Me and the Missus rolled our non-coffee filled bodies out of bed, dragged
combs across our heads…and made the 30-minute trek from Denton, Texas to the sprawling Dallas Ft. Worth International Airport at 6:00 AM.
Destination: Our ‘current’ home of ‘The West Side’, Arizona. We had dutifully helped complete a cross-country move for a close family member and were ‘somewhat’ happy to get back home (more on that in the near future).
After choking down some subpar airport coffee we boarded our American Airlines Boeing 787 flight and 2 hours later landed at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport.
(NOTE: after many false starts over the years I was finally able to fly the Dreamliner…and was very disappointed…more on this in a future installment as well…)
25 minutes pass by as we wait to get off the double-aisle plane: I am, of course, always amused as I watch people inadvertently drop baggage on their head trying to get off.
We finally make our way to the baggage claim area. 20 minutes later the ‘airport lady’ barks on the intercom (and I paraphrase of course): “Your bags aren’t in carousel 1…they are now going to come off in carousel 3. Go there right now or your bags will end up in Bangladesh”.
We lumber over to the other bag carousel with the other 150 lemmings (before you get all twitchy and offended I include us in that list) and wait once again.
At the new bag thingy I look over and there’s a 5’ish-year old with caked Spaghetti-O’s sauce on his cheeks leaning over and putting his hands in the carousel. I look next to him and there’s Mom…her nose stuffed in her phone having nary an acknowledgement of Junior’s antics in his new sandbox.
So from the title I’m sure you can guess what followed: Yep…in J-Pasta’s quest to grab every bag on the conveyor he falls right in and starts his fun-filled journey on the next cargo flight to Dubai.
Worry not, Mom finally got done posting a boob-selfie on Instagrump and casually pulled out the kiddo…without even the slightest fear that Junior might be the next batch of canned pasta.
People Have Become Numb at the Airport…Can You Blame Them?
Just like Mom of the Year, everyone else wandering around in Terminal ‘they-dont-care-about-us’ has given up hope that airlines (and most airports) are even going to fake that they are trying to do a good job and get flyers to their chosen destination.
Nope. Instead it’s the usual BS of ‘come on down to Scam International where we’ll cancel your flight at the very last minute because we can.’
This past week of ‘As the CyberSecuritySoftwareThatDoesn‘tWork Turns ‘ is a perfect example of such shambolic customer service.
So what is my point here? I’m actually not sure other than go slightly more than the extra mile in your own business. That’s all you need to do these days to stand apart from the shoddy examples we’re exposed to on the daily.
