Treated Shabbily, Like the Baggage

Ever see the movie “Falling Down”? Michael Douglas plays a disgruntled ex-defense industry worker who, stuck in a terminal traffic jam one day, simply snaps. He abandons his car, climbs down a freeway embankment and, in a purely quixotic act, decides to walk home across the devastated urban landscape of Los Angeles. In the course of a single afternoon, he will end up confronting the ills of society, from gangbangers and neo-Nazis to the nameless, faceless complacency of the corporate state.

All of this makes for a problematic, even reactionary piece of filmmaking, with mixed political messages and an agenda that in places crosses over to the extreme. Still, what’s compelling about “Falling Down” is the way it evokes a peculiarly modern breaking point, the instant when the petty indignities and degradations of contemporary culture finally become too much.

I had my own “Falling Down” moment not long ago.

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I was at LAX, in the terminal of a major airline (which one isn’t important, since they’re all equally bad). I had just spent six hours on a crowded flight from Florida where I’d gone with my wife and two children to visit my mother-in-law. From the beginning, it had been one of those awful holiday travel experiences, complete with cranky kids, disgruntled flight attendants and a plane that, like the Grinch’s heart, was at least three sizes too small.

The real fun, however, began after we’d landed in Los Angeles, when I discovered that my 2-month-old daughter’s stroller, which I’d gate-checked in perfect working order, now had a large crack in it.

“It’s not my fault,” said the baggage handler, although a fellow passenger said he’d seen the man throw the stroller down.

“It’s not my fault,” said the customer service representative, before I’d even finished making my complaint.

Finally, a supervisor informed me that the airline was not liable for the damage.

Never mind that the stroller had been broken while in the airline’s custody, on one of its planes.

I looked at him for a moment, waiting for an explanation. Not only did he fail to offer one, he refused to meet my eyes. All I could think about was how much it would cost to replace the stroller and that it had been brand new.

“What?” I yelled. ‘You’ve got to be kidding!” Then I slammed my fist down on the counter, and security was called.

*

I wish I could say I feel bad about how I acted, that it was an unfortunate overreaction, borne of frustration and the stress of a holiday trip. But while I’ll admit to having some regrets over my behavior, the truth is that I see it the same way I see the Douglas character, as something of an inevitable response.

We live, after all, in a culture in which the very notion of accountability seems to have deserted us, where the large commercial entities that increasingly provide our goods and services are remote and inaccessible, answerable to no one but themselves. Insulated by layers of managers, motivated less by ethics than by some amorphous standard of legality, they have become unresponsive to the needs of their customers, let alone their responsibility to do what’s right.

The problem has grown more prevalent with the advent of voicemail and e-mail, which come touted as a boon to communication but more often function as an electronic iron curtain, an insurmountable obstacle to talking with another human being.

Earlier this year, for instance, when a company with which I’d done some work was having trouble meeting its payroll, the staff decided to deal with the problem by refusing to answer the phones. Around the same time, a friend of mine called her credit card provider with a service problem, only to find that she could access neither a customer service option nor a human operator on the voicemail.

Experiences like this are becoming increasingly common. According to a recent news report, a number of large companies are actually doing away with customer service departments altogether because they haven’t been “cost effective” to maintain.

Even if you do manage to reach a person, chances are that he or she won’t have the authority to do much more than forward you to someone else. That’s what happened to me, when I decided to pursue my complaint with the airline.

*

This airline, it must be said, has raised customer avoidance to an art form, relying on a mix of miscommunication and indirection to keep disgruntled passengers at bay. The morning after we returned from Florida, I spent nearly three hours on the phone to various departments, getting absolutely nowhere. First, I called a general information number, only to learn that there was no line for customer service, that if I wanted to complain, I would have to do so by mail. Then, I requested a supervisor and discovered that there was a customer service number, but no one except a supervisor could give it out.

There’s a nice bit of obfuscation, I thought as I punched in the extension, where I spent 20 minutes on hold before being told that the person I needed was unavailable for the week.

Feeling optimistic, I asked whether there was anyone else I might talk to, a query that got me put back on hold, before I found myself disconnected altogether.

I called back. The number was busy. So much for Round 1.

*

My next step was to try the airline’s offices at LAX to see whether I might circumvent the electronic iron curtain there. I started with the baggage service office before moving to the claims department and finally passenger services, where the manager’s secretary said her boss was out for the day but promised he would call me back. Somewhere along the way, I talked to someone who finally explained the airline’s policy on strollers.

Strollers aren’t covered, the man said, because they have so many protruding pieces that are too easy to break. It made a certain kind of sense, I had to admit, but why hadn’t anyone said anything about this? Was any of this spelled out in the fine print on my ticket, the restrictions and regulations that no one bothers to read?

No, the man answered, just in the “Conditions of Carriage,” a document the airline doesn’t distribute to the public but would be willing to send out on request.

*

In the end, I managed to get the airline to cough up a $25 travel voucher, which matched almost exactly the cost of having the stroller fixed. I didn’t, however, get any sense of corporate responsibility, either for the damaged stroller or for the seemingly willful obscurity of the airline’s policies, for the way it tries to keep complaining passengers in the dark.

What bothers me about this is that it makes me feel somehow less than human; it makes me feel as if I do not count. What bothers me is that I wonder how I can teach my children about ethics, about accountability, when the society in which they’re being raised doesn’t seem to have any fundamental notion of what those concepts mean. What bothers me most is that, in trying to address the situation, I could not reach one individual in a position of authority, while the people with whom I did speak almost uniformly refused to give me a straight answer, to talk to me on the level of a human being.

As for the passenger services manager, I’m still waiting for him to call.