The good old days

Ah yes the wonderful good old days. The defining roar of the engines. The eternal shaking as you tried to sleep. Arriving 16 hours late.

Things are so much worse today.

Oh, I forgot the baggage limits that drove passengers to add pockets to their clothes. Ah well, at least that is coming back.


Mike W. wrote:
I've been a frequent flier for a long time. There is a process that has to
take place in the lifetime of all services and products for them to remain
commercially viable. This process centers around making all
products/services/technologies "accessible" (more easily usable,
affordable, "understandable", etc) to "the masses". Talking haircut/MBA
types call it "crossing the chasm" but once you own the company, it's ok to
call it what it really is... "slob enabling". When I began flying in the
80's, I heard then-frequent fliers tell of a time when people dressed up to
travel and everyone was treated as special. In their minds, at that time,
the airlines were catering to "the slobs in the back". To me, it was pretty
nice but it did sound nicer back in the day.

Today, I'm where they were. The make up of the back of the plane is getting
more and more and more like the crew you see at bus station. And now,
American has decided to invite this mixture of NASCAR pit whores, crack
addicts and other mutants with their plastic garbage bag carry-ons,
sub-marginal hygiene, and their bottomless unfiltered supply of exceedingly
obvious observations of the world around them up into OUR head in FC. ***
that. Yea, I know there are good guys back there too but as I hear how this
works, there isn't going to be an air marshall at the curtain deciding who
gets in and who doesn't. So screw them ALL then. It should be just like the
rest of real life works. I don't pay $1800 to hang out at the bus station
at midnight, or to have random samplings of the bus station crowd deposited
on my front lawn. I pay more for FC for a bunch of reasons, like being able
to get more work done (so I can pay disproportionately more taxes to keep
these fucks in the lap of luxury).. and not be entertained by the really
deep remarks of visitors from "back there" about how it's different. We
know it's "different", asswipe. That's why we pay more to be there.

United... I give you a bunch more business than American though until that
came up, I was thinking of jumping ship because frankly, you're sliding in
the FC and service roles MUCH faster than you need to. I swear to God if
you guys start courting the NASCAR crowd up front, I'll just start over and
take my average $1800 (plus 2 to 3 changes of my back end... another
$2-300) per flight someplace else. Please don't even think of going where
American just went.. I have a feeling the guys with the cardboard suitcases
aren't giving you as much dough as we are.


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