Most of us who travel, have ever traveled, or know anybody who travels, has some familiarity with the concept of air travel. We all know to complain about the food (really, it isn’t all that bad), the lack of leg room (it’s the only time in my life that I’m glad I’m not tall), the rudeness of the crew (Hey, they bring food and drinks right to your seat. What the hell do you want?), and the frequent delays, cancellations, missed connections, etc…(Yeah, that stuff actually happens. Not much you can do, but I’m not surprised people bitch about that). These are the standards of the airline comedy stand-up routine.
Some of them are tweeting
So, there are three airline stories in the news today, and that warrants a blog.
First, of course, is the tragic and mysterious tale of Malaysian Air 370, which is still missing. This will still be a news story 75 years from now, at least. Amelia Earhart still makes the news occasional, and she disappeared that long ago. I don’t know any more about the case than anybody, but I think the people who act all mystified that “they” can just lose an airliner in this age of infallible technology are overestimating the infallibility of current technology. Because there is, for sure, one lost airliner.
Another story that’s making the rounds is about a 14 year old Dutch girl who tweeted a really stupid tweet while she was on a flight, saying she was with Al Qaeda and she was planning something big. She was arrested when they landed at Rotterdam. Now, I’m not saying the police were wrong to arrest her, they need to investigate all leads, of course, but in the end, she is just a 14 year old girl who was making a stupid joke. I teach 14 year olds. They aren’t, as a general rule, the world’s greatest geniuses. The airline should just let this one go and the newspapers should let the story die.
The 3rd story also involves social media ham handedness, but this time by an adult, who has been sacked. He was working in US Airs customer relations department, so when somebody tweets a complaint to him, he is supposed to reply politely and diplomatically. Instead, when someone named Alex wrote in and said “You ruined my spring break. I want some free stuff,” he responded with a photograph of a naked woman putting a model 777 up her hoo-ha, captioned “@AmericanAir WTF, ONE OF YOUR PLAINES (their spelling, not mine) JUST CRASHED INTO MY PUSSY!” He’d probably just meant to send that one out to his friends, but, as they say in the IT industry, “whoops.” I’m not going to post the picture here but you can see it here.
Anyway, I wish you all happy travels and just don’t tweet anything stupid.
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