Tuesday, September 26, 2017

This Is Amusing, If Petty Tyrants* Amuse You

M.E. has a problem on an airline & calls the airline the next day.
There, I spoke to an extremely nice lady who basically told me that a lot of flight attendants are crazy.

This was not an answer I expected from the Customer Relations department of the airline. I was genuinely amazed at the honesty. Imagine if you called a washing machine company to complain about their product and the person at the other end said, "Yeah, a lot of our washers are junk."

I am not identifying the airline because this woman was so honest with me that I don't want to get her into any trouble. She was on the phone with me for at least fifteen minutes and it got to the point where she was complaining to me about power-mad flight attendants and all the complaints about them that come to her. And I want to emphasize here that neither of us were talking about all flight attendants or most flight attendants. We were talking about a tiny but still unacceptable percentage.

The Customer Relations lady was totally with me and clearly frustrated. She said — and this is a quote — "When I fly now, I just do whatever they say, even when I know it's wrong because you never know what's going to set some of them off. If they somehow get it into their heads that you're a threat to the flight, you're in for a lot of trouble."

This is a woman who works for this airline. She is in a position to receive and deal with complaints about flight attendants who misbehave. And she is afraid of the occasional flight attendant on that airline. She also told me that recently, they had two incidents where flight attendants ejected pilots' wives.

*In the Land of The Limeys, such are idiomized as "Little Hitlers". Seems right.

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