Originally Posted by
fastair
Well, let me requote MJ:
"While there my daughter sees the guy from the prior gate talking with another agent and referred, I kid you not, to the b___h and dick (his exact words) who wanted to get on his plane."
So a 3rd party (daughter) observes party 1 (cs agent in question) and party 2 (another agent) talking, listens in, and then assumes it is them (I hate to tell you, but every single airline employee I know including "the angel" sympathizes with Steven Slater) he refers to without engaging in conversation, then reports back to MJ (and I believe MJ to be a straightforward guy, and must assume he raised his daughter the same way) this, and he posts it here? Not quite the same thing as quoting the guy 1st hand, nor even realizing that we talk about LOTS of passengers who we perceive negatively, in a negative light (myself excluded, of course), when talking amongst ourselves (and we tell sympathetic stories too...we tell lots of stories...we have such colorful subjects/situations to talk about.)
This is pretty much a perfect summarization of the most-serious point I brought up. I wrote it exactly as it played out, and it
is possible the agent was referring to someone else, but definitely the situation at that gate. There was an older couple there as well, who were there before us, looking confused, and two others behind us. There is no doubt in my mind that I escalated the situation by "exposing" the fact that the plane was leaving with empty seats. That is not my normal style. Could I have handled that better?
I can tell you right now, the person in question's work ethic, knowledge, and dedication to his job is without question at UA. His "by the book" way of working makes me look like a liberal, and his professionalism...well, I am no saint for comparison purposes, but I look like Satan himself next to this guy, and I know with 100% computer data history certainty who we are talking about, and I have never in decades of work with him, ever heard him speak ill of a customer in public, and can't think of any time he has spoken less than "mater of factly" about a rude passenger in private.
I would say that somewhere between the eavesdropping, the background noise of an irrop ridden airport, and an upset girl, who then tells another, who then posts on the internet...something was lost or modified from actuality along the way, much as often happens in hearsay situations.
And I'm desperately looking for a way to support that contention. Seriously. I've gone over this one again and again and again. And will continue to. And it will become a lesson for my staff at the shop regarding talking about customers in anything other than a most-respectful way if they're not completely isolated from others, and further, to question why we would talk about customers in a disrespectful manner even in private, because customers are the only reason we have a job, and how could a situation have been handled diffeently so that everybody came out better? Given the result, the answer must be yes.
As to MJ's question on my previous post...I don't know how to edit quotes in a multithread kind of way, so I will just start a new thread and hope it gets merged/edited by the mods.
Nobody taught me how to do that. There may be a simple way, there must be, but what I do is select a post, start a reply, and then cust-and-paste it into a "master" reply. Confused? There's got to be a thread on this somewhere. Would be nice if you felt something positive came out of this thread.