The Village Idiot: If you want it done right, plan ahead

The airlines seem to think the reason they are going out of business has something to do with the high price of gas and the brutal competitiveness of the business.

I wonder if there’s more to it than that. Could it be that when I showed up at my local airport for a flight to Florida this week there was no one behind the ticket counter? I don’t mean they were busy, I don’t mean the computer was down, I don’t mean they were not doing their jobs quickly and efficiently. I mean I was standing in a line with 40 other people for 20 minutes and no one knew where the counter clerks for this airline were.

The counter clerks for Airline A were there and the clerks for the Airline B were there, but not the clerks for the airline I was flying. The clerks for the other airlines and the security people didn’t seem to know or care. It’s not my job, man. I tried to call the airline on my cell phone to let them know what was happening. Here I was, at their counter, in a major metropolitan airport and in none of their literature, in none of their promotional material was there a number I could call to reach a real live person and say, “Did you know that no one’s behind your counter?” I could report lost luggage. I could report missed connections. But of all the messages I could leave, “Press 8 to hear your Frequent Flyer points” was as close as they got to my current travel situation.

Maybe this airline went bankrupt last night and we hadn’t heard about it. Stranger things have happened. But no one else in line had heard anything about it.

While there were no clerks at the check-in desk there were four automated check-in machines. I told the machine what flight I’m not going to be able to catch today and how many pieces of luggage I was not going to be able to check because there was no human here to check it in and who would not be traveling with me and the machine gave me a boarding pass.

This was the most unique money-saving plan ever conceived by an airline. It was bold, it was unique, it was thinking outside the box. Charge me for a ticket, make me drive to the airport, cheat me, wreck my vacation, then send me home. Sure, the airline loses money every time they do this, but they hope to make it up with all the repeat business.

If you work for this airline, if you’re a flight attendant or a pilot, don’t worry about it. It’s a pretty good bet that your job is not going to be outsourced to Mexico or India. You’ve got the kind of job that pretty much has to be done on or near the aircraft. You can’t be in Bangalore and fly an airplane to Miami. You can’t be in Mexicali and serve drinks on a flight to Miami. Your job is safe.

There is only one way you are going to lose this job – if your boss makes a series of extremely dumb decisions and drives you out of business. Say, like not hiring ticket counter clerks. What are the chances of that ever happening?

He’s on top of things. Well, not this week. This week he’s in Aspen attending a conference on boosting executive pay and next week there’s that seminar on looting the employees’ pension fund so executives can get more perks. But that’s not the problem.

No, the problem is the high price of fuel. If it weren’t so expensive, airlines would be an absolute gold mine. But it’s hard to compete against people out of their giant, comfortable, gas-guzzling cars and into planes. How are you going to compete against that? They tried by offering smaller seats and less legroom but that didn’t work. What’s an airline to do?

Jim Mullen is the author of “It Takes a Village Idiot: Complicating the Simple Life” and “Baby’s First Tattoo.” You can reach him at [email protected]