A quick post this morning. The next few weeks are going to be busy, busy, busy. I think I’ve figured out what the problem is with the conversion of Nocturnal Rebellion. I’m going to do a trial run this morning — after my second cup of coffee. If everything works, I’ll follow by uploading it to Amazon and putting it up for pre-sale. Once I have, and once it goes live, I’ll let you know.
Not only am I doing that but I am working on the “special editions” of the Honor and Duty series. More specifically, I’m working on Vengeance from Ashes right now. While the expanded editions won’t change the overall story arc, they will provide more of Ashlyn’s backstory as well as adding some scenes I cut from the originals. I’m really excited to get VfA to my beta readers by the first of the week to see what they think.
Once that is done, I’m going to take a couple of weeks (well, probably a month) to write something a bit lighter. That means a revisit to the Eerie Side of the Tracks universe. I have several things already drafted that just need to be fleshed out. More on that later.
In the meantime, real life continues to happen. It wouldn’t be a normal week without hearing yet another story about United Airlines. How long is it going to be before the feds finally step in and start fining them enough that they either sell or get their act together?
This time, a mother and her three-year-old son were flying from Hawaii to, iirc, Boston. One one of the connecting legs of their trip, mother and son went through check-in, their tickets were scanned and they were seated, waiting for take-off. Along comes a flight attendant who asked if the child belonged to the mother and she, naturally, said yes. A few moments later, another passenger came up and said that the seat the child was in was his. Yep, you guessed it. He was a standby passenger who paid a whopping $75 or so for his ticket as opposed to the close to $1,000 the mother paid for her son’s ticket. He gets to stay on the flight and she has to hold the young child in her lap for a three hour (approximately) flight.
In an interview with the mother, she explained she was afraid to cause a scene, referring to what happened when the doctor was dragged off another United flight last year. Plus, she had her son with her and didn’t want to risk anything happening to him. I can’t blame her for that. United, in return, offered her compensation as a “gesture of goodwill” days after this happened and they have said they will make sure something like this doesn’t happen again.
The official explanation is that the child’s ticket wasn’t scanned right, so it didn’t look like he had boarded. That let them offer his seat to a standby passenger. Now, I have a problem with this. For one, they had eyes on the child as evidenced by the flight attendant coming by and asking the mother if the child was hers. For another, even if they made a mistake, it would have cost them a lot less in the long run — both financially and in good will — to have told the standby passenger they’d made a mistake than to have the woman hold her son in a manner the FAA says is unsafe for a lengthy flight. Oh, and it is against United’s own policy to have a child more than two-years-old sitting in a parent’s lap for a flight.
This is yet another indication of problems within the United culture. They look at the immediate dollars they can put in their pockets over the long term damage such actions might have. It is clear they are failing in their training regimen as well. The flight attendant should have either questioned how old the child was and then why he didn’t have a ticket or they should have informed the pilot and ticketing agent they had a violation of their own policy if the child was forced to ride in the parent’s lap.
But no. It was more important to get that whopping $75 from the standby passenger. How much is that decision going to cost them?
United, for your continued survival, you need to wake up and start acting like a responsible business.
While I’d like to believe that, the stark reality is that the existence of this incident demonstrates that they are still filling aircraft and the “compensations” they are paying are trivial to their bottom line.
So while they’re getting “bad publicity”, it isn’t really costing them in any way the bean counters care about.
This is what you get with a “they all suck” oligopoly: whether it’s Verizon vs. Time-Warner, United vs. American vs. Delta, or (over here) Bank Leumi vs. Bank HaPo`alim vs. Bank Beinleumi … You don’t like the shoddy service of A? Instead you get the shoddy service of B.
This is why big companies utterly adore government regulation. It creates barriers to entry that prevents anyone else from entering the market and doing the job better, and more efficiently.
In effect we have government endorsed monopolies on many major travel routes. Their attitude is essentially you can fly United or walk. Actual reasonable alternatives are few and far between.
And people wonder why 1) I’d rather drive, and 2) I don’t fly US carriers when I go to Europe.