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…

I Miss the Old Days…

I was saddened to hear that in the aftermath of the earthquake in Japan last week there were apparently cases of people using the occasion for a few cheap laughs. I’ not referring here to the firing of Gilbert Gottfried by AFLAC because of a few insensitive tweets; that has always been Mr. Gottfried’s style of humor, and if the idea bothers them the company shouldn’t have hired him to voice their spokesduck in the first place. No, here I am referring to some roguish jokester who apparently thought it would be funny to tell the parents of a young woman living in Japan that she had been confirmed dead in the aftermath of the disaster…

You can pick up the Associated Press story off of the Toronto Star website if you want to, but the basic idea is that someone posted a message on a Google site set up for the purpose of tracking loved ones who might have been in the affected area, saying that the woman in question had been confirmed dead. It became clear that this was incorrect when the woman managed to get a text message through to her parents using a satellite phone a day or so later, and it became clear that this was a deliberate hoax (not just an informational error) when it was determined that the name signed to the “medical” report was not that of any doctor who had ever worked at the facility where the “death” supposedly occurred, and no one has been able to identify who actually posted that entry in the first place…

Now, I realize that modern-day trolls are not, for the most part, truly descendants of the hacker culture of the last century. I used to run with a group of hackers, back when the Internet was still just a gleam in DARPA’s eye and most computer exchanges were done over telephone lines using 300-baud modems and bulletin-board systems, and I can tell you that not only would we never have considered such a hoax, we wouldn’t have tolerated anyone who did. We might have attempted humor by listing Julius Caesar, Richard M. Nixon, Pope Pius IX or the AFLAC Duck among the departed, or political commentary by making entries for Wisconsin’s Public Employees’ Union or Governor Walker’s career (depending on our party affiliation), but causing somebody’s parents such a moment of heartbreak and grief isn’t just unfunny, it’s also cruel, callous and stupid – and those are just the adjectives I can print…

There was a time when being a hacker meant something; when we aspired to be the knights of the Information Superhighway, defenders of the defenseless, the conscience and the whistle-blowers of a nation (and, one day, the world). We knew it wasn’t really true, of course; just as we knew that the majority of us really were zit-faced nerds playing video games in our parents’ basements who had never had girlfriends. But it was something to believe in; something that made us more than just a bunch of poorly-socialized technology geeks with a penchant for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons and vintage Mountain Dew. The interconnection of all of humanity has done some wonderful things for our world, bringing people together and creating friendships and communities where once there was only quiet desperation and loneliness, but it has also given that tiny number of truly monstrous human beings the chance to vent their spleen, hatred and cruelty onto innocent people in a time of crisis…

It makes me sad for my species, sometimes. And if this behavior is ever accepted – indeed, if it is ever greeted with anything less than a murderous rage – then our Race to the Bottom has achieved a new speed record…

The Human Factor

Every once in a while you’ll hear someone talking about how all of the new security we’ve been seeing since 9/11 is just window dressing; not only are the borders still as open and the ports (air and sea) just as vulnerable as ever, but the actual TSA security, which manages to defy multiple Amendments from the Bill of Rights, manners and (frequently) sanity is accomplishing nothing. Now, I’m as security-minded as the next guy, and more patriotic than most; I want to be as sure as possible that no one is going to slip a bomb onto the next airplane I ride on, and I’m perfectly okay with whatever our government decides to do to anyone who does. Nevertheless, you have to wonder if the pessimists are correct when you hear stories like this one from the CBS affiliate station in Boston …

If you don’t want to hit the link, the story is pretty straightforward: TSA agents testing the security procedures in Charlotte managed to get a package onto a Jet Blue flight to Boston by the time-honored method of slipping a $100 bill to the agent at the front counter. Yes, you heard that correctly; for a measly $100 an otherwise sane adult was willing to place a package containing who knows what onto an airliner. I’m not sure if I’m more appalled as a consumer (I expect better from the private sector!) as a reasonably ethical human being (how could ANYONE risk over a hundred human lives in such an idiotic and reckless fashion for mere personal gain?) or as a business teacher (you risked a life sentence for $100? Really? You’re okay with being paid the equivalent of $2 a year for the next fifty years? Assuming they don’t just execute you for being a terrorist or an idiot?) Nor do I find assurances by the TSA or the airline that all packages going aboard are screened for explosives in any way reassuring; the desk agent was willing and able to commit forgery, perjury, and accept a bribe that put over a hundred people in mortal danger – do you expect me to have any faith in his or her adherence to safety protocol?

