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(Be patient. I promise this will turn out to be West Seattle-related.)
I just finished the X-Treme Customer Frustration Marathon, sponsored by a local airline whose name you’d probably recognize. (I’m not naming names, but long ago, this company’s slogan was “kindly skies” or something like that.)
See, my 84-year-old, wheelchair-bound dad is flying into town this month, and I wanted to meet him at the gate, so I tried to contact the airline he’s flying in on to set it up. Nothing doing. They don’t have a published number that you can call and actually talk to a human being, and when I tried their so-called “customer service” 800-number, all I got was one of those cruel automated menu recordings. You know . . . the kind that make you want to seek out Alexander Graham Bell’s grave just so you can desecrate it.
Anyway, after taking several wrong turns in the maze, and after shouting a variety of off-menu expressions into the telephone receiver at the top of my lungs, I finally gave up in disgust and called home to break the news.
“I guess I’ll see you in the baggage claim area, Dad,” I said. “If you wind up LA, it means you got on the wrong shuttle.”
The airlines and the government want us to travel, right? So why do they make it so godawful hard? When I was a young man, some twenty years ago, you could get on a plane without having to show anyone your private parts. And if you had a question or problem with your ticket beforehand, you just dialed a number, and within seconds a human being would answer and get you the help you needed.
Sure, it wasn’t high-tech by today’s standards. But it worked pretty well, right? I guess the low-tech days of things working pretty well are gone, though. No use living in the past . . .
Now here’s the West Seattle angle, folks:
When my wife and I were looking for a place to leave Iowa for, lo these many years ago, we used the following principle as our guide:
Let’s move somewhere that’s so beautiful, we’ll never need to go anyplace else—just in case we’re not able to go anyplace else someday.
Well, it looks like the days of not being able to go anyplace may be here sooner than we thought. Fortunately, we made the right choice of places to end up. We’ve been here in West Seattle for more than twenty years now, and we’ve never seen of a greener pasture to graze in than this.
And to the airline that gave me all the grief, I would just say this:
Keep your “kindly skies” and telephone house of horrors for some other mule. As for me and my house, we’re staying home.
—D.P.
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