Employee communication people want evidence of the connection between morale and customer service. They ought to do lots of business with corporate basket cases like Kmart, and United Airlines.
Yesterday on a United flight from Dallas to Chicago, the middle-aged head flight attendant gave a purposely overlong speech telling the passengers that it’s illegal to drink our own booze on the plane, adding that if we’ve done so, we must seal it up and stow it in our bags.
Incorrigible booze hounds that we are, we apparently also needed to hear another 30-second lecture about how we’re not to use the bathroom in first class. The flight attendant wasn’t finished until she actually apologized in advance in case anyone takes offense "if we have to remind you" of this rule.
And when it came time to push the drinks cart up the aisle, the flight attendant came on and told us to pull our arms and legs in. "We prefer not to hit you," she said.
While we passengers had done nothing to deserve Nurse Ratched, United has earned her over at least two decades of mismanagement, decline and forced union concessions.
They serve us shit and we eat it. Air travel has been stripped down to nothing more than a bus in the air. And by the way, I’ll take that bus from Mackinac to Chicago, with a beer tub in the aisle, any day over the bullshit we have to put up with on United. I hate those assholes.
Carlin had it right; we’re trading dignity and peace for gadgets and we’ll line up and get on boxcars as long as we can have our iPods.