I should also point out that this is a plot element from a movie that was, unfortunately, released the same week as the 9/11 outrages: two minor criminals are able to get tickets for themselves and a hostage out of the country simply by offering the desk agent several large bills. They’re also carrying an atomic bomb with them in the mistaken belief that it’s really a case full of diamonds, but that’s not point; 9/11 itself proved that you don’t need to get a bomb onto a plane to destroy it – or to kill several thousand people on the ground at the same time. My point here is that as long as the people working for the airlines and TSA remain fallible human beings there will always be some chance of this happening – and if these individuals are underpaid and overworked (or even believe that they are) they will be able to justify such misdeeds in their own mind for long enough to cause another set of catastrophes…

Of course, this time there was a happy ending; this time the mysterious package was just a test article and the sender was an undercover TSA agent. But as long as our entire airline security system is based on everyone who works at every airport doing the right thing regardless of temptation, resentment, or personal feelings, then it’s only a matter of time before this sort of outrage happens for real – and another airline destination joins us on our Race to the Bottom…

You Keep Using That Word…

There’s a famous joke that occurs in the classic movie “The Princess Bride,” where the leader of the bad guys keeps saying the word “Inconceivable!” with regard to their enemies catching up with them, climbing up the cliffs, and so on. Finally, one of his henchmen responds in consternation “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” This was essentially my reaction to one of the most recent pronouncements from a pretender to leadership of the Tea Party Movement this past week; I’m just worried about what will happen if more people start making the same malapropos…

You can find the story on TPM here if you want to, but I’ve cross-checked the story on some other sources, and it appears to be correct in the particulars. On Wednesday of this week, Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips put out a list of what he called “Liberal Hate Groups” – in other words, groups that he and his followers (assuming he has followers) believe hate them and their values and possibly America into the bargain. It’s a direct reaction to the Southern Poverty Law Center (number 4 on Mr. Phillips’ list) declaring some of the hard-line conservative religious/political groups like the Family Research Council and the American Family Association onto its list of Hate Groups because of their opposition to same-sex marriage and the abolition of the military “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, along with more basic civil rights. Other groups named in the same fatwa include the NAACP, the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU, and the SEIU, all for the same general sort of refusal to adhere to a conservative Christian Euro-centric cultural view of the U.S. It would be even funnier if it wasn’t so clear that the Tea Party Nation has no idea of what a hate group actually is…

Now, in fairness to everyone, the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list includes groups like the KKK, and having a political organization whose goals you agree with end up a list like that would certainly anger most people. But calling them a hate group because they take exception to organized (and well-funded) groups trying to deny millions of people basic civil rights is a little silly, and putting DHS on the list because it supports the current Presidential administration is asinine unless Mr. Phillips actually wants Federal agencies to declare open rebellion against a lawfully-elected government. The ACLU is just as stupid; the only rationale given is that the ACLU hates America (according to the Tea Party, anyway) and is therefore a hate group. By the time you get to the end of the list, it’s clear that whoever came up with this spew has both the intelligence and the manners of a spoiled child. The problem is, they’re also the nominal leadership for a group that numbers somewhere between five and thirty million people – and they don’t appear to be kidding…

It would be nice to end the year on an up note, and maybe sometime in the future I will, but for the moment, I read this sort of thing and a cold wind goes up my back. Because when those in power (any kind of power, I don’t care!) start calling their enemies “un-patriotic” and demanding that they be disenfranchised, imprisoned, or destroyed outright, I recall the lessons of history and what happened the last time a national government was co-opted by such people (reference Germany, 1930 to 1945, if you didn’t catch it), and I worry for the future of this Republic. In five hours or so it’s going to be 2011 – let’s all be careful out there…

Plummeting to the Bottom

I’ve done a number of posts so far about the excesses of junk food – and institutional food in general – and I want to be clear that I’m not going after the industry as such. I believe very strongly in personal responsibility, and thus I feel that if you are eating a nice 2,700 calorie entre and then washing it down with a 990 calorie milkshake and a side of 1,730 calorie waffle fries, that’s your business. Unless you happen to be 7 or more feet tall, work as a professional athlete, have the metabolism of a hyperactive weasel on speed, or all of the above, I believe that you should also accept responsibility for the obesity that will likely result from eating six to eight times the recommended calorie intake each day. But what about the people who have no choice in what they ingest, either because their meals are selected for them, because they have no income to purchase healthy options, or because they’re too young to know what a calorie is in the first place?

