"We are truly sorry for the ongoing flight disruption" is what infuriates the situation; when words have no meaning behind the phase. Pixelated hold-music I am sure is designed to make you rage further.
What do you hope to accomplish with the phone call?
Failures happen, does it make a difference if there's someone in charge feeling a strong emotion about it? Do the call center staff have to feel genuine guilt as if their mediocre job somehow made them personally responsible?
Being angry is just as useless as faking being sorry, all they're doing is acknowledging a screwup in an automated message. Give them a break.
There's also placebo buttons in many offices for aircon/heating.
Maybe there are the ones that dont work, somewhere, but there are also the one ones that do.
Also of course outside of a junction the control system has no reason to stop the vehicular traffic if nobody demands to cross. So even in the middle of the day the only reason somebody who refuses to press the button can ever cross is that other people will press the button.
For example, I was recently at the hospital to pick up a friend who was due to be discharged that day. I arrived in their room, spoke briefly with the attending nurse who said it would be a long while before the patient was discharged (as it always is at hospitals) and sat down to wait. After a couple of hours I checked in with the nurse, who said he was waiting on the social worker. My friend noted that he had already talked to the social worker, and despite her insistence, said that he didn't want or need any sort of nursing or in-home care after discharge. When the nurse heard this, he went back, printed up the discharge papers and we were soon on our way.
Why did this happen? Because job of the social worker is to push the hospital/network's post-discharge nursing and rehab system. Once this was turned down, she had no incentive to stay involved or update the discharge status. The busy nurse had no incentive to pro-actively scrutinize the forms and decide the patient was ready for discharge. The hospital itself (as an organization) had no incentive to speed up the discharge, as they were making tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from his excellent insurance coverage.
If we had just sat around, and said nothing, we almost certainly would have been there for several more hours, until the next shift of nurses came in and reviewed the patient files. Sometimes you are just screaming into the void but many times it helps to speak up.
Advocating for your health care can have very large effects, healthcare suffers from a strong lack of someone being in charge of and following your care, it's more like a collection of poorly communicating agents giving you brief spurts of attention somehow leading to a resolution. In other words, folks are barely paying attention to you.
First one, United flight from IAD to SJU, 4-5 hour delay, mechanical issue, with updates from the gate agent every 45 minutes or so, basically keeping us well apprised of the status of our plane (and when that plane was no longer viable, of the replacement plane and then replacement crew). "Flight crew saw a warning light and needs to talk to company" then "company says try again" then "that didn't work, maintenance crew coming to look at it" then a few more similar updates. No, there was nothing we could do with the info, but it was nice to know the problem was being worked - at least made me feel less out of control.
Second one, Aer Lingus from DUB to IAD, 4 hour delay, mechanical issue, no updates from the gate agent beyond "so sorry, we're delayed another hour" every hour or so. I found this much more frustrating. No, there was nothing I could do either way, but it would have been nice to know a bit more about what was wrong, who was working the problem, etc. This felt more out of control, and more frustrating.
Worst part is, likely no compensation as it isn't the airlines "fault".
On a recent trip (when I encountered issues on every leg — cancellations, delays, missed connections, you name it), it is clear that airlines are incentivised to not communicate delays until it is clear the delay can't be recovered. In one case, at the airline's hub, the airport displays were showing a 2 hour delay and their app showed on-time departure (to the point I had to go and ask which source to trust). Having been a frequent flyer in the past I was able to determine that the delay was likely (but airlines can swap in equipment at hubs and mitigate the delay).
Once you do have a delay the ripples are complex to handle. You have some passengers that were meant to connect to other flights. You have some that won't travel at all die to the cancellation. You then have 100+ people who you somehow have to accommodate in the coming days when flight loads are hopefully already 90+%.
To be fair to my airline, their app was actually great at offering me a rebooking option the following day when my flight was cancelled. Unfortunately, the option I selected resulted in a non-direct flight with a transfer time that was impossible in reality (shouldn't have been offered in my opinion). I was literally rebooked 5mins after they declared the flight cancelled, skipped the queues back in the departure area (I don't think the local service agents even knew about the app) and drove home to my family for an extra night.
Plus, imo, they dont know what exactly will happen. There is likely whole bunch of negotiations and replannings going on in background with unsure results.
Scare quotes are an Americanism that is gaining traction her, but normally we use it for quoting speach.
It blows my mind that consumers have lots of protection from the airline, but we have no protection from ATC failures.
As it happens, flight just got cancelled.. so airline is responsible for hotel and rebook. Which is also unfair on them.
As a reminder, our shareholders are our primary concern (by law) and staffing trained humans to handle in customer support during unexpected surges isn’t something that can be supported while also funding the €0.05 per share quarterly dividend paid to British Airways share holders on June 29th of this year.
We are not in a rush. If you’d like, try another airline. But they’re all the same.
Beep.”
It doesn't have to be that way. Here's Haley Dragoo, former head of the New York Subway's "Twitter Division".[1] She had the sense to insist on a desk in the Rail Control Center, so she could know what was really going on. Down on the working floor, too, not up in the gallery overlooking the control room. She was a few meters from the people directly running the subway.
Her point was that the MTA was "good at monologues" but didn't interact well. So she posted on the MTA's Twitter account, several hundred times a day. If someone asked a serious question, she'd answer quickly, with actual info. Not sugar-coating the info, just translating from "subway speak". (The operations people talk about location in terms of distance from a reference point at the start of the line, the signal number plate on each signal, but customers think in terms of stations.)
It's very New York to do that.
The MTA has dropped Twitter/X, though. Twitter/X wanted to bill them for using the Twitter/X API, and the MTA will not pay others to distribute their info. So now the MTA uses their own web site and app.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/01/nyregion/subway-mta-socia...
Sure, you can say humans made these decisions. But at scale, that seems like saying our cells choose what we do.
What do you mean, it's ALL inconvenient!