Figured this one also fits this sub.
Used to work taking calls for the airport. I can’t forget this one call so here I am (?). This is going to be long because a bit of background is needed, sorry about that.
There’s this Spanish airline called Vueling that’s kinda shit. We used to get loads of complaints about them, be it because of cancelled flights, delays, lost luggage… You name it.
Thing is, of course the airport and the airlines that operate within it are in fact completely different companies. And a lot of people straight up didn’t understand that. “You have a problem with Vueling, you call Vueling” should be an easy enough concept to grasp, but alas.
So it was a pretty calm autumn night, around 10 PM. This lady calls, screaming from the get go (joy) because her daughter’s flight has been delayed and she is supposed to attend a medical convention early next morning in another city, so she ABSOLUTELY CAN’T LOSE THIS FLIGHT!!!
Vueling is pretty bad with late night delays. A late night delay more often than not means the flight is cancelled. What normally happened then is that both air and ground crew would disappear and show up again once the logistics of what the hell to do with the passengers were solved. Which could take hours. In the meantime, nobody would tell them shit. A cancelled flight SMS might or might not be sent. That’s it.
Of course, Vueling doesn’t take calls past 8 PM. The airport does. Lucky us.
This lady’s daughter had already been waiting two hours. She wouldn’t entertain the notion that that flight was probably cancelled and all was left to do was wait. We went in circles for a while because she wanted the airport to force Vueling to make the flight happen. That’s obviously not a thing we could do.
5 minutes of us going nowhere went by. I should have ended the call but it was a slow night, I was bored and immune to yelling. My coworkers didn’t have much to do and noticed I had been at it for a while, so I turned the speaker on. Right around the time this woman was explaining that people would stop flying because of this travesty and I wouldn’t be able to feed my children (?) and if her daughter died waiting for this plane (??) that made all of us ACCOMPLICES!!
We were hooked. I stopped answering at this point (my input obviously wasn’t needed) and she went nuts. We should call the President or the army and save her daughter right this instant. I offered to give him a call if she provided his number and she dropped that idea, bummer.
She also found the time to ask if I knew what guardian angels were. I knew, kinda. Well, both them and God take care of their creatures, UNLIKE US!!! Lady! What!
It went on and on, I can’t even remember all the crazy shit she screamed. I do remember that she, of course, didn’t miss the chance of telling me that since I wasn’t born here I didn’t have a heart and I couldn’t understand how beautiful Barcelona used to be before (before when? Who knows).
She ended up losing steam and ending the call after 20 (20!) minutes of uninterrupted screaming. I thought that was the end of that but I was wrong. My coworker got a call from the daughter herself after a while, but she was perfectly polite and understood right away that there was nothing we could do about her cancelled flight.
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