MAGIC MEALS

Flying on KE602 going to Incheon from Hong Kong on September 14, the service was good and the crew were kind, as is usual on Korean Air.

However a problem started when they served dinner. There were two options: beef with rice or fish with noodles. Apparently beef was much more popular than expected and it quickly ran out. The crew apologised and offered the fish dish to my neighbours and myself, but we all declined the food.

When the flight attendants finished serving the meal they came through with tea and coffee and my neighbours complained strongly. Later, the cabin manager came and apologised, but nothing could make them happy. A minute later, a funny thing happened: the cabin manager came back to the couple with two beef meals!

To be honest, I was tempted to make the same fuss because I was hungry, but decided not to because I knew that other unhappy passengers would make the same request if they saw the crew performing such magic repeatedly. I’m not complaining that I couldn’t have beef – I understand mistakes can always be made with estimation, and obviously the airline can’t prepare two meals for every passenger.

At the same time, I was surprised to see that cranky passengers managed to get what they wanted in the end, whereas behaving passengers were just forgotten. This taught me an anecdotal lesson – that I need to be troublesome, cranky, and raise my voice in order to get what I want (regardless of its availability). It was unfortunate that the crew only listened to moaning passengers and accommodated their moaning.