<story><title>The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X</title><url>http://dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>noonespecial</author><text>The mistake Mr. X. made here was not about caring about his job or even criticizing his employer. &lt;i&gt;He contacted an outsider, with his company&apos;s email server, ostensibly on their behalf.&lt;/i&gt; At bigco, you just can&apos;t do that folks. &lt;i&gt;Everything&lt;/i&gt; that leaves corporate walls must be vetted by legal, (and probably marketing too). There are lists of 100&apos;s (maybe 1000&apos;s by now) of innocuous seeming words that you just can&apos;t use. Language, nationality, gender, and racial issues all must be considered.&lt;p&gt;Like it or not, at Bigco International, &lt;i&gt;everything is a press release.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Personally, I would have given the guy a warning. What he said was quite harmless and almost certainly common knowledge, but we don&apos;t know the whole story here. He may have been warned before, or AA burned by this type of thing before or both. Its unfortunate, but understandable. In the name of tolerance and acceptance, we&apos;ve built one of the most intolerant and litigious societies ever. This is just one of the many sad side effects.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Incompetence of American Airlines and the Fate of Mr. X</title><url>http://dustincurtis.com/incompetence.html</url><text></text></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jrockway</author><text>Ouch.  I have top-tier status on AA, and they will be getting a note from me about this.  Not cool.&lt;p&gt;That said, I am still confused as to why Dustin thinks AA&apos;s website is so relevant to its business model. Their website is not very Web 2.0, it&apos;s true.  But, they make up for that... I can fly non-stop from Chicago (my home airport) to thousands of cities around the world on AA quite cheaply.  They have three-class international service, which means I can use frequent flyer miles to get a really nice seat once in a while.  They have lounges.  They have international partners where my status benefits can be used.  I get free domestic upgrades to first class.  They have customer service that cares.  (I have never been greeted by name on Southwest, but it happens rather frequently on AA.)&lt;p&gt;So anyway, the legacies are not totally incompetent.  I fly at least every month and I would never even consider WN or JetBlue.  The fare is about the same, and I have no chance of receiving anything other than a middle-seat on the back of a 737.  No thanks.  Perhaps the website UX is nice, but the rest of the trip won&apos;t be.  And when I&apos;m in a metal tube for 18 hours, I don&apos;t really give a damn about how much AJAX the website had.&lt;p&gt;(I am a little defensive here, I know.  AA has been really nice to me, so I feel that they deserve some compliments for that.)</text></comment>