Monday, October 05, 2009

INTRO: WE CAN BE NICE SOMETIMES...

note: I wrote this as a supposed introduction to a series I was planning to do based on my current experiences working for an airline company. originally, i intended it as a mere catharsis in times of unexpected occupational burnouts, but at the end it became a personal imposition to blog it. hence, the result.

For whatever reason, people drop twenty points of their IQ everytime they step inside the airport.

As if their world had been detached from them, like a leap into a different dimension, they would see it as an entirely new experience. With that is a substantial decrease in brain function.

For one thing, ineptitude is not a mortal sin. Well, as long as the excuse can slip through the tightest of openings, it is still considered valid. People know that. And they make the most out of it. Even if the obvious is right there, ready to smack them full-force in the face.

“Where is the ticket counter for Southwest?” a woman would ask. She might be an intellectual for all I know, the elegance in her would not fool even the stupidest of all people. She wore thick glasses—academic-style—rounded black frames and the slender mold of the size of the lens. She would smile as she throw away that query, prepared for a response that is mechanical and polite.

Polite it would be, as my reply was a simple: “Towards the end, two miles down, take the bus and tell the driver to drop you off at the terminal for Southwest.” It was a joke, I know. And she knew it was. To me, it was a jab at her insolence—to go with a playful tilt of my head to where a big billboard of Southwest pointing the directions to their ticket counters.

In actuality, Southwest is located at the far end of the A-side terminal. It is easily seen primarily because most people would take that dirt-cheap-fare air carrier than most. And particularly because they were smart enough to advertise the lowdowns of other airlines. A long queue of people would snake down for miles, visible from every nook and cranny of Landside A, yet people would incessantly ask you the same question. Where’s the ticketing for Southwest?

I work for a small air carrier.

(Although further research contradicts this assumption—the company I work for is now considered a major player in the industry.)

The pay is not enough, but the job is fun.

Fun, in a sense, that there is a sense of entitlement that goes it with it. A similar sensation to that of a pilot. Or a flight attendant. The only difference is that they don’t get the share of spit and bull that we get whenever somebody misses a flight. Or they don’t get the seat they said that they requested. Or they were not informed of any changes to the flight schedule. Or whatever they could just easily make them feel horrible.

And it was always our fault for them to feel that way.

You cannot argue your way out of that. Customers are always, and will always be the one who gets the nod at the end. That’s how the world revolves. It might not be partial to whoever, but the law of the wild is just never untenable.

That is our defintion of fun.

Don’t get me wrong, I like what I’m doing.

There were blurry parts, but I learned to like it. It’s not highschool algebra that when everytime you fail, there is a love lost. Honestly, I never had any kind of affection for anything mathematics. Or anything that concerns numbers. Except, of course, during payday when you can do the simplest and even the most complicated calculations on how much you earned. Sometimes I can’t help but wonder how people become expert mathematicians when it comes to finding out the solutions to complex problems regarding their pay differences.

Anyway, that lady who asked me the directions to Southwest would find her way there. And we would continue to be their quasi-information booth. A kind of job description we did not sign up for. Except that it was an unwritten responsibility if you work at the airport. People would incessantly use their vocal chords rather than their visceral senses in finding out the wheres and the hows and the whens. Even if the answer is right in front of them. So much for signages, I guess.

“Can you tell me where me where Air Jamaica is?” a dark-skinned fellow approached a co-worker of mine. His eyes never scanned, but his lips parted as if Moses immediately knew what to do with the Red Sea. A couple of his companions started to walk the other way, one of them pushing a wheelchair. His accent was Jamaican, obviously.

My co-worker, B, raised her right arm and pointed to a ticket counter at the end of our row to where a Customer Service Agent was hunched over. An LCD screen with the green logo of Air Jamaica was behind her, in full view of everybody passing by. The man was not convinced. I assumed he was certain B was wrong, and he started to contradict her of the possible location of his destination.

“You see that woman working there?” B replied, her thick Puerto Rican accent crunched her English like teeth on crackers.

“No, that’s not Air Jamaica.” The man retorted. “We passed that a while ago.” Since both of them had difficulty in enunciation, neither of them could agree on the other. It was like a spar with two different skills, each had his/her own weapon to fight with.

B was clearly beginning to get annoyed, I noticed. She leaned back on our counter, stretched her figure up so she can point straight to where the agent was. “That sir, you see that woman working? That’s Air Jamaica. You might want to look at the sign again.”

The man gave up with a slight shrug and started for the agent. As soon as he discovered the sign was indeed the one he was searching for, he turned to B and waved. B waved back and forced an exhausted smile. I knew it was more than just a grin.

It was a sucker punch.

For us, sometimes seeing people get humiliated and embarrassed in front of everybody is a sweet revenge.

It was more of a get back to a similar kind of treatment we endured at the hands of some maladjusted human beings. We were frequently told that such attitude deficiencies were byproducts of a constrained buildup of temper plus the fact that it was merely a normal thing.

Although I am not adept at singling out the people lined up in front of me to be a potential blowup, but I managed to inculcate to somehow treat them as if they have the capacity to become a nutcase in the end.

Which is not the way it should be. But in reality, it’s different.

Especially if they are easily irritated by the least possible reason for them to react like that. But nobody could blame them. Not us. Not their fellow travelers. As far as I can tell, they arrive there with not just a rucksack or a black bag stuffed to the brim with their clothes and whatnots, but a luggage full of repressed pessimism.

I would have expressed sympathy. But for the most basic circumstance, they just put even the simplest as something that even Einstein or Freud could not figure out how to resolve. I try as much as I can to help these poor creatures of foreseen flight, for the caveat that I received from colleagues whose long list of industry experience would probably trace back to the Wright Brothers was more than sufficient for me to do something to an otherwise unrectifiable scenario.

Still our unending role as a live Global Positioning System persisted, from the unfussy direction findings to complex, oftenly stupid, queries like: does the coffee they serve in the airplane tastes like Starbucks?

I rest my case.

latest musing of Etchie at 13:33