I Apologize for Raising My Voice

       After a 45-minute wait, we learn our United flight from LAX to Newark has been cancelled because of a mechanical problem.

      Okay. Now what do we do?

      A line immediately starts forming at the gate of the cancelled flight: We are about a dozen people back, and that line ain’t moving. An announcement instructs us that we can get help finding new flights from a human on the United app. My wife tries. No human, just a recording playing over and over again.

      I walk up to the front of the line, to find out how long this is going to take. The lonely United employee there responds: “one hour.” I can handle that.

      But then she makes clear that she meant it would take an hour just to find alternative flights for the first couple on that line: “A lot of these people are international travelers, and it’s complicated,” she explains and suggests that I and the rest of us non-international travelers, use the app.

      That’s when I decide to raise my voice: “My wife is on the app and all she gets is a recorded message that repeats endlessly. United is going to have to do a better job of this!”

      Raising my voice was a decision.

      I certainly knew this was not that one employee’s fault. And I’m not a particularly short-tempered. But I had quickly calculated—based on decades of experience with unfeeling companies and unconcerned employees—that a certain amount of impatience, even anger would be necessary to get big, cost-cutting United Airlines and its employees to devote more energy to this situation. We—those of us trapped on a stagnant line with a useless app—needed to draw attention to our plight, needed to squeak.

      But hold on…. By the time I made it back to my wife, she was talking to a pleasant fellow from United on the app. And after about five minutes, he had found a couple of flights, with a short layover in Houston, that would get us home five-hours late but still that same night.

      This been-around-a-time-or-two fellow was wrong.

      And a realization was beginning to sink in: Maybe what we learned about dealing with large, impersonal companies and unfeeling employees in the 20th century is no longer applicable in the 21st.

      Sure companies are understaffed, employees are underpaid and things get screwed up. But most people seem to be less officious, less gruff, less callous than they used to be.

      None of this applies, of course, to internet/cable companies, with whom it is necessary—standard operating procedure—to get indignant when they surreptitiously jack-up your rates. Nor does it apply to entirely faceless Facebook, if they have mysteriously decided to ban you.

      But your average 21st-century airport, as a rule, functions relatively smoothly. Planes do still break down, though not that often. And they do have reasonable mechanisms, staffed by relatively helpful people, in place for rebooking stranded passengers. Twenty-first century airports—or supermarkets or car dealerships—are not places where Kafka would be at home.

       Indeed, the only person who was intemperate that morning at LAX was, uh, me.

       So I went back to that woman from United at the front of the line and said that we had worked things out on the app and that I was sorry for raising my voice.

      She looked up at me for a minute, but then quickly resumed helping those international travelers.

      And I had learned a lesson.