American Airlines Strikes Back

Remember our not-so-great American Airlines flight to Las Vegas last month?  The one that took us from Chicago to Tulsa to Dallas to Las Vegas?  While it may not have been as tragic as say Titanic, it did make me recall a quote from the movie, spoken as protagonist Jack glistened with frost while submerged in the North Atlantic with Rose:

I don't know about you, but I intend on writing a strongly worded letter to the White Star Line about all of this.

Inspired, I jotted off a note to American Airlines and had Joey drop it in the mail.  This wasn't just your typical email complaint or "to whom it may concern" letter to a random person at customer service. Nope. I utilized my 10 years experience in corporate America and knew the only way to get my letter read was by sending it directly to the top. The corporate office doesn't want to deal with disgruntled customers, so they typically forward your letter down to some assistant vice-president in customer service or operations. But here's where the true genius lies: whoever opens the interoffice envelope will see that it has already passed through the CEO's office. Your letter now gets placed at the top of the pile and you may actually receive a form letter back before the turn of the decade. Hey, it's something.

Joe trying to make sense of our revised, non-non-direct flight on the plane

What I was NOT expecting was an actual phone call from someone in the corporate office.  Today.  After an afternoon of abandoning my kids with Atheist-Friend so I could run my cataract-surgery-recovering mom around town, I returned home and found a real live person from AA had left an actual message with a call-back number on my answering machine.  Was this some sort of new parallel universe I was now living in?

Part of me is intrigued.  Part of me fears those AA execs know about the blog and I am about to disappear.  Either way, I have to wait until Tuesday to call back due to the holiday weekend.

If anything happens to me between now and then, please tell the police to take a careful look at American Airlines.

Yet if this goes well, I will be happy to eat crow and say that I was wrong in casting all American Airlines representatives as heartless minions (Isabel the desk agent and the Australian beer-producing flight attendant notwithstanding). 

 If this does not go well, you may never hear from me again.

Tell my children I loved them.