Milk of kindness goes sour

Having missed National Happiness Day this year (see Wry & Dry March 24), I’m obviously not firing on all attention-paying cylinders at the moment. I also appeared to have slept through or found myself otherwise fully engaged during National Kindness Day, way back in February.

This was all just a week before my 60th birthday and to be frank, I was too busy having people being wonderfully kind (and generous) to me (and, in my defence, I was also planning kind and generous treats for me and my mates and family to enjoy) to realise there was, in fact, a day specifically dedicated to being nice to a’body. A whole day? Fancy…

Not, I must say, that it appears to have made a massive impression on others either, with horrors too numerous to mention continuing to be perpetrated around the world by truly appalling excuses for human beings – horrors too serious to take lightly in a column like this. Embarrassment So let us turn our jaundiced, if basically affable, eye (I speak for myself alone) to the less serious but still highly illustrative behaviour of America’s United Airlines whose reputation and share price has plummeted (unfortunate direction for any airline, let’s face it) in the wake of the forced “de-planing” of one of its passengers – embarrassingly and bloodily (literally) caught on social media and broadcast to the world.

Airline overbooking is apparently a common and widely accepted practice because, as with medical appointments, some selfish beggars don’t bother to turn up.

Here, the plane was fully booked and all the paying passengers seated when the company decided that four of them would have to give up their seats to accommodate four members of staff who had to be somewhere else to get another lucky planeload of passengers off the ground.

Bribery, in this case, didn’t work which must have come as a bit of an unpleasant shock in a culture where everything – and everyone – is assumed to have its price.

Why or how this logistical difficulty had not occurred to any member, senior or junior, of staff before things got to this pass, I don’t know; but then it’s usually a mistake to assume that everyone in any service industry knows how to do their job.

Now, of course, insult has been added to (literal) injury by the company’s attitude that the man was “belligerent”, had an allegedly chequered past and that their marshals or security staff or whoever was, ironically, on the ground, had every legal right to remove him.

While completely deploring bad or antisocial behaviour on any type of public transport or in any walk of everyday life, I didn’t actually realise you had to be Mother Teresa to fly from one place to another without the possibility of being forcibly ejected from your seat and literally carried away. Belligerent I’d get a bit belligerent, I think, if I was facing such a possibility at the hands of someone with a jobsworth outlook and an axe to grind (thankfully, not literally this time) because his or her company had cocked up its arrangements.

Of course, no one ever went broke (yet, United Airlines) underestimating the ability of an out-of-touch, smugly entitled senior executive to make a bad situation much worse, which duly happened with the above excuses being trotted out as an explanation for what, basically, is awful organisation and dreadful customer relations.

But if you look at what’s going on in the world these days and at those who are setting an example (or not) of how to behave, the context in which these things happen has generally become one where certain people at any level of authority, however specious, feel they can say and do what they like and the rest of us just have to like it or hike it.

As a generally docile passenger, like most of us, I will put up with a lot at airports, much of which is genuinely for my and others’ safety.

I have, I will say, made a stand against having my hand luggage stowed in the hold when I am specifically travelling with only this amount so that I don’t have to hang around at baggage reclaim – especially when everyone else’s hand luggage is twice the size of mine and they already have suitcases checked in. Petty, perhaps but irritating, nonetheless.

As to overbooking, I can’t say I’ve ever been offered any incentive to shift my sorry a*** to another plane and time, not even, as Oscar Wilde put it, for ready money.

I didn’t realise you had to be Mother Teresatofly from one place to another without being forcibly ejected

Amusement The only time I’ve ever been upgraded, actually, was on the local Dundee to Edinburgh train when my pal and I so amused the somewhat harassed guard (or whatever they’re called these days) with our joint Lady Bracknell impersonations that he laughed like a drain and ushered us into the first class carriage, saying we had made his morning.

And we hadn’t even got the frozen daiquiris and the proper cocktail glasses out of our purposely capacious handbags at that stage.

Watch and learn, United Airlines. The milk of human kindness? Give me the strawberry daiquiri any time…

Picture: Getty Images. The Rev Jesse Jackson leads protests against United Airlines after footage emerged of a passenger being dragged off one of its planes for not giving up his seat. Helen says it is symptomatic of executives thinking they can just do what they like.