Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Today is a historic moment. One of my goals in life was to achieve life time Gold Status on American Airlines. If they have not already secretly done away with the program, then as of today I will retain my Gold Elite status on American for the lifetime of the Frequent Flyer Program. This is a rather discrete program that they do not document anywhere. My father reached lifetime Gold a few years ago. Once you reach this you no longer have to re-qualify for elite status (Gold is 25,000 miles flown a year).
I joined the program in 1998 and since then have racked up 50,000 miles each year in air miles, and the rest has been bonus miles, credit card, etc. Basically I got miles any way I could. I have been AA Platinum (50,000 miles flown a year) since 1998, which translates to about 10 transcontinental flights a year, or in my case usually 5 trancon, 1 trip to Europe/Asia/South America and a boat load of short hops form SFO to SEA on Alaska.
Anyway, the reason I care... if you are Gold/Plat etc on AA you can reserve exit row seats ahead of time (great for me since I am 6'3"), board early and checkin at biz/first. Even better is that you get stickers for upgrades (and can purchase upgrades in 500 mile blocks). I would say that I typically get upgraded on most flights via miles or stickers, and while AA Biz/First is nothing compared to international carriers, it still beats coach. Airline seats were not designed for people my height. Needless to say, you get addicted to getting cheap upgrades and it's hard to switch to any other airline where you don't get these perks (the genius of these elite programs).
Anyway, if all goes well I should be getting my new membership cards reflecting my lifetime status in a few weeks (or lets hope I do, cause if I don't that means American went and cancelled the program w/o telling anyone, which of course you don't have to do with a secret program).
I have the wonderful forum at FlyerTalk to thank for much of this. Over the years I have learned most of the frequent flyer tricks, promotions and the very existence of this program over there.