Dear Customer Service Representative,
Please kick this email up your chain of command as high you
can. I have a lot of anger and I need to vent, but I don’t want to harass
you, since you don’t run the airline and it is not your fault that the entire airline industry is collapsing in ruins
around you and that your bosses are idiots. No, please send this email to the
head idiot.
Dear Head Idiot,
I am spending yet one more day of my life in an airport because
of your incompetence. I bought a so-called “ticket” over a month
ago for which I paid nearly $400 in holiday premium price. As a child, I foolishly
believed that a ticket was something akin to a contract, and that it obligated me to pay you, and obligated you to deliver
me to the agreed upon destination something like the same day as the ticket was scheduled for.
Now I know this ticket simply obligates me to pay you -and that you will then decide what I get for it. Here is what I have gotten so far.
I arrived at the airport well in advance of my flight so that
I could participate in the kabuki theater you would have us believe is security. I
was told my flight had been cancelled due to weather. The weather here in Boston was fine. The weather in my destination was even better.
But the weather in Ohio, however, was bad. And since you have brainlessly
designed a totally interdependent spider web of flights, rather than working zones or routes or maybe even leaving a tiny
bit of slack in the system, all it takes is one snowflake or raindrop in Timbuktu
and the entire system shuts down. Kudos!
Weather is apparently new to the world, so I can see why you
haven’t been able to design a system that can deal with it yet. I joke,
of course, since it is obvious that the real reason you have such a weather prone system is that you want it that way. You are not expected to pay any price for weather related delays. Thus, the permanent web of “weather delays” means you can screw people left and right and not
have to issue so much as a meal voucher if you can find one flight in Tempe that was late because of a thunderstorm. What a wonderful fraudulent cushion you have stuffed for yourself!
So, since my flight was cancelled due to the existence of
weather in another time zone, you informed me that you had already booked me on another flight –TOMORROW. How logical. I purposely buy tickets a day ahead of when I
really want to fly, so tomorrow is just a great idea. The fact that I was standing
in the airport when told this didn’t seem to faze the “ticket” agent at all.
I guess he knew that Logan was just so damn convenient to get to that it
would be no problem just to go home and come back whenever you guys feel up to honoring the “ticket”. He said I could fly standby. I was dumb enough to believe
he thought this might actually be possible. As it turns out, it was just a way
to get me to move aside so he could explain to the trusting fool behind me that you do not control the weather.
I have now sat here for three flights. There are somewhere around 1 billion people with standby tickets waiting for what you knew in advance were
oversold flights. Would it have been too much to tell me this five hours ago? Why was I told I could “fly” standby?
I am “sitting” standby and will end up going home sometime tonight and coming back tomorrow, when you will
undoubtedly delay me for weather or Christmas or some other totally unforeseeable event.
I would like to say that I will use a different airline next
time, but you are all incompetent. You and your comrades have managed to ruin
air travel. The last three flights I have taken have been around 1000 miles each
way. In every case, the airlines were so bad that it would have been faster to
drive, and substantially less annoying. So in light of this realization, I am
declaring the air travel system broken and no longer worthwhile. Every vacation
I take from now on will by car. Congratulations, you are so dumb, greedy, incompetent,
and dishonest that a 777 in your hands is slower than a Dodge truck. September
11th did not stop me from flying. You have. I look forward to the next round of bankruptcies in your industry.
A once enthusiastic air passenger,
Mac Johnson
