Bob Sutton’s blog post is titled “United Airlines Lost My Friend’s 10 Year Old Daughter And Didn’t Care”  and I believe every bit of it. I also believe this was not an isolated occurrence, because my own experience with United indicates that the airline doesn’t care, or at least allows its employees to adopt that attitude.

First, I’ll  summarize Sutton’s horror story (and then on to mine):

• Sutton’s friends sent their 10-year-old daughter to summer camp in Grand Rapids, which meant that she had to fly as an unaccompanied minor on a United Airlines flight from San Francisco to Chicago.
• United promised to have an employee from their unaccompanied minor service meet the girl at the gate and take her to the connecting flight. No employee appeared: she “forgot.”
• The girl went to United attendants for help, but they were too busy to assist a 10-year old girl stranded because of the incompetence of their own employer.   She told them she had a flight to catch; they told her to wait.
• The girl asked repeatedly to use a phone to call her parents. Again, they were “too busy.” Again, they told her to wait.
• While waiting, she missed the flight.
• She asked the United attendants if someone would contact the camp, which had a representative meeting her at her destination, to make sure they knew she would be delayed. She was told they would handle it. They didn’t.
• When the girl didn’t arrive on the plane as scheduled, the camp called her parents.
• The parents’ frantic calls to United ended up with a customer service agent in India, who told them he was “sure she is fine.” From India. After the United employee charged with the girl’s safety “forgot.” How reassuring.
• After the usual interminable waits on hold and being given the runaround, the parents found a United employee who agreed to help. Then she said she was going off her shift and that the parents had to find someone else. They finally persuaded her to help them anyway by playing the Golden Rule card: she was a mother, and they asked, what she would do in their position?
• The woman, as a mother, not a United employee, located the girl in the Chicago airport.
• United ignored their complaints about the incident until the parents contacted the media.

This, my friends, is United. I am writing my own letter to its CEO, having finally regained my composure from my own recent experience with the airline, which had me seriously considering an airport massacre. My destination was Sun Valley, Idaho, which is approximately as convenient to get to as Mongolia. I had an early morning ethics presentation at the resort the next day, and there are not a lot of flights into the tiny airport, so I arrived at Ronald Reagan National Airport in DC more than an hour ahead of time—plenty, unless you are flying United, I discovered. Although it was before 7 AM, the line at the counter and check-in kiosks extended forever: United had just a skeleton crew on duty. The same was the case at the curbside check-in. Knowing that it had high volume, the airline nonetheless refused to hire sufficient help to ensure their customers’ convenience and to ensure a reasonable wait. In my experience, United and American are the only carriers who never have adequate staff on duty, essentially making money at the cost of their customers’ anxiety and time. It’s bad business, bad customer relations, and bad citizenship: people need work, and  United needs more workers—it just doesn’t care enough about its performance to hire them.

By the time I had checked my one bag—I already has a boarding pass, for all the good it did me—time was tight. Security was even slower than usual, and my gate, 14, was on a distant offshoot of the main terminal: “Gates 10-24,” the sign said, but 10-14 required a trek, which became a jog.

When I arrived at Gate 14, the sign said that it was for another flight, despite what both the airport flight directory and my boarding pass indicated. The rude, dismissive, middle-aged, white-haired female United gate attendant whose blank and doughy face will haunt my nightmares forever, curtly told me that I “had the wrong gate”, and that my flight was taking off from Gate 24. ( I didn’t have the wrong gate; I was given the wrong gate information….by United) Now I had just 10 minutes to make the flight, so I had to run—not a good idea or a pleasant experience for an out-of-shape ethicist with one artificial hip and another ready to go. Back I went to the fork in the gates, then ran to the very end—to find that Gate 24 was empty. Where was the flight? The directory still said 14, and now there was no time, even if I was Mr. Bolt.

There were no United attendants anywhere, so I pleaded with a Delta agent to contact United. Nobody at United picked up the phone. Nobody from United answered her page. With no other options, I ran, sweating, grunting and hurting, back to 14.  Dough-face, her flight having successfully departed, was checking boarding passes. Like the 10-year old, I told her I needed help–my flight was scheduled to leave imminently, she had sent me to the wrong gate, and there was no source of information to get to the right gate. If I missed the flight, it would cost me my fee, and also harm about 200 lawyers counting on me for their ethics CLE credits. I was obviously desperate and panicked. Her unsympathetic response: “I’m sorry, sir. I’m busy. I will help you when I’m finished.”

“That will be too late! ” I said, urgently. “You sent me to the wrong gate. You have to help me, and now. Call the gate and tell them to wait for me. Do something! Call customer service!”

In a moment of cold and blinding candor, she then uttered these words, which will forever define United Airlines in my mind:

“Sir, United has no customer service.”

Truer words were never spoken.

I asked to see her supervisor. “He was here a minute ago. He must have gone on break,” she shrugged. ” Please stop bothering me; you made me lost count.” Dough Face will never know how close she came to getting her wings at that moment. Then the supervisor suddenly appeared. He pointed a few gates down, and said, “Your flight is boarding now, at Gate 11.”  So I ran there. That wasn’t my flight either. I ran back. “Oops,” he said. “I meant Gate 12. You will make it. It was delayed.” I will leave out the part where I told him my assessment of his airline, Dough Face, their likely parentage, and their apparent lack of concern for providing their customers with correct information or lifting a finger to counter the effects of their own arrogance and incompetence.

When I reached O’Hare, I nearly missed my connecting United flight, because despite the delay of the D.C. to Chicago flight, I could get no United attendant to call ahead and make sure the second flight waited for me, even though it was officially a continuation of the same flight.  You guessed it: all the attendants were “busy.” Again I ran, making it just as they were closing the doors.

Good, ethical businesses don’t conduct themselves like this, even once. My experience with United, like that of the parents of the little girl whose United contact “forgot” to meet her, is the end result of a rotten corporate culture that breeds arrogance, laziness, nastiness, and the modern day equivalents of Lily Tomlin’s “Ernestine,” the snorting operator on TV’s “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” whose response to complaints was  “We don’t care! We don’t have to…we’re the phone company!” Just substitute “United” for “phone company,” and you have the airline’s new corporate slogan.

I sympathize with Annie and Perry Klebahn and their 10 year-old daughter Phoebe, who were the victims in Sutton’s account. Nobody, especially at current air travel prices, for a service that includes a virtual strip search by the TSA, should have to endure this level of indifference and incompetence from an airline and its employees. As I told the United supervisor, as he was refusing to let me board the flight his employer had assiduously conspired to make me miss until I calmed down, I will have myself towed on a skate-board cross-country behind a team of flatulent aardvarks before I will subject myself to his airline’s abuse again.

I urge all of you, for your own good, to make the same pledge.

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Pointer: Gawker

Facts: Bob Sutton

Graphic: Billie Gail

Ethics Alarms attempts to give proper attribution and credit to all sources of facts, analysis and other assistance that go into its blog posts. If you are aware of one I missed, or believe your own work was used in any way without proper attribution, please contact me, Jack Marshall, at  jamproethics@verizon.net.