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…

Wasting Your Time

In the main blog, I have occasionally gone off about frivolous lawsuits, although technically they’re not really a business topic. Actual business suits are, of course; if you are sued (or sue someone else) because of a broken contract, a dispute over debts, or a product that failed and/or caused harm to someone while being used as suggested, then it’s hardly “frivolous” and is most likely just part of doing business. By the same token, there’s nothing you can do about truly frivolous legal actions – most municipalities allow you to counter-sue the person, but for the most part, if someone wants to sue you because the weather today was ghastly, they can. However, this blog is more oriented toward making snarky comments at people who deserve them, and the woman who is suing because she was arrested for illegally taping a movie falls into that category…

You can pick up the story off of the local broadcast station if you want to, but the facts of the case appear to be that the movie theater operators noticed the woman taping the opening of the second “Twilight” movie and summoned the police, exactly as they are required to do under both criminal law and their contract with the studio that made the movie. The police arrived and arrested the woman taping the film, but the charges were later dropped when it was discovered that she hadn’t actually taped the whole movie and was mostly just recording a few scenes and images of other members of her party in the theater. Now the individual who was arrested is suing the theater for the “great public ridicule, embarrassment, humiliation, inconvenience, damages to her reputation, and other damages” that her lawyer says resulted from the incident…


I call this to your attention for two reasons. First, this individual is wasting your time – more so than I am, I mean. You, the taxpayer, are the one who ponies up the funds to operate the courthouse; every moment it is open costs you, and this individual is wasting those moments trying to capitalize on a profoundly stupid, self-absorbed action that is, in fact, in violation of both civil and criminal statute. Second, this individual is wasting your money – you, the movie-going member of the public who actually pays to see movies on the big screen. Because the movie studios, production companies and theater companies aren’t just going to suck up the costs of the lawsuit (and the damage award, if there is any); they’re just going to pass those costs along to you in the form of higher prices at the box office. And since time IS money – you have to work, for the most part, in order to get the money with which to buy these ticket, your time is being stolen and wasted again…

Now, I certainly don’t want to suggest that people shouldn’t be allowed to sue corporations for actions that embarrass or humiliate them, or that businesses should be able to use law enforcement agencies to damage whomever they wish without risk or penalty. But I’m also opposed to frivolous lawsuits (for all of the reasons stated above, and many more) and I’d have to say this one fits the description well enough. Suing a company because they had you arrested for an actual crime – even if the local district attorney decides not to bother trying you – is not an appropriate use of civil court, and should not be something you can just cash in on for money…

So before you call this a victimless crime, or express your approval for the gutty little consumer who is getting to really “stick it to the man” here, just keep in mind: it’s not the big, bad corporation that will suffer here, it’s you. That’s your money she’s going to walking away with – and it’s your time she’s wasting…