Friday, August 13, 2010

Take that, you @#$%^& customer

Having started my career as a Salesperson, I was trained quite early to treat customers with courtesy and never to lose my cool whatever may be the provocation from the other side. In the course of my long stint in Sales, I have met many kinds of customers, starting from the most polite to the most annoying. When confronting the latter type, the training takes over and I usually keep my equanimity intact.

That doesn’t mean that I enjoy doing it. Every salesman’s fantasy is to deliver a resounding kick on the backside of an unreasonable or a needlessly demanding customer. And, if said customer complained about you to your boss, to use some choice expletives against the boss as well and storm out of the office. Tap any salesperson on the shoulder and ask if he dreams of this day, the answer will be a resounding ‘yes’. This is true not only for salespeople, but to all frontline staff in the hospitality sector.

That is why this story about the attendant on a Jetblue flight heaping choice expletives on a misbehaving passenger and then declaring on the spot, “ I have spent 27 years with this airline. This is it. I am quitting, ok?” resonated deeply with me.

Not many of us can see our fantasies some true, but here is this excellent fellow who managed to do it in style. Having hurled the abuses, he deployed the emergency slide and jumped out, remembering to grab some beer cans while exiting. What a man!

Judging from the comments to the news story, most people seem to empathise with the flight attendant. The passenger deserved it, seems to be the general verdict.

A shining star of the sales fraternity.



2 comments:

Mambalam Mani said...

Reminds me of the scene from Meet the Parents movie, though the roles are reversed and the passenger (Ben Stiller) is the one who loses the fuse :)

hari said...

It says something about a guy who has been a flight attendant for 27 years without any promotion or improvement in rank.

(Caveat: I don't know how the airline industry works, but either way, if a person has to work 27 years as a waist-coated coolie at 39,000 feet he would develop a pretty bad temper even if he started out a motivated and good natured individual)