False Email Alarm Causes Man To Rush To Southwest Flight Without Clean Underwear
As long as your clothing isn't scanty or sporting lewd or suggestive imagery, Southwest Airlines is usually pretty good to fly. Not so for the author of the Strobist blog on a recent trip whose fun had only just begun when Southwest sent him an email reminder about his trip that said it was leaving 7 hours earlier than expected. He rushed off to the airport, nearly all of his clothes still in the wash, only to find out that his flight was leaving at the later time as scheduled. Always double-check those flight times and if you see something wacky, verify it first before leaving the house without a clean pair of underwear.
Very bad SWA experience [Strobist]
(Photo: Paxton Holley)
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Comments:
Dude should have called to verify. You can even check flight status on their website.
That's one way to avoid the $25 charge for an extra bag!
Yeah, he is savvy enough to have email notifications but not smart enough to verify? Why the heck would he accept a 7 hour bump anyway?
@joeblevins: You know I had a very similar situation happen but due to gates.
Everything I had pointed to one gate. Even my verification with the Continental people say "YES this is the gate."
Hour and a half later Im running down the terminal because Continental changed the gate and never announced it anywhere at Newark except on the board AFTER I had verified it. No verbal announcement or anything.
Was it that hard to call Southwest to confirm?
Stupidity knows no bounds.
Morons make bad consumers.
@Pro-Pain
Totally not true. Morons pay sticker price on cars, buy extended warranties...shop at best buy(?).
Best Buy once sent me an email letting me know that a game I had ordered finally came in. I drove all the way there only to discover that they wouldn't sell it to me because the e-mail is generated when the item is scanned for receiving, and no one was willing to go in the back to dig for it. Yeah, that's what they really said.
Falcon fire, but you were at the Airport. This guy was at home, where he did have access to confirm info. I have been in airports haveing to confirm gates, when teh airport had no info updates on the screens, but got correct info from airline on phone.
Wow. I am perturbed but not surprised by the OP-hate going on. If he had shown up at the original time and the flight had left 7 hours earlier I'm sure there would be even more vitriol that "Ha-ha, that IDIOT should have had e-mail notifications."
Is the moral of the story just that e-mail notification is worthless or that everything airlines tell you is probably wrong? Maybe some of both.
The moral of the story is: Always carry a clean pair of underwear.
The thing I'm most disturbed by is the fact that Blogger.com appears to edit entries and replace profanity with things like 'flock' and 'motorboat'. What the motorboating flock, man!?!
Mistakes happen, but the fact they tried to charge him an additional $66 when he tried to get on the next flight ... ugh.
C'mon, his B.S. meter must be broken if he thought his flight was leaving 7 hours early. This sounds like a parody of those commercials where people drop whatever they're doing when the hear the "bing" on their computer.
seven hours early? BS, they will put my ass on a later flight.
@joeblevins: "Falcon fire, but you were at the Airport. This guy was at home, where he did have access to confirm info"
on his computer. duh. southwest.com has a flight tracker.
i'd like to see the e-mail he received prior to passing judgment. i'm expecting to see, in so many words, "your flight number xxx is on schedule". then in a move of retard fate, he got overexcited and misinterpreted the message and dashed out the door; now he's trying to blame the airline for his own stupidity.
because seriously, an airline is not going to remind you of your flight AS IT'S BOARDING.
He should have called to verify, he should have logged in to verify -- read the article (and Ben, this applies to you also). He was logged in to print his boarding passes when he discovered his duplicate reservation / flight time change.
He didn't learn this from an email notification. This was the online check-in system. Something that a lot of people would naively expect to be more accurate than an email reminder system.
I have no idea how far he lives from BWI, but chances are that once he found out there might be room on the 12:40 flight, he didn't have time to 'waste' placing a phone call.
Burn SWA!!!! BURN THEM!!!!!
For the love of the noodley appendage a misguided email caused trouble to one person.
By all means rip a poop chute for this.
Here's a thought, maybe this would be bad if it happened to many people repeatedly.
Gotta blame the "victim" here, because we have to discourage these stupid, anecdotal, user-error postings so that we don't end up being rightfully blamed for crying wolf. The more bandwidth we give to this sort of thing, the less credibility we have to take on the real problems.
who wears underwear?
Or, as CatMoran said, perhaps you can actually RTFA.
He wasn't being stupid, he was logged in to confirm his flight and print his boarding passes. If you can't trust the time printed on your boarding passes, exactly what ARE you supposed to trust?
Would you have every person ever getting on a flight call to double-check every time they see in the airport and on their carrier's website?
Since when do airlines get a plane off the ground on time let alone EARLY by 7 hours!
what happens when your on time to a flight and you are correctly packed, but still wear dirty underware?
That's just so annoying - poor guy! With all of this inefficiency with ALL of the airlines lately, I fear a cataclysm in the near future. :(