Some things that piss me the fuck off

[trinityvixen]

Time for a good old-fashioned gripe. Here's what's annoying me this week!

1. People who pronounce things wrong.I don't mean people who don't speak English well or have accents. They are lovely and allowed to speak with accents all their life for all I care, especially if they are British. (Or Australian. Or Kiwi. Or even South African, though I

Comments

[ivy03]

Read the Kevin Smith article. I'm split on the issue of airplane seats. One the one hand, the airlines are absolutely pushing the blame for having seats smaller than the average American onto the customer and cloaking it in culturally accepted bigotry

[agrumer]

On the other hand, when you buy a plane ticket, you are not buying a trip from A to B, you are buying a specific amount of space on a plane going from A to B, which is priced accordingly.

Actually, the determining factors behind airplane pricing are nowhere near this simple and clear-cut. Same for clothing and jewelry prices, for that matter.

[edgehopper]

The problem on Southwest, from what I know of their policies, is that they aren't clear about it but will screw you over at the gate, often embarassingly. I don't have a huge problem with discrimination here, but I would prefer to know what the standard is in advance, so I know that I actually would rather take the $180 Airtran flight over the $130 Southwest flight.

[ivy03]

Agreed. Not letting you know in advance, but instead publicly humiliating you and ruining your plans--and couching it as your fault--that's not cool.

Of course it serves them if the entire population gets smaller--more people, more sales. So it seems like they're doing their small, ineffective part to try to shame people thinner, instead of actually selling something that fits most of the population.

I realize that most of my argument above about sizist pricing is about having to pay more for sizes that are outside the norm. In this case, it's the airplane seats that are outside the norm.

[trinityvixen]

I'm not going to argue with your rational, but I'd like to reiterate that the argument here is not about what's the right protocol for heavier people on planes. That's not what the story is or should be about. I'm tired of people turning it into an issue about weight. This is not an issue about weight. The issue of heavier people flying has been dealt with. The airlines have rules, usually clearly and painfully stated upfront or already known to people who are large in any dimension (my brother-in-law is 6'5", and he has trouble fitting without being fat). The issue is not fat people needing to realize that they are being forced to pay extra. It's not about whether or not you or I agree with that policy. (I don't agree, but that's not important.)

The issue is, as Kevin Smith says at his blog, customer service. It is the problem of companies treating paying customers like absolute garbage and thinking they can get away with it. He begged people, on his blog post about it, to stop talking about whether or not it's fair to charge people

[ivy03]

Yes, well, you're not going to get an argument from me on the customer service front. But you did link to an article about the fat acceptance side of the debacle.

[trinityvixen]

I did, and I ask your forgiveness for the rant. I was trying to point out with the link that, as a rule, it's not a good idea to let the person who hates fat people (and herself) tell people what's healthy or not.