Come on People!

Okay, so last night I was working a flight to Vegas. Evening flights to Vegas are always full and always a pain to work. The plane leaves on time and you spend the next 30 minutes cleaning everything up. Last night was especially interesting.

A family approached me because they had received 2 boarding passes for the same person, we'll call her Jane, and did not recieve a boarding pass for one member of their party, we'll call him Jon. I took the boarding passes, printed a new boarding pass for Jon, ripped up one of the boarding passes for Jane and handed them 2 boarding passes, one with each person's name on it.

They came back a few minutes later because the boarding pass for Jon did not have the same seat as the old boarding pass for Jane and they wanted that seat back. The following is a break down of where each of us were coming from. (This story is way to complicated for a play by play.)

Their view:
They had 2 boarding passes with 2 different seats but with the same name. They wanted me to change the NAME on one of the boarding passes from Jane to Jon.

Reality:
Jane was assigned to seat A. An agent meant to move Jon to seat B. The agent instead moved Jane from seat A into seat B and left Jon where he had been all along in seat C. The agent then gave Jane and Jon the boarding passes for Jane's old seat and new seat and did not give them a boarding pass for Jon.

Their view:
The above didn't happen because they had chosen their seats and there was no way that they agent they spoke to when they checked in changed their seats. They wanted both seats that had been given to Jane and all they wanted me to do was to change Jane's name to Jon on the boarding pass. I had wronged them by moving Jon to seat C.


They were VERY unhappy and arguing with me that I was wrong and there was NO WAY that the agent had changed their seats and that I needed to give them their seat back. I tried explaining it to them many times, in many ways, but they didn't want to hear it.

It was 4 against one and I was tired of argueing with them so offered to them that they were welcome to talk to someone at the customer service desk, (there was no way to get a supervisor to the gate in time) but if they left they would more than likely miss the flight because we were at the end of boarding and would be leaving soon. This REALLY got them riled up. (It was actually kind of funny.) The problem was that they were keeping me from doing what needed to be done so the flight could leave on time. I guess I could have told them, in front of everyone, that they were personally going to cause the flight to be delayed, but I really didn't think this was the appropriate course of action, so instead I informed them what their options were.

They decided to get on the plane and promptly starting telling the flight attendants what a horrible person I was.

Shortly after they got on the plane I got a call from the flight attendants that there were 2 people assigned to the same seat on the plane. I asked for the names. Oh yeah, one of the people was Jane.

When I ripped up one of the boarding passes with Jane's name on it, I ripped up the wrong one. I had given them back the boarding pass for seat A, which now belonged to someone else, which was why I couldn't give it back to them in the first place!

The flight attendant also told me that I was Jane and her groups favorite person. I told him that I had no doubts that I was and we both laughed about it. I then told him which seat Jane was supposed to be in.

The fact that someone got mad at me over something I couldn't change and hadn't done in the first place is not new. The reason I have shared this story is because of what happened after.

The father of an unaccompanied minor was hanging out in the area waiting for the plane to get in the air so he could leave. He was chatty and pretty cool, so I had been talking to him. After I hung up the phone with the flight attendant he made some sort of crack about the family. I asked him if I had explained what had happened to their seats poorly. (I was trying to determine if it was me or them.) He informed me that he understood exactly what had happened the first 4 times I explained it.

I guess it was them. :)