The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X
dustincurtis.com
dustincurtis.com
Like it or not, at Bigco International, everything is a press release.
Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don't know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we've built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.
I believe companies have to embrace allowing their employees to communicate independently while making it clear that what they say is not the official position of the corporation. There's simply no other way, the age of controlled communication channels is just over. A good example is MSDN blogs - anyone at Microsoft can launch his or her blog and talk about whatever they want (except, of course, confidental information).
Hardly. If Sun can, then sure AA can too:
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/10/16/I-Just-Wan...
Sun was one of the first companies to open the blogging floodgates, officially. [...] I note, with some pride, that we’ve had maybe ten thousand person-years of blogging since we launched, and we’ve never had any material disclosures or legal trouble. Nor have I heard of any over at IBM or Microsoft or Oracle or any of the other companies who empower their people.
That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA's website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it's true. But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply. They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while. They have lounges. They have international partners where my status benefits can be used. I get free domestic upgrades to first class. They have customer service that cares. (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.)
So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent. I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue. The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737. No thanks. Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won't be. And when I'm in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don't really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had.
(I am a little defensive here, I know. AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)
(I have flown on Southwest. Once. I got to the airport two hours early for a domestic flight. Waited in line for an hour and 45 minutes to check my bag and get a boarding pass. The boarding pass was "the wrong one" and security wouldn't let me through. Ticket agent didn't care. Gate agent didn't care. I then ran around the airport like a crazy person, "oh, you can connect in Kansas City, go to gate whatever". "She told you that we had room? HA! Try Oakland." Then I was stuck in Oakland for 6 hours.
This was before I was a frequent flyer and perhaps I was being stupid. But I have missed a fair share of AA flights and have never had any problems.)
And you checked "a" bag in? On a domestic flight? If I can't carry-on on a domestic flight, then I cut down my packing so I don't look like a woman taking my closet.
When the two are combined, you only need to show up ~:30 minutes before a domestic flight assuming security isn't a mess.
I still check my bag, even though I "know better", because unpacking at the checkpoint is a big pain. I don't think I carry anything on that doesn't have to be taken out of my backpack.
Also, I have to open my bag anyways, it has my laptop in it.
Things that let them offer better service significantly more affordably than their competitors. Processes to make due with fewer attendants, for example.
All I know for certain is that I can fly a 1.5 hour Southwest flight, check my bag for free (if I so desire), get a free soda (or 2), and a free snack.
The expression is "to make do", not "to make due". Ask anyone from an English-speaking country that doesn't pronounce "due" and "do" the same (ie, not in North America).
Thankyou.
Could you please reconsider your phrasing? Thank you.
OTOH, on the way back, the nice person at the AA ticket counter saw there were problems with one of our connections, and put us all on a Lufthansa direct flight to Frankfurt.
If it was your fault, what do you expect to happen? If you travel by TGV in France and miss your train, your place is also gone and you have to buy a new ticket.
Because I was calling at a weird hour, my call got routed to Qantas in Australia. Guy answers, I tell him in a panic about my situation and he's like "Yeah, no worries mate. Changed your ticket to tomorrow. How's New York? OMG! Have you seen the Statue of Liberty?!" Ha!
The difference really came down to how we were treated - a little bit of sympathy and trying to work with someone goes a long way to take the sting out of a bad situation.
One of the original reasons why I disagreed with Dustin. Slick Web 2.0-y goodness does not imply a better user experience. Copious amounts of whitespace is easy on the eyes, but also doesn't automatically imply discoverability or readability. I know first-hand of at least one top-50 website that is very Web 1.0 but absolutely excels at what it does.
Also, booking flights is very straightforward on aa.com. Dustin could have provided some substantive comments on usability, but instead simply called it ugly and slapped together a minimalist southwest.com knock-off. The only thing that really annoys me about the site is how confusing it is to get a list of your current reservations.
A majority of the public only shops based on price and availability. Unless the website is so bad that they can't figure out where to put their credit card number, it doesn't matter.
Like I really needed another reason not to fly AA. These days, its Jet Blue or Virgin America if at all possible.
I have a year to fly anywhere I need to, with JetBlue, except I needed to fly from Puerto Rico to Florida.
American flew me, and my dog, to Florida, no difficulties at all, on the spot. So maybe their corporate culture is screwed up, like many companies in this world, and maybe they're so big that there are a whole lot of people to screw up their Web design.
But when it comes to actually flying somebody somewhere with a dog, well, they appear to be an airline. Between AA, whose staff knew what they were doing, and JetBlue, whose staff came off as clueless, I'll continue to take AA.
And when said kitty needed to come from Boston to Toronto, it was in AA in the cabin. They were nice but largely indifferent about it. I'm guess they see plenty of pets every day. The normally surly TSA metal detector guys were really patient with me though.
