(rush hour can be 8 or 9 hours straight, it seems like) they default to red even when there's no traffic to meter. People don't get grouchy because they get older, they get grouchy because they've seen so much **** like that that they're no longer willing to cut any slack at all for idiots because they've already used up their supply. But somehow they are willing to cut slack for idiots in office. ; Ducking Less and less. I know somebody doesn't have to be a good speaker in order to be effective (although it certainly helps), but SURELY there should be somebody on his staff that can keep him from saying the awful things he does. Where is CJ when we need her? I take comfort in my continuing belief that the other guy would have been worse, but we'll never know. -- Cheers, Bev ---------------------------------------------- Linux: The penguin is mightier than the sword
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#54
September 4th 05, 04:09 AM
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Walt wrote:
klaus wrote: Walt wrote: As long as you don't mind the indignity of humping the turnstile every time you want to get on to the lift. Do you guys wear lead clothes or something? um...no. I guess it's just that the turnstile won't open until the pass is in close proximity to the reader. And I'm impatient. Ditto. He only makes fun of us because he doesn't understand. One thing I forgot -- the turnstile openings are smaller than you might expect, and if you move too quickly you can jab yourself with one of the rotating knives. Seriously - you've probably never skied laps on a man made molehill in the midwest. A round trip - take the lift up, ski down - takes under three minutes. 6 minutes up and 3 or 4 minutes down if I didn't have to stop and catch my breath. Rest happens on the chair. Ten seconds waiting for the the turnstile to open is an *eternity*. The only way to get in any sort of vert is to start timing your turns about 2/3 of the way down to get in synch with the lift so that you can ski right up to the loading area at the precise time that the chair arrives. Anything else is just wasteful. Now that's bordering on anal. I don't think I'd be able to time it that carefully even if I wanted to. Besides, it's a detachable quad and they halt the line often enough that it would foul up serious timing anyway. Yes, it makes no sense to ski like this on a real mountain, but habits die hard. Especially when one has flown across the continent and knows that it's only physically possibly to ski X runs between 9am and 4pm each day before flying back to the flatlands. Each second is precious. Even without the flight each second is precious. And then there's the thought that if I break something this might be the last second. Depressing. Hmph. Rehnquist just died. Let the wild rumpus start. AND knowing that winters in North America are cruelly short, passing by in the blink of an eye, seconds waiting for the turnstile to open will haunt one all summer, lamenting what could have been: If only I had humped a bit more efficiently, I could have gotten in two more runs last February. Is it winter yet? Not until January, and it ends in March. -- Cheers, Bev ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ All bleeding eventually stops.
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#55
September 4th 05, 06:59 PM
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On Fri, 2 Sep 2005 12:43:32 -0700, "Richard Henry"
wrote: You can tell W is not running for re-election again. Today he asked people to buy less gas. I want some sort of compensation from everyone who voted for him the second time. The guy is, in my view, a complete disaster. I really do think this gas crunch is going to directly hurt ski resorts more than anyone might be thinking. We get a president whose a major oil player. We invade an oil-rich country and lose the lives of nearly 2,000 of our kids and no telling how many locals. The end result of that gas prices of $3.50 a gallon? Either he's a total moron or only a partial one given the great profits the oil companies are experiencing. What happened to Iraq's oil paying for the war and helping us break free from being hostage to Saudi oil?
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#56
September 4th 05, 07:09 PM
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#57
September 4th 05, 07:13 PM
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On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 15:09:28 -0700, The Real Bev
wrote: Buying a one-size-fits-all vest and swapping it among the users doesn't seem to be that big a bother. That wasn't the point. I don't want to wear the vest now. So now I have to stop what I'm doing, leave the mountain, take off my skis, go stand in a line, wait that out, get to the front, have them officially remove my ticket (some mountains won't even allow that much) and then print out another duplicate and provide it. Wow. That sounds real convenient for me when all I wanted to do was ski over to the lockers, pop off my skis for a moment and drop my coat/vest/layer in the locker and head back up. Clearly, but perhaps they should. They probably relate to the people who are so desperately trying to stop people from sharing music. Similar to what I was thinking.
