Originally published at: Southwest kicks off woman for petting her own puppy, then kicks off 2 others for their "attitude" (video) | Boing Boing
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Yeah, Southwest is the RyanAir of the west. Avoid them whenever possible.
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What’s really crazy is that they are #3 from the top of my list behind Alaska and Delta. The rest I won’t even bother with.
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I fly over 100K/yr for work, so I’ve seen F/As of all stripes, and people need to realize that F/As have a lot of power over you (ultimately it’s up to the captain if you’re kicked off the flight but the captain always listens to the F/As), and if you run across one of the petty dictators wearing the uniform, if you want to get where you’re going, sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.
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That sums up pretty much the entire passenger flight system. A whole lot of people, with an encyclopedia of unwritten rules, have the power to make your life a living hell if you look at them cross-eyed.
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Many were shocked by the incident as they’d never had a problem travelling with animals, with one viewer commenting: “I flew my bulldog puppy from Dallas to PA. They had me take her out and she was carried around by flight attendants.”
While I realize LOT Airlines are not domestic to the US (they’re Polish), I had the best experience flying with them back in 2007. My cat was in the carrier, but after takeoff the flight attendants all came around to see her and allowed me to take her out of her carrier and permitted her to sit and sleep in my lap during the flight. The flight wasn’t packed, so it wasn’t an issue for folks sitting around me (I asked first).
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This is the real enormous problem. For any given situation there’s not consistency, and that’s even if they know what their own rules are. Whatever your special case is, you can call and speak directly with the airline, and the gate agents and F/As will say something else. It’s like a bunch of large corporations looked at the IRS and said “hold my beer”
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Another flight attendant, dressed as a cat comes up and says “are we going to have a problem here!?”
Wait, what? Nobody else thinks this is weird?
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i used to love them so much. today, not so much.
Oh, her puppy… she was petting her puppy. I thought it said… never mind.
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Color me
That poor ees pupper, and lady, and their “neighbors!” 
southwest seriously displeased me the only time I flew them, and their terminal at DTW is an abomination. Its design is a total mindfuck.
southwest put my luggage on a plane I was not allowed to board b/c weather, but which still went on to my destination. I was forced to stay in the stopover airport overnight, with no compensation nor cot. They then put me on the second flight to my destination in the morning!!! My friends were freaking TF out when I didn’t arrive on the first flight.
Flying home, they once again put my luggage (which now also included brand new expen$ive equestrian gear) on a different flight, but during excellent weather! You can well imagine my shock when fellow passengers spoke of the $100 walmart vouchers sw gives those whose bags they’ve lost!
They delivered my suitcase to our home a couple days later, but WTAF?!
But wait! There’s more!
sw’s terminal at Detroit’s DTW airport will get you lost, guaranteed. Your fellow passengers will immediately disappear in different directions, and none of the signs make sense. You’ll wind up walking around for at least an hour, sometimes in circles, and then finally get outside at a drop-off point instead of a pick-up zone!
Mom screamed at me when that happened to me, then picked on me about it whenever she got mad. That shit didn’t end until the same thing happened to her and her then-BF. She was only vaguely apologetic, then told me all about it in great detail, as if it had never happened to me.
I just said, “Well, at least no one screamed at you about it right after you’d gone through all that hell.”
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I can’t help but point out how UNITED ended up being the hero of this story…… Our collective expectations of domestic air travel in the US are so low that WHEN something like this happens we are actually grateful that Other Airline (villain of last week’s story) helped us out a little….
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Though better than America West (aka America’s Worst), erm I mean US Airways, erm I mean American Airlines.
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We call it south worst.
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I used to enjoy flying… Maybe I was just naïve.
I just got back from a four day weekend. Spent Friday & Monday doing a 12 hour, 800 mile drive each way. This was the right choice.
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This sentence was the “did you see the gorilla” of the article.
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Also in to add that SW used to be the most reliable and best customer service of all the airlines.
Used to be.
I haven’t flown for 7 years and nothing is tempting me to start again.
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On one side: Airliner crews hyper-empowered to exert Standford-Prison-Experiment levels of arbitrary authority by a post-9/11 panic preserved amber-like in their deeply conservative institutional culture.
On the other side: entitled “fur-baby parents” bringing their yappy slobbery animals everywhere with them and acting righteously indignant when informed that the rules apply to their “baby” no matter how special it is.
Let them fight.
Did you even read the story? This wasn’t the situation AT ALL. The woman had flown out to pick up her new puppy and was flying it back home. And from all accounts, at the time of getting kicked off it wasn’t being very loud or “slobbery.”
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