Best I've had in a few years so I'll take it thanks :)

In principle this is now down to the what, when and where of custard. We have established that it has changed over history and that in no way should any attempt ever be made to misrepresent it as either asparagus or green tomato soup. Since this happened on a BA flight I see no difficulty in establishing relevance. I hope we are all agreed that custard is 'in and of itself' a good thing. We are merely debating the sub-optimal-ness of unexpected custard.

Deathslam,
Laurie was a Prof of Criminology at York, in the Sociology Dept, back in the early 70s. We invited him to talk to us in Leeds in about 72.
I really enjoyed Goffman's books.
However, Goffman would not have been happy to receive custard when he expected soup. He wanted to see the server's reaction to ordering in a strange order. He was not about his reaction to being given the wrong thing!

I do hope the custard was Bird's.

Wow...as someone with an avid interest in fair treatment in the workplace, I am very saddened by your wish to see formal disciplinary action taken against someone who simply made an error. We are all capable of making mistakes - and very often these offer the best learning opportunities. I hope you find your next flight much less stressful

I have a strong line in Custard stories, but to be fair it's not exactly a BA theme. Catch me at the next 'do'. :)

What this incident demonstrates is that when in F you pre-order food, what you are (perhaps) actually doing is just getting first dibs at the options. I think this is misguided. They ought to add the dish as an extra.

OP - I think a written complaint is in order. State that you accept that mistakes will happen and that you don't hold ill will toward the CC member, as these things happen. Draw attention to the fact that something could have been done about it had there been greater options and more redundancy on dishes loaded in F. Also draw attention that an alternative might have been found had the CSD been able to come to you quicker rather than you having to try and find him.

That is not a strong argument as one can argue God has also made mistakes.
The beauty of experiences is one tends to cut back on mistakes, especially smal and obvious ones. The reason we have and will command salaries to our current levels is not for just good looks ar nepotism. Our experience levels plays a major role in our selection for that job. Yes of course the obverse side to that is we all rise to our levels of incompetence.
If you read participate in such threads you will currently see an incident of someone was not up to snuff in drinks service, CSM excusing it as "It was her first First assignment". Experience does not bring mistakes to zero but minimize then to near zero as we also see that reported on FT.

Fundamentalists would disagree with your first comment.

Experience does not make you perfect. It does not prevent mistakes from happening. In this instance I don't think experience or inexperience played a role. It was a mistake that could have been made by anyone. It's called being human. The lesson to be learned by BA is that only catering for the numbers present means that it is more difficult to gain service recovery when mistakes DO happen. This is exacerbated by the fact that the CSD is not always available to manage service as effectively as if he/she were not responsible for giving routine service in Club.

Experience may reduce the number of occasions when a mistake will happen, but it does not eliminate them, and this kind of mistake can be made by anyone regardless of experience. What matters is being able to recover the situation, and BA following the just in time principles of Tesco and the like does not give them the flexibility with which to recover the situation. BA is not going to go back and stop the Mixed Fleet Principle. It would be cheaper for them to bring in some redundancy into catering and it would still be wiser to have the CSD managing the whole flight and assisting in ANY cabin as the situation demands. At the moment the CSD ends up having to wear two caps. I am sure that CIHY will correct me if I am speaking out of turn. I think these particular savings are false savings. In premium cabins you need to have a great chance of delighting customers. One way of delighting them is being able to recover a situation when something goes awry.

I don't know about you, I as a customer don't expect perfection, that is unachievable. I am often most impressed by how an organisation deals with a problem or an error. Some would say that this is the ultimate way of judging a company's customer service credentials. BA failed the customer here. Not because of the error, but because it had no way to give effective service recovery as quickly as it should have been able to.

You do try to make a persuasive case. Practice does not make it perfect but done correctly nears perfection. Neither am I naive enough to expect perfection although I try to deliver it ....

SIMPLE question: When you need brain or cardiac surgery would you pick a surgeon fresh out of residency or one who completes say 200 such operations a year with a mortality rate of less than average ?

I whole heartedly agree with the importance of SPEED & QUALITY of recovery.. I did not mention at as in the past some esteemed posters thought I was flogging a dead horse !!
The importance of experience is very clear in the ME3s or SQ etc. They know what to do when, how and how to recover ASAP. Do try it a few times.

Are you seriously expecting me to accept the comparison between service on a plane to life crucial surgery? I don't know where to begin how ridiculous that comparison is. I have flown on EK and on QR. I am not as enamoured with them as some. I found service quite cold on EK, and patchy on QR. Being barked at when asking for water to drink the water from the bottle rather than having it served in a glass is much more civilised is not good. And that was the CSD. This is not a unique experience on QR. Don't get me wrong, I have had good service on QR and Q suites is a fantastic product. But the grass isn't always greener

I am pleased to see I am not alone in this view, I was subject to some rather unpleasant comments on here when I mentioned this in another topic recently.