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#58
September 4th 05, 07:20 PM
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On Fri, 2 Sep 2005 22:36:13 -0400, "JQ" wrote:
As a consumer I do agree with Rich that the lift ticket should be transferable to other family members but as a business owner I do see the resorts point of view too. It would be like me teaching my karate class and I see their viewpoint fairly clearly too. However, my contention is that it's in everyone's best interest to consider just making all tickets transferable. I'd be curious to see what effect that would have, say, for a week. I suspect very little would change and that a) people like me would welcome the freedom to be able to quickly change layers (I'm going to get my way on this regardless now grin) and b) that they'd find they make some money from those who the tickets were transferred from--money they would NOT have made from the initial purchaser of the ticket. As I said elsewhere, money in concessions, equipment, services, etc. If I left early there's no more money coming to you from my ticket under the current setup. accommodate for more people. The resort does know and has planned that most people do not ski all day long on a day pass and those day pass people take certain amount of breaks during the day. Thus, I argue that this is planned gouging and something consumers shouldn't stand for especially when it's coupled with tactics that result in goofy inconveniences. Oh, I could also argue that anyone going to a karate class the way you described certainly wouldn't get very much out of it.
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#59
September 4th 05, 08:35 PM
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Rich Heimlich wrote:
Now if you want to support resorts gouging customers by charging them for services under the hope that said services will go unused, then we can debate that tactic too. However, I think that's more what's going on here than putting the onus of fraud on the consumer. It surely does seem that simple fairness would indicate ticket-sharing. Same thing goes for automobile liability insurance -- you can only drive one car at a time, why should you have to insure six cars for liability? The answer, of course, is 'Because we can'. OTOH, how much money does a ski resort actually make? Which ticketing method would be more profitable? If non-transferable ticketing keeps them out of the red, is it gouging? How many people do you think show up at a ski resort at say, 4pm planning to get the lift ticket of others going home early? That depends on the area and the price. I generally leave at 1:00 because I get a $10 credit on my next trip (within a year) and I'm tired then anyway. While I'm leaving, new people are arriving. If I could sell my ticket to a newcomer for half what I paid for it, both of us would be ahead of the game and the resort would be out roughly $35. I'm sure this could become a common occurrence since many people take off from work at lunch time for an afternoon of skiing. Mountain High sells six-packs of all-day tickets at a significant discount, cheaper than a half-day pass. These tickets are completely transferable - Six people can use up all the tickets on the same day if that's what's wanted. The 4th time I went up I knew I wasn't going to come back because it was getting too warm to be enjoyable so I sought out two nice-looking kids in the parking lot and we all went to the ticket office to buy three tickets. I sold them at my cost, but some might have asked more. Mountain High (unless they've since discontinued the program) has determined that this is profitable. OTOH, it's a crappy place to ski. OTOOH, it's a shorter and easier drive than the better places. If we ever repair the road directly through the mountains (When does hell freeze over this time?) it will be perhaps a half-hour drive rather than 1.5 hours to the better places. That's significant, especially with $3 gas. Also, as I noted elsewhere, I've also seen this work out for the business. The second person comes in and buys a pair of sunglasses, or a pair of gloves (maybe the first person bought gloves too) and he buys a meal and drinks (as possibly the first person did too). This is possible, but the people who are likely to benefit from transferable tickets are unlikely to waste their savings on overpriced food or equipment. I think a minority of ticket-transferrers would be parents swapping off child care duties, but I could be wrong. -- Cheers, Bev ================================================== ============== "Everything sucks; reverse the wires and everything will blow." -- Desert Ed
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#60
September 4th 05, 10:26 PM
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"Rich Heimlich" wrote in message ... I suspect very little would change and that a) people like me would welcome the freedom to be able to quickly change layers Anyone can make something difficult if they're set on proving some sort of agenda. From experience I know that it is not difficult to attach a lift ticket to your pants and change layers underneath if conditions require.
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