Don't United Airlines Yourself

1. A Debacle for United:

Just a short entry today. I am not the kind of blogger who often pounces on the social media news scandal de jour, but in this case we have been flashed with a 10,000 watt, unpleasantly vivid object lesson.

Here's the basics (click the link above for more details and the video):

Needing to transfer 4 airline staff to another airport on an overbooked flight, United Airlines requested some passengers to volunteer to take another flight later, with compensation. Nothing special there. But after raising it to $800 and no one volunteering, UA announced they would select passengers at random with a computer. One passenger, a doctor, insisted it was important for him to make the flight to see patients later, and would not leave the plane. He was eventually dragged off the plane, face getting bloodied in the process, in an ugly spectacle that shocked watching passengers.

At this point it's irrelevant whether or not his behavior was reasonable or not, as the film of him being dragged from the plane is all over the internet. My FB feed is covered in darkly humorous UA memes, every post representing tens of thousands of dollars of people taking any other airline but UA, and a tone-deaf pseudo-response from United Airline's CEO is only making things worse.

It's already quite obvious that this is an absolute public relations nightmare for United Airlines. At best, this escalates into legal action which results in passengers actually retaining their civil rights on an airplane, which is currently not the case, practically speaking.

Just imagine the exchange next time United calls for passengers to take another flight.. "Or else what, you'll beat us up and drag us off the plane?"

"Oops" - Rick Perry

2. A Lesson for Us:

While it's true that, if more people suffer for this very poor judgment call in the coming days, it's likely to be the employees of United (and not likely the ham-handedly or apathetically unapologetic CEO), let us at least consider the important lesson for us here which should not be ignored:

Unwilling to offer a few hundred more dollars for people to voluntarily give up their seats, United Airlines has incurred a public relations scandal which is going to cost them millions at best, probably more.

So consider this: are you doing the same thing to yourself right now?

For the sake of stubbornly or lazily being unwilling to pay whatever cost would be necessary to overcome some small obstacles in your life, are you hurting yourself in deep and significant ways over the long term?

What things would take merely some unpleasant effort in the near-term, require spending some money you don't want to spend, in order to avoid big problems down the road? Living in Taiwan, I can think of at least three things I need to stop procrastinating on, three hurdles I need to jump, which would make my life easier in the long run and save me from future problems. Not ministry things, but things which would put me in a better position from which to minister.

One fairly mundane example would be how I've balked at spending the money and time necessary to get a real water filter installed. Bottled water is cheap here, and the tap water won't make you sick (in the short term... the water is okay, but the pipes in various areas are not, leading to nebulous health issues which are difficult to prove are from the water but many local people believe it to be so), but either way there are obvious reasons why being having a filter for the tap is preferable, if only so that I can offer a glass of water to visitors worried about water quality. I've just been putting it off as a fairly expensive and troublesome item that there's never a good time to stop everything else and do.

(Now having blogged about it I guess I'll need to pester myself into doing it.)

3. Do Not Withhold...

If that seems like a stretch to get to from the United Airlines situation, it's much less so than it seems. We often undermine ourselves by focusing on our current disinclination to do something, even though there are big potential downsides which are only possible when we don't do it. This is especially true when it's a question of paying other people. You may seem to have spared yourself a bit of time or money or effort, but you may have lost much more.

United Airlines never imagined that an unwillingness to pay what they considered unnecessarily high compensation amounts to passengers would result in such a scandal, yet being unwilling to do so has cost them greatly. (Or, if you argue that the airline shouldn't have to submit to passengers holding out for the maximum compensation allowed by law, consider that they could have avoided the situation altogether by not overbooking the flight to begin with.) Again, this makes the forcibly deplaned passenger's behavior or motives irrelevant. I'd be willing to bet you the amount involved that someone on that plane who wouldn't get off for $800, would have done so for $1,300. We can't know for sure, of course, because they never made the offer, resorting to force instead.

This is less a slippery slope argument (for want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse, the rider, the kingdom, etc) and more an observation that when we establish a pattern of declining to expend time, money, or effort when it's appropriate to do so, we may hurt others and ourselves too.

For United Airlines, that was stopping well short of what they could have offered passengers because they knew they could force people off instead. Well, that backfired.

So, pay for the maintenance. Go get the check up. Practice for the certification. Tip the server appropriately. Don't shortchange yourself or other people when it's not necessary.

As Scripture says it: "Do not withold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it." (Proverbs 3:27)

That includes yourself too. Who knows what trouble you're saving yourself from.