Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/05/09/united-canceled-mans-ticket.html
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They all blow chunks, but United is striving to suck harder than the stiff competition.
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I am running out of bourbon tonight!
The world’s gone mad. Fuck Airlines.
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Saddest thing I’ve seen all day.
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“You don’t have permission to film me!” is apparently the go-to phrase for people caught acting like assholes.
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Does United have a death wish? You would think there might be a memo somewhere asking employees to remember they have a job because people choose to fly with them. There are a lot of other choices and I won’t be choosing United.
This is exactly why we need completion in the world of business. If there were only one provider we’d be even more screwed.
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You the missed Spencer’s press conference.
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True. But the problem is deeper. These people know they’re being dicks to their customers with these shenanigans, and they fear being internet infamous, so they lash out at filming. In their minds, they’re just following company policy. And granted, a lot of them are too stupid to think for themselves, but ultimately they’re jobsworths. The real tragedy we should all despair at is that the airlines will just fire the poorly trained workers, and the airlines’ crappy culture won’t change.
I fly a lot. While I’ve been avoiding United as best I can, sometimes they’re the only flight I can schedule. Last week I had to take a flight and United was my only option I could fit into my time table. At the gate, the UA agent made a stunningly inappropriate comment. “We only drag you off if you board as a doctor.” Now this comment was clearly intended by her to make light and she perhaps thought that since I was TSA Pre that I would just laugh along. I just gave her an oh, really? face and left it at that, because I wasn’t going to get a young woman in trouble for a deeply stupid and unfunny “joke”. But it highlighted to me that instead of trying to reform their corporate culture, United was just paying public lip service while their workforce continued to cultivate contempt for the customers in their charge.
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So, United is a government, too?
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An airline I fly with regularly explicitly acknowledges this at the end of each flight. On landing, as part of the “Welcome to [nondescript] airport, the local time is …” speech, the flight manager will say something like “thank you for flying with us. We realise you have choices, and appreciate your choice to fly with us.”
It’s one of many reasons I like flying with them.
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I’d say the similarities between corporate capture of industry regulation (which was originally supposedly intended to control their abuses and excesses) through pork-barrel privatization and the monied influence in politics are two sides of one coin. It’s a continuum of graft and corruption ripe for harvesting by grifters like Trump who channel outrage onto scapegoats through bigotry. So yeah, not too much difference.
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I thought they all said that. In my mind that’s typical flight attendant patter.
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I never get a choice. My company uses some sort of algorithm to assign our flights, and we have to take what we get. Sometimes it’s Singapore Air business class, and sometimes SriLankan Air coach. I think it is mostly based on the company waiting until the very last moment to schedule travel.
When they call me, their first question is usually “How fast can you get to the airport?”. Then, when I get to whatever hellhole they send me, the people there have had my name on the schedule for a month or more.
But I don’t think I am alone in being in a situation where I have no choice of airline or destination.
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Delta does that and the last few years I’ve had good luck with them…almost like they really do care about my business…kinda nice.
I do think that filming or recording a conversation with someone else without warning them is kind of a dick move (and completely illegal in some jurisdictions).
An airport is not a public place and it’s quite possible that the reciprocating dick move of cancelling this person’s ticket was completely above board. I guess we’ll see what kind of fallout there is from this incident.
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take away: airline employees are demi-gods
Maybe not technically, legally, but in most people’s eyes it is an easy assumption to make.
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Contempt for customers is common among employees in pretty much any service or retail type job. Airlines though, they take it to new heights.
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