I'm a geochemist. My main interest is in-situ mass spectrometry, but I have a soft spot in my heart for thermodynamics, poetry, drillers, trees, bicycles, and cosmochemistry.
Saturday, October 24, 2009
Asshole of the Month
The Asshole of the month award for October 2009 goes to the United Airlines Steward who harassed the woman sitting in front of me as we came in to land at Sydney this morning. She was flying with an 18 month-old in her lap, and a three-year-old in the seat next to her, with no other adult assistance. The flight was over 13 hours long. And the kids were great- there was a brief point where the older kid tried playing with the hair of everyone around him (including me), but in general they were quiet and kept to themselves the entire flight. No so for the steward, who went off on some passive-aggressive, sarcastic bombast. With slang. American slang. To an obviously non-American passenger. I don’t know what he meant by “fresh”, but I don’t think that word can really be applied to anything on a sold-out 747 that has been in the air for over 12 hours. Luckily all the other 400-odd people on board were acting sensibly, so the flight as a whole was surprisingly bearable. He should have been pinning a medal on the woman. Instead he made trouble. What an ass.
Too often though the airline flight attendants just stand by and tolerate bad behavior. Like a 4-5 year old boy getting up and wandering around and bugging everyone around him with his parents doing absolutely nothing. Or a kid continually kicking the seat in front of him. You sure other passengers weren't agitated at the momentarily bad behavior? I can't imagine a flight attendant doing anything like that without being asked to, perhaps there was some a-hole sitting a few seats away from you as well.
ReplyDeleteStill, there are some attendants that need attitude adjustment for their behaviour without provocation. I had a similar experience on a recent Qantas flight where a solo-travelling Mum across the aisle asked for a water top-up for a sipper bottle. The attendant gave a big sigh, rolled his eyes and huffed way like some pantomine ugly sister. Dude, it's your *job* to serve people... If you don't like it, get a job at an Australian retail store.
ReplyDeleteThe kids were asleep, so I don't see how that could be considered tolerating bad behavior- they weren't even snoring.
ReplyDeleteI missed the beginning of the conversation, but I think it was something about putting a seatbelt on or putting a seat upright for landing not fast enough / without waking them up.
Probably those pesky seat-belts for infants that are supposed to loop through the adults seat-belt and around the kid. Designed by some intern engineer who modelled the infant as a 15 pound sack of sand without thought for how a mother would breastfeed or how a real child would behave in such a contraption. Or how hard they are to put on with a sleeping child and a sarcastic flight attendent bearing down on you...
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