A recent study from thee Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale, as cited by the U.S. News & World Report website examined kid’s meals from some of our better-known national junk food chains, and come up with some remarkable results. You can read the attached article (or its parent study) if you want to, but let me call your attention to the worst product offering cited: the cheeseburger kid’s meal available at Dairy Queen, with 973 calories. Obviously, no one goes to Dairy Queen to obtain health food, but 973 calories is a reasonably large meal even for me (it’s a third of my recommended daily intake), and I’m 6’2” and 250 pounds – no one’s choice for a small person. It seems a bit much to be giving a pre-teen, let alone a pre-schooler…

If that sounds like an isolated case, consider the Sonic chicken strips kid’s meal, at 708 calories, or a Taco Bell bean burrito meal at 760. In fact, Taco Bell did not offer any kid’s meals that the Yale team was willing to acknowledge as “healthy” for the purposes of the study; most of the other national chains at least had low-fat and low-calorie options that, if not exactly healthy, were at least probably no worse than any other form of lunch. It’s probably also worth noting that the offerings the study criticizes the most are also the ones that actual kids are most likely to eat – certainly, it’s harder to sell kids on macaroni and cheese with apple slices and milk than on a cheeseburger with fries and a soda, especially if you’ve gone to a junk food stand to obtain them…

Now, no one is saying that everything kids eat has to be healthy, or that there’s anything wrong with the occasion junk food meal. In that classic phrase, I’ve been eating the stuff all of my life, and I’m not dead yet. But at the same time I can’t help thinking that 973 calories (and the attendant amounts of fat and sodium) is a lot to put up with in exchange for the relatively small amount of food described. Even as a small child you could probably have talked me into a Happy Meal (at only 385 to 650 calories), and I suspect that modern kids aren’t that different – especially if they get the toy they really wanted in the package. I’m just suggesting that if eating habits are really learned in childhood (and all of the current research suggests they are) it might be possible to start teaching children to get the most from their calories and fats at the same time we start teaching them to get the most for their money and time, and give them the chance to opt out of both the massive health problems associated with obesity and the massive social problems of being a health food snob while there’s still time…

Because if we don’t, the next generation is going to be plummeting to the Bottom right along with us…

Point and Counterpoint

Over the past few years we’ve been hearing an increasing number of stories about atheist groups renting billboards claiming that there is no God and they’re all doing fine without one. A lot of religious people seem to take these as a direct attack against them, or at least against the institutions they belong to, while the atheists themselves see such messages as a counter-attack against all of the religious billboards, radio spots, television commercials, bus benches, movie trailers, and propaganda pamphlets (to call them by their right name) that most major religions spread around. Consequently, neither side seems to understand why the other side is mad at them – the atheists see their ads as nothing more than a demand for equal time (in the sense of publicly proclaiming their beliefs, just the way the religious advertising does), while the religious groups believe that the atheists are trying to destroy them (and in extreme cases, to turn the entire world over to the demonic forces of the Adversary) and everything they hold dear, and must be stopped at all costs. In at least one case, literally…

A story being reported by the Fox affiliate station in Dallas tells about how an anonymous group of “pastors and businessmen” has hired a number of mobile billboard trucks, equipped with Christian advertising messages, to follow the Dallas city busses that carry the atheist billboards around. I don’t know enough about advertising to say for certain if this campaign is likely to be effective; as a strategist, however, I can see at least three problems with the idea. First, the mobile billboard trucks are calling far more attention to the atheist billboards than they would ever have gotten on their own. Second, a lot of people don’t like mobile billboard trucks, religious advertising, or being proselytized in the first place; combining all of these things into a single event seems ill-advised. And third, who on Earth do they expect to influence with such a gesture? Anyone who is likely to convert to their particular brand of Christianity because of a proselytizing billboard has almost certainly already seen one, and the atheists already dislike efforts to convince them of the error of their ways, so directly attacking their advertising seems particularly useless. And that doesn’t even address the fact that this gesture directly contradicts mainstream Christian ethics in the first place…

