You may have read my blog post earlier this week about the recent Virgin Blue debacle that affected me in more ways than my usual tradition of being highly opinionated about secondhand news items. I was inside the Virgin terminal at the Sydney domestic airport in the wee hours of Monday morning and, considering I’m not someone who often gets out and about, there was a lot more to be observed than simply the mind-boggling reality that I was out in the real world.
Despite the obviousness of the IT failure that was commented on in the other blog post, there was the tension of the place. With hundreds of uncertain and annoyed bodies crammed into a once spacious location, it was difficult not to pick up on the negative feelings in the air. As I walked through the crowd, there were disgruntled murmurings, dirty looks and an all-round feeling of righteous disappointment. These murmurings, looks and feeling continued during the entire time I was in the terminal; even after Virgin Blue staff continually announced that the IT problem had been fixed.
But what struck me with its peculiar awesomeness was how the murmurings never evolved to raised voices, the looks didn’t degrade into angry sneers and the feeling of righteous disappointment did not spiral into the fear that there would be an all-out brawl. Having worked in the retail service industry before, I have experienced stuff-ups that have led to these very things.
So what was different here?
We were in an airport.
In this post-9/11 world that we fly in, airport security is still tight, warning messages about the seriousness of security are rampant and there is, at least for me, a very obvious awareness that one must be more civil when disagreeing with any staff member. When it comes to service at the airport, the customer is not always right.
I can honestly say that I’ve never seen anyone become irate at an airport, and even the person in front of me at the security screening station, although upset about not being able to take her scissors onto the flight, backed off considerably after the security officer pointed out that she didn’t make the rules.
And the strange thing (or perhaps not so strange for those who read this blog post) is that I really enjoyed that we customers had to control our angry impulses to vent our disappointment in confrontational ways.
What do the rest of you think?
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