My return flight from Baltimore led to two very strange things happening. The first occurred before the plane took off. The second occurred the following day. My friend and I were traveling on a major airline. I'll tell you in a minute why I'm not mentioning its name.
What occurred is kind of difficult to explain but basically, one employee of the airline — a lady at the gate — told me something. A second employee — a flight attendant — told me something different during the boarding process. I said, "That's not what I was told" and I repeated what the lady at the gate had told me and I even gave her name. The attendant accused me of…well, basically lying about her telling me that. "That's contrary to our policies, sir," she said. "No one would tell you that." My traveling companion backed me up strongly and she was accused of being rude and suddenly this flight attendant was announcing that she had the power to have us both removed from the flight.
I still do not understand how it escalated to that level so rapidly. My companion was a bit loud but other flight attendants had gotten into the discussion and my friend was trying to be heard over several people talking. It is true that flight attendants can have you tossed off the plane but I felt that it was being threatened inappropriately with an attitude of "You don't dare disagree with me because I have the power to have your ass bounced right off this plane!" I was still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery caused by one airline employee telling me one thing and another employee telling me the opposite.
One of the pilots heard the squabble, came out and reflexively backed the flight attendants before he even heard what it was all about. I explained the dispute to him and that got him about a third of the way to my side. I also explained to him that our luggage was already on the plane and that my suitcase held the CPAP unit which I require to sleep. I said, "If you toss us off this plane, you're going to have to unload our luggage and I'll bet that will delay this flight a while." That got him another third of the way to my side.
Then one of the other flight attendants came up and whispered something to the pilot. I suspect she had gone off, checked with the lady at the gate and found out that while that lady was wrong, she had indeed told me what I'd claimed she'd told me. That got the pilot the rest of the way to my side. Within minutes, we were seated and buckled-in and the plane took off, Incident Over.
…except that yesterday, I called the airline not so much to complain but to try and figure out what happened and how to minimize the chances of it happening again. It took a big bit of patience to navigate my way through the automatic call redirect feature to a department called Customer Service or maybe Customer Relations. It was Customer Something. 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.
Rhetorical Question: If you were a pilot and they thought maybe your wife was a threat to the safety of the flight, what does that say about you?
The woman on the phone said that she could follow up from her end but that it was unlikely anything would come of it. The flight attendant would say we were hysterical troublemakers or something. It would be my word against hers and no action would be taken. I thought that was an amazing, probably honest admission. She gave me the name and address of the airline's CEO and suggested that a calm, rational letter to him might do some good so I'll be writing that letter later today.
I often call up businesses to complain about this or that…always calm, always reasonable. I am used to being stroked and to receiving perfunctory apologies from people who dole them out by rote about matters that in no way involved them.
The letter will go out shortly to the CEO, if only because I'm curious as to what, if anything, I'll receive in reply. I may or may not mention the lady on the phone because, as I said, I don't want to get her in any trouble. But boy, I was genuinely amazed to find someone in Customer Service who put honesty above defending her employer. How often does that happen?