Yay for globe trotting kitty!
Actually he travels pretty well, as long as you stay next to him and he knows you're around. If you want away from him he gets plenty upset though.
So, yes, checking the airline's policies would've been top priority. With JetBlue, this is amazingly easy: http://help.jetblue.com/SRVS/CGI-BIN/webisapi.dll?New,Kb=ask...
I realize that you're just trying to rag on AA, but I don't like the implication that 'unattractive' people shouldn't be airline employees.
As upsetting as this is, it's just not that big of a surprise. Some companies take non-disclosure very seriously. Why didn't Mr. X just use gmail? I can't imagine discussing any company's internals on their own email system.
OTOH, maybe Mr. X just committed corporate suicide by email. That's one way to escape the insanity.
Thanks for the update, Dustin. I sure hope Mr. X lands on his feet fairly soon and I applaud your contribution. I like to think that integrity still trumps idiocy.
Things like this will keep happening so long as we're willing to trample all over each other in our race to the "top".
This guy admitting anything but the most perfect of environments and purity of process, while not a firing offense to normal folk, opened a vector for the possibility of the hint of something bad being done. So he had to go.
When that company is a US company, then yes, because of the sue-on-sight culture that has grown there. The same thing wouldn't have happened if this was Air France, Scandinavian Airlines or Iberia Airlines.
I'm reading in a dark-ish room right now. I suspect it may have something to do with the type of monitor used to view the site, because on mine the physical effects are very pronounced.
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200608/light_text_on_d...
For as long as I can remember I have not liked reading large amounts of light text on dark backgrounds. It's always felt as if this was some kind of genetic predisposition for me. While for others, the opposite (i.e. strongly preferring light text on dark background) seems to be true.
I'd be really interested if anyone has heard of some solid research on why certain people prefer one over the other.
I feel I can take risks with my blog that I can't take elsewhere. Sorry if it bothers you.
But some people seem to find it more appealing, so I suppose it works both ways.
I guess AA took some of that advice to heart here.
I can only hope this guy does land a job someplace where the company culture isn't completely and utterly fucked all across the board, all the way from the hangar to the board room.
An articulate explanation of how good intentions at big companies can often be implemented only slowly.
And, yes, that's depressing.
"AA searched their exchange database for the text I posted, found the guy, and fired Mr. X on the spot."
The last place I worked had software that took a screenshot of your desktop every so often, and the boss could remote into your machine to see what you were up to. I didn't find out till my last day, it explained why he was so good at busting us when we were on facebook
That's always the way with any non-trivial undertaking. Recognizing this is the hallmark of actual experience.
This dialog comes near the end, Lester and Perry discussing the paradox of working for a big company. According to Cory's bio, he never worked in a big company, but he nails it here.
gvb
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Lester: "They said that they wanted me to come in and help them turn the place around, help them reinvent themselves. Be nimble. Shake things up. But it’s like wrestling a tar-baby. You push, you get stuck. You argue for something better and they tell you to write a report, then no one reads the report. You try to get an experimental service running and no one will reconfigure the firewall. Turn the place around?" He snorted. "It's like turning around a battleship by tapping it on the nose with a toothpick."
Perry: "I hate working with assholes."
"They’re not assholes, that’s the thing, Perry. They’re some really smart people. They’re nice. We have them over for dinner. They’re fun to eat lunch with. The thing is, every single one of them feels the same way I do. They all have cool shit they want to do, but they can’t do it."
"Why?"
"It’s like an emergent property. Once you get a lot of people under one roof, the emergent property seems to be crap. No matter how great the people are, no matter how wonderful their individual ideas are, the net effect is shit."
"Reminds me of reliability calculation. Like if you take two components that are 90 percent reliable and use them in a design, the outcome is 90 percent of 90 percent - 81 percent. Keep adding 90 percent reliable components and you’ll have something that explodes before you get it out of the factory.
"Maybe people are like that. If you’re 90 percent non-bogus and ten percent bogus, and you work with someone else who’s 90 percent non-bogus, you end up with a team that’s 81 percent non-bogus."
"I like that model. It makes intuitive sense. But it’s depressing. It says that all we do is magnify each others’ flaws."
"Well, maybe that’s the case. Maybe flaws are multiplicative."
"So what are virtues?"
"Additive, maybe. A shallower curve."
Very truly yours (and hoping I don’t get fired for being completely incompetent),
Last line from his email, ironically.
It seems the proper thing to have done would be to make the email untraceable to Mr X rather than just anonymizing the name.
Steve Jobs also cited 'taste' as the fundamental difference between Apple and Microsoft. His high-and-mighty attitude almost made me want to puke, as Dustin's does here.