Saturday, August 7, 2010

Off Topic - The Joy Of Business Travel

It never ceases to amaze me how often adults will behave like spoiled children.

Last night I flew back from Charleston, S.C., and it turned into something of an ordeal because of strong thunderstorms throughout the Carolinas. A series of flights that was supposed to have me home by 9pm instead turned into an arrival time of 2am. As Charlotte is a hub city for US Air, I was just one of hundreds (thousands?) of passengers seriously inconvenienced by Mother Nature and the airlines.

Now, I will say that US Air did not do a good job of communicating with its stranded and re-routed passengers (I know ... I was one of them). I think US Air's "system" of "go here for this, but then go across the airport for that, and then go to a third place for something else" is a frustrating, exhausting, and frankly stupid system.

BUT

I would like to know why so many of my fellow travelers thought it necessary to berate and abuse the gate agents and staff. These people were not out on the tarmac doing rain-dances, and they certainly were not the ones who formulated the company's policies or built the US Air "system". They were, and are, people just trying to do their jobs according to the rules of their employers.

Yelling at these people did not make the storms go away, did not result in a single plane arriving or departing a minute faster, and did not change a single US Air policy regarding compensation or rescheduling. All it did was make a worker's job harder and poisoned the atmosphere for everybody else.

What a bunch of jerks.

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