Come on, you've flown I'm sure and had contact with brainless airline employees. I have been a Flight Attendant, a Dallas police officer for 8 years, have a degree from SMU, have a Commercial pilot license/Instrument Rating, and currently work for a major airline....in RES. Insulting all airline employees because their management "freezes" when the res agent gets a call like this, and the res agent acts like a res agent and not a trained police officer or flight crew member, is expected.
I will say corporations do not place enough worth on the diversified work experience, cross-training, other "seemingly unrelated" training, or education of their employees, nor are they empowered accordingly. Our PC society no longer places value on general knowledge and experience and neither do employers [G Gordon Liddy would agree]. In this I agree with you if I have, perhaps, clarified your point.
I would have handled this call differently (I'd have recognized the F/A nomenclature immediately, and COMMANDED the agent next to me to disconnect their call, call information, get ARTCC (and the right one!) and the FBI on another line within the 4 minute duration of this tape and not waited for a "supervisor" to come by and stand there) but what the hell do you expect?? My background is slightly unique, to say the least.
In the end, ATC had the info in time to scramble fighters but the government held off a few minutes too long, because after all, it can't happen to us.
Your personal attack on "airline employees" in general is what is FUBAR.
If I misunderstood your post...apologies.
NEVER FORGET who did this to us, nor how our INS dollars assisted all of them!!
And by my tagline, I'm not PC like my employer either.
Well, I didn't insult ALL airline employees, just the brainless bureaucratic ones.
And I never can remember all of what FUBAR is...I know the F and the U and the B...the rest I don't remember!
The rest of your comments I agree with. Actually, I normally have nothing but good experiences when flying and the only crap usually results in ridiculous FAA rules and not the airline.
But I won't fly American any longer and my last three flights have been with Southwest. But I don't fly enough to make a judgment. Southwest is cheaper and more flexible and I don't care to eat on the plane...I take flights to get somewhere and not have a gourmet meal and thus do not understand those that complain.
But I've had a couple of employees that I could swear had lobotomies...walking zombies they were so stupid. You have to wonder how they keep their jobs if it wasn't for unions.
No apologies required. Thanks for the reply.
I just wanted to say I agree with you about how employers do not value the well-rounded, creative, flexible employee. I think there's a mental form of repetitive motion injuries. "Overqualified" means "can and will do more than the very most common tasks involved in the job but wants to be paid for the difference."
Every single year we go through a huge hassle with our mortgage and insurance companies because the escrow and the premium are never in sync--they do this all the time, but you'd think they'd never done it before. We end up spending hours on the phone. It's not an emergency! but it's their JOB, and they can't handle the simplest deviation in routine. I shudder to think what they'd do if there was some kind of emergency affecting them. They can't think, follow through, or come up with a solution to the simplest problem--what would happen if they were handed a life-or-death matter?
Probably what we hear on this call.