Making a Federal Case Out of It

If anyone out there still doubts the truism about power corrupts, there was a report out of Polk County, Florida this week that should lay those uncertainties to rest. According to a story online from The Ledger.com website a Polk County sheriff’s deputy responded to a call from his wife saying that a local Burger King had messed up her order by driving to the restaurant while on duty, interrogating the manager and the drive-through attendant, and demanding to see their identification. Upon realizing that the Burger King in question was actually in the city of Lakeland (and therefore under the local police jurisdiction, not his), the deputy called a friend on the Lakeland PD out to the restaurant and tried to get her to proceed with the investigation. On learning the actual details, the police officer decline to get involved in what was essentially a civil matter, and bowed out. Which would have been the end of it, had the Sheriff’s Office not gotten wind of the story, upon which they suspended the deputy for two days without pay. At his pay grade, the $10 fast-food meal ended up costing him well over $300…

Now, it’s no secret that I have had my own run-ins with the Burger King organization over the years. I found it particularly amazing to have once purchased an order of “sliders” (miniature cheeseburgers) from a nearby Burger King, only to arrive home and discover that the top halves of the buns had been left off of them – a story I promised the company I’m going to keep re-telling until it stops being funny. Accordingly, I have no difficulty imagining some of the things that a Burger King location could do that would make the wife of a peace officer mad enough to call him over to arrest everyone in the place. What remains baffling to me is that anyone who has actually completed the training to become a sheriff’s deputy (let alone a 6-year veteran) would have behaved in the manner described. Even allowing for an absolutely preposterous level of arrogance, entitlement, and belief in his own power and immunity, the deputy in our story had to know that law enforcement officers are public officials, and consequently their actions are generally a matter of public record – and so are their reprimands…

I don’t expect to see too many recurrences of these events; this case is unusual if not actually unique. However, it would seem that there are at least two lessons to be learned here. First, as people in general become more connected and less patient, it’s only a matter of time before somebody who is given the wrong food (or something completely inedible – which happens sometimes) calls in people with guns who will actually use them. Being more careful with the orders won’t prevent this – crazy people with guns are going to do what they’re going to do – but it might keep the occurrences down a little if these mistakes weren’t as common. It might also help to have more security in public-contact businesses, especially those that involve cash purchases…

Second, it might be a good idea for local law enforcement to start cracking down on officers and deputies who would do something like this. Because the days when this sort of bully-boy behavior would be ignored by the public are long gone – and the days in which it was possible to cover up this sort of behavior are on their way out. If business and local government work together, it might be possible to put a lid on the worst of the crazy times in which we find ourselves living. But if they don’t, I can almost guarantee that there will be more incidents just like this one – and that more and more law enforcement agencies will find themselves racing to the bottom…

Fly the Traumatic Skies

On the face of things, the story I saw this week on the website for one of the Seattle news stations looks like just another of airlines being foolish – and I’ve already spoken to you all of my determination not to let this degenerate into the Airlines Follies blog. But once I dug down past the headline, I came to realize that the story has a bit more to it than meets the eye- and it isn’t just the company that is racing to the bottom, because at least part of their concerns are at least partly reasonable…

You can pick up the original story from the King 5 News site if you want to, but the basic scenario is that a woman who has terminal cancer is trying to fly home from Seattle to Korea to spend her few remaining weeks with her family. She and her daughter obtained all of the medical clearances saying she was healthy enough to travel that the airline required, and signed off on all of the forms required to deal with the various legal issues, but the airline still refused to let her board at the last moment, saying that the other passengers would be traumatized if she were to pass away unexpectedly during the flight. Despite being presented with multiple expert opinions that this would not happen, the airline wouldn’t budge and also started making trouble about the refund (saying that processing the refund would take longer than the woman had to live), which prevented her from just taking the money and buying passage on another carrier…

Now, the business with the refund was heartless; it was also illegal, and after this was pointed out to them by the news program, the airline relented and coughed up the money. But while it would be fun to condemn the airline for the passenger trauma concerns in the first place, we can’t – which is to say, given the current state of the U.S. legal system, we can not say with any confidence that someone on that flight wouldn’t have taken the opportunity of having a fellow passenger expire during the trip to sue the airline for vast sums of money for emotional trauma or whatever cockamamie nonsense they (and their lawyers) could dream up. We can suggest that the company should have the courage of their convictions, that they should stand up for their passengers and against frivolous lawsuits, or that if they keep attempting to avoid anything that might conceivably traumatize anyone they will not be able to continue running their business for any length of time – but the fact is, that’s not our call to make…

As I occasionally note on my other blog, Notes on a Business Page , the management of any publicly held company isn’t paid to take on all of the injustice and evil in the world; they are paid to make money for the stockholders who actually own the company. It’s possible that the airline’s stockholders would have approved of taking a gamble to get this customer home, but short of an emergency stockholder’s meeting (for which there also wasn’t time) there is no way for the management team to know that, and if the stockholders have voted against accepting legal risk for such situations in the past, then the management team was just following the directives of the people who actually own the company. We can deplore those policies, and if you care enough about this issue you could purchase stock in the airline and protest at the next stockholder’s meeting, but short of that, we can’t really say that the management team has done anything wrong…

That honor must go to all of the people who have sued over such issues in recent years, and all of the ones who read this story and thought “Payday!” and their attorneys, of course. Because the truth is that those individuals aren’t just racing to the bottom; they’re jetting there at 525 knots on four jet engines…