WAPO said an ill service animal.
Which is still just as awful. Also wouldn’t this be a serious OSHA violation?
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I can still smell it…
https://www.zazzle.com/collections/leshit-119542745255384943?rf=238492079452335690
Yeah i guess there was a back and forth on if it was human or a dog’s, looked it up and it does conclude that it was indeed from a dog. There’s still a contagion factor there though that the airline needs to be responsible for, i don’t understand why they were so difficult about it… but then again it’s Delta
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ok but sick elderly men are wearing pants and probably also underwear so it is unlikely to just get on the seat, at least in quite that amount. a baby being changed, a sick service animal, or members of the crew being fecal freaks and doing the nastiest in between flights seem more likely to me.
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It’s still better than flying on United.
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Advocacy of violence has no place in this discussion forum.
I share your puzzlement at that part: you don’t appeal to an airline’s better nature; but this whole sordid episode seems destined to become that one section of the compliance training module that everyone rolls their eyes at because it’s so ridiculous.
The only way this could end up looking even worse for them is if the feces in question turned out to be riddled with hepatitis or something(not wildly likely; but likely enough that trying to pull a ‘nobody could have known’ isn’t going to fly).
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Are you familiar with revealed preference? It’s an attractive idea in a number of respects: people are very interested in consumer utility functions, while consumers don’t appear to be terribly good at self-reporting(as in a wide variety of areas) and trying to survey them in detail is laborious.
Unfortunately, it’s very easy to take the idea of inferring people’s underlying utility functions from the choices they make and ending up with an essentially circular justification for just about anything popular enough to not die immediately in a hail of revulsion. Particularly if a given industry moves in the same direction in concert, so the range of choices that are even available changes.
There is also no for trouble because of imperfect information: the consumer makes their choice based on what they believe their options to be, which isn’t always the same as what their options are unless their information is perfect; so observing their choices still leaves you at a level of indirection from inferring their preferences.
It finds unfortunate popularity as a tool for explaining that what the market will bear is actually what the consumer wants.
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come on, it’s Delta!
You’re exactly right–the flight attendant is going to be framed as a villain, but the reality is the flight attendant likely acted that way because they were terrified of losing their job by delaying an aircraft. This is different from police/air marshal brutality, in the person who acted immediately was probably a victim themselves.
That doesn’t justify their behavior, but I think it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the fact that this didn’t happen because the flight attendant was an asshole. They might be, but that’s probably got less to do with why this happened than that person’s bosses, and their bosses. Those are the people who are creating an environment that enables and promotes this kind of behavior, and which punishes things like kindness or compassion.
Delta would love for us to heap all the blame on the immediate jerk to protect the entire chain of jerks and legitimately bad or even “evil” people that put that immediate jerk in a position where they considered that an acceptable course of action.
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That’s not a very humane way of house training animals, please don’t do that.
(The humans responsible, however, have at it. They are capable of understanding that they’ve done something wrong. An animal that makes a mess in the house is just being an animal, humans are the only ones who actually “know better.”)
It reminds me of how one of my kids got salmonellosis. He got it when another kid put the “poo” in “pool” (and the life guard(s) didn’t enforce the rule about swim diapers).
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As i see it the failure was from many many people with Delta. The pilot, all the attendants, the manager at the gate that threatened the passenger, the crew at the gate, the cleanup crew, etc. I wouldn’t specifically point the finger at any one person as the bad guy, everyone with the airline involved in this failed to act like reasonable empathetic human beings.
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Yep, that’s a more realistic picture of the real problem, but Delta and a lot of people in the media will likely paint the flight attendant specifically as the villain. This kind of “fuck you, you have no options” behavior arises whenever an essential industry isn’t properly regulated, and more often than not the icing on the cake is the company will place almost exclusive blame on the low-level people who were involved while sparing themselves, the creators of the systemic problem that motivated the behavior, from really any scrutiny at all.
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From experience, it often squeezes upwards, over the belt.
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To be clear, the manager does sound like an unprofessional asshole who shouldn’t be in a customer service job. But I agree that incidents like this are a product of a company’s culture, and right after they fire him, they should change their training.
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No one should have to put up with this shit.
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You can gently smear it in their hair. Lovingly, even.
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Sadly I think problem is a lot bigger than just the airlines, but essential services in general. This is just another general product of late stage capitalism, but those products are amplified when you operate an essential service as a for-profit company. The lack of oversight relative to pre-1978 rules sure doesn’t help either, but overall the problem is basically the same reason why things like healthcare and waste management are so unbelievably screwed up in the US. These are all things that are big enough, and important enough that they should be public works, not for-profit companies.
Even if you believe strongly that private enterprise is better than a planned economy or anything in between, essential services still don’t make sense as private companies. Capitalism depends on profit and competition, we must have airplanes for travel just like we must have hospitals and we must have water treatment plants. If these are government entities, all they need to do is, at best, break even–and even if you don’t, when dealing with government services, it’s less important that individual things break even or come in under budget as long as overall your expenditures are around or below taxation. Once you make them private companies, the motivation for profit eventually subsumes all other motivations, innovation, customer service–everything gets replaced by “get more money.” Under capitalism in normal circumstances, what’s theoretically supposed to happen here is that other providers of this good or service would crop up who would provide better service or quality or whatever factor that is missing in the competition in order to gain a competitive edge and the whole thing eventually “balances out.”
In practice they simply provide worse and worse service because it lines the pockets thicker, and not having them isn’t an option. These are things that can’t really go out of business because the lack of them hurts everyone, so without the kinds of regulations that existed pre-'78 no amount of trying to right the ship will help. The prime motivation, hell the only one, is to make the most money for providing the least service. Until they’re forced to provide specific minimum levels of service they have no reason at all to change. Bad PR just means that people will be in a shittier mood when they fly, which I imagine the airlines will use to justify providing even less.
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