I do not envy the PR guys at United. Talk about sleepless nights.
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I think that they’re all refugees from a dimension where that’s true, or just Not From Around Here.
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Doesn’t have to be that way. Employees misdirecting their resentment at shitty employers onto customers reflects on the company employing them at least as much as it reflects on the employees themselves.
One more canary in the coal mine, IMHO.
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If you think that people working a job have to somehow misdirect resentment towards customers means you’ve apparently never done any of the following:
- Been a retail employee.
- Been around any other retail customer.
- Been inside a retail establishment.
- Existed, at any point, in the history of the human race.
Customers are basically the worst part of any retail job. Not all customers, but just enough to make it the worst. Having shitty bosses or whatever is a separate problem.
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You misunderstand me. But the misunderstanding is half my fault for trying to take on a complicated subject in a format that won’t fit it. Explaining would take more energy than I have; nothing against you or your comment.
I’ve done all of those and more. I’m not talking about shitty bosses, I’m talking about shitty companies, and about not creating a culture where loathing is a default ambient force.
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This has come up here before; I stayed out of it then.
I worked retail for about five years [1], selling outdoor equipment. Tents and boots and rucksacks and sleeping bags and so on.
I liked the job, I was good at it, and I enjoyed 99% of the customers. There’s the occasional dickhead, sure, but most of them were pleasant people who were excited to discuss their planned adventures and vocally grateful for the advice and assistance I offered.
Apart from sore feet, the only hard part of that job was dealing with the clueless dickheads at corporate HQ [2].
[1] About 30hrs/week; my sole income during my undergraduate degree.
[2] I’ve still got a couple of lovely ink sketches of a fig tree cascading over rocks, that were given to me by a customer.
She was an ~80 year old hippy/bohemian artist, married to a physicist who was dying of cancer. They’d been together for around fifty years, travelled all over, did all sorts of stuff.
He was cold all the time, but didn’t want anyone to buy him clothes because he thought it was wasteful since he’d be dead in a few weeks. But she was determined to do something, so hauled herself into town to find the warmest thing possible.
After about half an hour of listening to her story, I eventually sold her an Antarctic-grade fleece jacket. As she was leaving, she pulled two of her artworks from her bag (ink sketches of the trees at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair) and declared that the psychic voices in her head insisted that she gave them to me.
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The really overly reductionist short version is that the way a company functions is the main variable in whether employees and, by extension, every non-asshole customer wind up paying for shitheads at every level from jerkwad customers to employees that vent their frustrations on their their coworkers and customers to abusive management to, as you say, clueless dickheads at HQ. But there are people who believe, variously, that any one group is the source of every problem and I simply don’t want to delve into what would be a longish polite discussion at best and has a far too good a chance to devolving into a derailing flame war - not nessicairly because of anyone who’s weighed in so far, but because this is the internet and certain arguments are honeypots for people with axes to grind with strangers and no consequences. So I’m staying out of it too.
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A lot of customer-facing jobs can actually be fun. But only if management and corporate backs-up their front-line employees. If employees don’t feel like they can stand-up for themselves against the rare bad customer, they eventually lose their empathy for all their customers.
So while an engaged and supported employee can tell the difference between someone having a bad day and someone who’s just a jerk, the exhausted and unappreciated employee doesn’t care and just treats any non-standard reaction as being a jerk. The first employee is empowered to help that customer and maybe brighten their day. The second employee just wants to get home and have a drink.
Customers can be horrible. But (for the most part) it’s employers that create horrible employees.
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She may be technically right - not sure how it is in the US, but in many EU countries you can’t film a private person without their consent, even in public spaces. She is not a public official (cop, public administration, politician, etc.) on duty where the rules are more tolerant, she is an employee of a private company. The privacy protections can sometimes go to ridiculous extents.
However, the same goes for people with smartphones being asses and filming where they shouldn’t. Shoving a camera in someone’s face is a sure fire way how to escalate a misunderstanding into an open conflict, regardless of who is “right” - especially after that guy admitted that he arrived with baggage that was purposely over the weight limit. That is a great way to slow down the queue at the check-in counter while the bag gets handled and paid for, even without someone having an argument with the clerk. People queuing behind this guy certainly “loved” him for this - someone was again trying to be smart and flaunt the published rules. Sadly a lot of people think that this is OK and not at all selfish.
That said, you are completely right that she is being a dick to the customer and should be fired. These clerks should be sufficiently thick skinned and trained to deal even with annoying customers without blowing the gasket like this.
Seems the only ones who strive any more are companies. But, they’re people too, so …
Surely a PR professional finds lying while standing up to be almost as restful as lying down?
IANAL. Assuming we’re applying the laws about recording a conversation, in most US states, you only need permission from one party to record a conversation (i.e. if you are part of the conversation, you can record it without notifying the other person). If we’re talking about filming, I’m less familiar with the law, but I think it’s different.
I’d actually be on her side if she had just said that she does not consent to being filmed and she would only continue processing the customer’s request once he stopped recording. At least, if it had happened in a jurisdiction where consent is required.
How can something like that ever be completely above board? They’re randomly refusing to provide a service that has already been paid for. That’s a direct breach of contract (and if the small print says otherwise, many jurisdictions have rules that render such small print clauses invalid), and of course the airline is liable for the damages caused by that act (in some jurisdictions at least; should be, in others). If they did it on purpose, that’s called fraud. If something like that happened to me, I’d just naively try including my bank account number and a copy of the receipt for the replacement ticket in my letter of complaint.
Never got used to those thank you speeches. I realize it’s more common in the English-speaking world for companies to thank their customers, but in Austria, I’ve only ever heard airlines do it. My gut reaction is always, “Yeah? Well I didn’t intend it as a favor to you - you just happened to offer the cheapest price/best connection/were chosen at random by my travel agent/my company/etc.”. It offends me because the person saying “thanks” is just reading a script and would be fired if they refused, and the soulless corporate entity supposedly thanking me is by definition incapable of feeling thankful. Insincere thanks are worse than no thanks.
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I wonder. The airport in my city is owned by the city. Would that tip it toward being a public place?
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I see what you did there.
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Anytime you see a policy preventing people from recording interactions with a business, you are likely seeing a policy designed to ensure that bad behavior and wrongful actions on the part of that business are not made public. But, there may be some logical argument why filming would be prohibited, but I’ve not seen one presented.
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Well fair enough on the response. I admit to being pithy.
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I understand, and in general agree with the sentiment. I give this particular airline a partial pass because it seems somewhat genuine, and they aren’t too shitty.
Not that Jetstar is a particularly inviting choice.
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They took the whole… fucking… bar!
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