Consider, for a moment, the huge amount of money that these billboard trucks are costing the consortium every hour they are on the road. Then ask yourself, how many poor people could be fed, clothed, sheltered, healed, medicated or educated with that amount of money? More to the point, perhaps, what is more likely to convince someone that your beliefs have meaning, the fact that you fed them when they were hungry and cared for them when they were sick because your faith demands that you treat all people as your brothers and sisters, or the fact that you hired a large diesel-powered billboard to shout down someone whose beliefs differ from yours?

Some years ago, the great American musician and folk singer Cheryl Wheeler wrote (of evangelical Christians of her acquaintance) “If the Lord is telling you what to do, that’s great. If the Lord is telling you to tell ME what to do, we’re going to have a problem!” To date, this remains the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say on the subject of religion in general and evangelicals in particular. For all you or I know, the Dallas consortium may be absolutely correct in both their beliefs and their interpretation of what their creator wants them to do; it might even be that renting those billboard trucks will get every one of them a free ticket to Heaven and ten free games of skeeball when they arrive. But in terms of civility, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, tolerance, or even the ethical structure of the very religion they claim to be champions of, this is nothing more or less than a diesel-powered entry in our Race to the Bottom…

Come For the Mold, Stay For the Idiocy…

In our ongoing collection of bad customer service decisions, I noted a story that was quoted on the WPXI website and later aggregated by the nice folks over at The Consumerist , about a man who was apparently blacklisted by a Motel 6 after he complained about a moldy shower curtain. If you’re like most people, your immediate reaction was probably “How skuzzy do you have to be to get on a Motel 6 blacklist?” or perhaps “Wait, Motel 6 has a blacklist? WHY?” I read the story and was transported back in time to a similar case in my personal experience – where the local management team got it right, instead…


My wife and I were on vacation and had selected a national hotel chain supposedly a few ranks above Motel 6 because they were offering a good rate and a convenient location. Everything had been reasonably satisfactory until one night when we came back to our room and discovered that the maid service had left us the most disgusting bed sheet either of us had ever seen. What on Earth they were thinking I’ll never know; the thing was stained, torn, and generally looked like the sort of sheet your mother would have thrown out without even making into dusting rags first. My gut reaction was that somebody had probably quit that day and was going out of her way to cause trouble for the management team. My wife’s reaction was that whoever was running the place had completely dropped the ball, and needed to do something about it…


We made a point of being discrete when we showed the hotel manager the sheet; he in turn was appalled, and apologized profusely for the screw-up. It probably helped that we clearly weren’t trying to scam anyone (we didn’t demand cash, a reduced bill, free room service or anything else), but the fellow clearly knew that he had a problem on his hands, and went out of his way to correct it. For the rest of our stay, he personally inspected the room everyday after the maids were done with it, and I recall getting a better rate than we had originally been quoted when we checked out – although I can’t swear to that one; it’s been a few years and my memory is getting worse. All I can tell you is that whatever he did, the lasting impression I have is of someone trying very earnestly to get it right…


Now, you and I weren’t there when the Motel 6 case went down; we don’t know for any certainty whether there was mold, how bad it was, whether the customer was an ass about things, whether the on-site manager was an ass about things, whether any effort was made to satisfy the customer’s demands, whether the customer’s demands were outrageous, or anything else. It’s possible that a business-friendly website would have told a very different side of the story from the one I found on The Consumerist. Still, it’s hard to imagine what possible good could come of leaving mold in a shower, blacklisting a customer for complaining about mold in a shower, or refusing to take that customer’s money when he actually returned to that location. Unless he was noisy, disruptive, abusive, threatening, or actually appeared to be trying to cheat the company (none of which has been alleged by Motel 6), there should have been no reason for a for-profit venture to blacklist him in the first place, let alone backpedal when called on it by the media or consumer-advocate websites…


I’m not saying that Motel 6 is racing toward the bottom any faster than any other national chain; I’m just saying that if you go you might want to bring your own Lysol…