Programming the Glitches Into Our Lives

Now, it seems funny. But, for a few moments, it was anything but.

Emerging from the swank Rio Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas early Monday morning, I was shocked to find that my car was missing from guest parking, where I had left it the afternoon before.

Obviously, it had to have been stolen. Mentally, I made plans to rent a car to get myself and my guests back to Los Angeles, where I would have to buy a new car two or three years early. I’d worked all that out by the time I got to the hotel security station and rather dramatically announced the theft. I got the age, color and make of my car--a five-year-old blue Camry--right, but I was so excited I got the license number wrong.

Security officer Joseph Lemieux just smiled. “Your car was towed,” he said. And quickly checking the Rio’s state-of-the-art computer system, he said the car had been taken at 6:41 a.m. and that, even as we spoke, it was at Action Towing, where it had been impounded.

Within five minutes, Lemieux’s superior, Sgt. Irla Main, arrived. It was all a mistake, he said. My car had been towed because it was believed to belong to a construction worker, and such people were forbidden to park in the guest lots.

He apologized and said the car would be brought back to the hotel in about an hour, and the hotel would pay the towing charge, which they did. It came to $164.50, and we were just 90 minutes late in getting started back to L.A.

But how could this happen, I asked Main. My car looked just like any other guest’s car, and it had California plates.

“Many of our construction workers come from California,” Main said. Later, when I got the car back, I realized it was quite dirty, so maybe Main was too polite to say it did not match the appearance of cars driven by the highfliers who normally stay at the Rio.

But the official reason was different.

Hotel public relations spokeswoman Tyri Squyres said she had checked with the chief of security and the towing had been ordered by an officer “who believed he had seen a worker coming from your car. Actually, he was walking from a truck next to it.”

My colleague Frank Clifford, reading this, said the real lesson from the affair is that I didn’t belong at a five-star hotel like the Rio, and my car “was a dead giveaway of that fact.”

It was a glitch, though, and it wasn’t the only one to occur while we were at the hotel.

These modern computerized systems utilized by nearly all sectors of the burgeoning service industry aren’t perfect. Due to human error, they don’t always convey good information, and it’s easy, psychologically and in other ways, to run up charges very quickly.

I went to the Rio with a visiting journalist from Beijing and her 8-year-old son. We occupied adjoining suites Sunday night.

We arrived about 4 p.m., at the time hotel reservations said the rooms would be ready. But the clerk, citing her computer, said one room was not ready and might not be until 6 p.m. She gave us the keys to both rooms, anyway, and it turned out the computer was wrong. In fact, both rooms were ready.

Then, while our heads were turned, the 8-year-old started fiddling with the television. He somehow managed to order several pay-per-view movies with the remote control. We saw none of them while we were there, but it came to about $40 on our bill.

I asked Squyres to comment for this column, but not for a deduction on the bill.

She had little to say about the movies, but this episode of quick electronic charges actually illustrates something with which all consumers are being forced to cope in an ever-growing number of fields--electronic billing.

EDS, the big Texas firm that used to belong to Ross Perot, recently called a news conference to announce that it is offering a new interactive billing service for electronic payment of bills.

In making the announcement, however, EDS executive Paul Rudolph thoroughly alarmed me when he extolled the new system as “cutting three to six days out of the process. . . . It means millions of dollars of cash flow to billers.”

This sounded to me like the end of the “float,” and if there’s any feature of modern life I like, it’s the float--the ability to put a check in the mail on Friday and know that it will not be cashed until Monday.

In subsequent conversations, EDS put a different slant on Rudolph’s remarks. Dan Twing, director of the new billing service, said that many companies using it may actually allow customers the right to decide the precise moment to pay their bills. Thus, they could go right up to the due date.

“You as the consumer have the controls,” said EDS spokesman Ken Capps. “Magically, it’s transmitted, and it’s paid the same day.

“It saves printing, mailing, staff and overhead, and for consumers and business alike, you’re not waiting on the whims of the mail.”

I can’t help wondering, though, how long it will take, or how many hoops one will have to jump through, to correct errors.

There has, in fact, been quite a bit of customer resistance to such arrangements.

For instance, Southern California Gas Co. has been offering in recent months debit procedures, whereby the bill is deducted from one’s bank account 10 days after the bill is sent, or, alternatively, on a day the customer designates in a phone call to a toll-free number or an entry on the Net.

There are now four alternate arrangements, but spokeswoman Denise King says only 173,000 of the Gas Co.’s 4.5 million customers have opted for any of them.

Twing says that in 1997, only about 6% of adult Americans were taking an automatic debit in paying at least one of their bills. This compared with 23% of Britons.

These types of systems are probably as inevitable as the rising tide, and it is futile to oppose them. But even in the world of electronic commerce, instantaneous is not infallible, and what’s cost-saving efficiency is not necessarily convenient or--more important--fair for consumers.

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Ken Reich can be contacted with your accounts of true consumer adventure at (213) 237-7060, or by e-mail at ken.reich@latimes.com