People Are Soft, United Is Hard

Any time any passengers are asked to leave a United Airlines flight henceforth, the Internet will proceed to be blanketed by people promising never to fly United again. They’re lying. Everybody picks their flights by lowest fare. Except for frequent flier members which is why the airlines spend a fortune locking people into those loyalty program. 

Being kicked off a United flight is the new everybody’s got ebola frenzy. Four people got ebola in the U.S., two died. Nine people died skiing in Colorado last year. One old quack with a penchant for rent boys and a felony record got the bridge of his nose cracked by Chicago cops. Some middle school girls on comped tickets were asked to not dress like Russian whores.

Now a couple flying to Costa Rica to get married were kicked off a United flight because they were repeatedly trying to move from Economy to Economy Plus seats. It’s huge news. Why? You try to sneak into better seats. You get caught. You stop. You keep doing it, you get kicked off. Seems a bit strict, but you make any kind of fuss at TSA screening and you’ll find five fingers plundering your rectum for thirty minutes. Air travel has become a humorless process.

United runs 1.6 million flights a year. Perspective is not relevant to the social media outrage chain. United’s a shitty airline because they’re all shitty airlines. They’ve made airline travel cheap enough and common enough that it’s become impossible to run as anything other than a DMV, with government mandated service animals shitting on the carpet. The planes don’t crash. That ought to be worth something.

United has a market cap of 18 billion and employs 80,000 people. Facebook has a market cap of 400 billion and employs 17,000. United is the tons of middle income jobs Trump got elected on. The old economy is messy, dirty, and doesn’t offer free breakfast cereals in the tech campus kitchen. Sometimes a down low illegal opioid scrip writing doctor gets bloodied. For 99.99% of passengers, the downside is delays, fat people, and cramped knees.

Get drunk in the airport bar like people have been doing for generations and shut the fuck up. Your ancestors rode a wagon for four months to go transcontinental. The ones who lived ate the ones who didn’t. You get there in four hours. You’ll live without a warm in-flight meal.