Say Hello to My Little Friend

Allow me to immodestly begin this post by quoting myself from an earlier Nob, entitled A Few of My Favorite Things.

iPad. This is my first year with my iPad, and I’m still transitioning from my deeply satisfying love affair with my laptop to this technological marvel that comes in the shape and heft of a menu for an unpretentious restaurant. It allows me to search for $10 bottles of wine, play my Pandora stations, watch sexy French films, maintain my solitude and sanity simultaneously…take pictures, save pictures, send pictures, read books, follow my teams, rant about politics, map my most confounding thoughts, and find my way home. If I wanted to, I guess, I’d be able to download an app that would provide me with: Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes/Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes/Silver white winters that melt into springs…in short, all of my favorite things. 

That’s critical background to understand the full gravity of the story I’m about to tell here. Lorna and I were making our way home from a glorious holiday season with Daughter Gillian and family. The first leg of the trip was a shorty from Savannah to DC (yes, like so much else in this increasingly upside down America, we’ve become accustomed to flying south to north to reach west…Columbus really did leave his mark on us). As is my custom upon squeezing into my seat and strapping myself in…ho-ho…for safety, I took out my precious iPad and prepared to finish the book I had recently downloaded to Kindle (Lincoln in the Bardo, if you must know). But just before I got started, my eye was caught by my Christmas gift from Lorna of Rolling Stone’s special edition dedicated to retrospective reviews of every Bob Dylan album ever made. Since it was a short flight, I decided to dip into that and save my novel for the long haul from DC to San Diego. It was a fateful decision. Opening the Rolling Stone was like opening a bag of Hawaiian kettle style sweet Maui onion potato chips…I couldn’t stop reading and got totally caught up in a debate I didn’t know existed: Was Dylan’s Christian music period underrated? Before I knew it, we landed at Dulles International…and before I go further, a word or two about one of the two major points of entry for visitors flying in from all over the world to visit our nation’s capital…it’s a dump. It’s dark, inefficient, and…and…get this: when we landed we had to stand on the tarmac in 10° weather waiting for our luggage to unload. It is without doubt the worst airport experience of my life…and that includes landing in Loreto, Mexico, after a hurricane knocked out the power--so no lights or AC…and it includes being escorted by an unpleasant guard armed with AK47 in Zimbabwe who led me to a shack to interrogate me about a knife they’d found in my suitcase. (Yes, you’d think a knife in a suitcase in Zimbabwe would be as common as a toothbrush, wouldn’t you…but noooo). With a government shamefully negligent in maintaining our nation's infrastructure, I don't see Dulles getting better than airports in Mexico or Zimbabwe any time soon. (Let's have a parade!)  But my real travel pain was self-inflicted. By the time we finished racing to the gate for our connecting flight, I realized I had left my iPad in the pouch of my seat on the previous flight. (If you can’t imagine how distressed I was, I invite you to reread my opener above…one of my favorite things…in the world…EVER!) When we arrived in San Diego, I went straight to the United Airlines baggage lost & found where a very sympathetic clerk advised me where to go online to register my loss. The fact that this was a United flight is also central to the story. Like many Americans I was outraged by the report from just about a year ago of United dragging a passenger off an overbooked flight. And like many Americans vowed I would never fly United again. As happened though, we were United Mileage Plus cardholders, and before I could ever exercise my rage by not taking another United flight, the CEO sent out an apology to all its members. There’s a delicate art to these corporate apologies. When I wrote my book on Lean, I read quite a lot of criticism of how Toyota handled its apology over safety issues. There’s a fine line between showing genuine contrition and appearing too defensive. For me, the United letter succeeded in threading the needle. Moreover, staying with United was more consistent with a basic tenet of my consumer philosophy, which, if I may be so bold to quote myself again, is encapsulated here:  

Perhaps there are other voters who, like me, take a bit of perverse comfort in the serial investigations of Hillary Clinton. For instance, I actually prefer to fly on airlines after they've been involved in a crash on the belief that all those maintenance and flight crews are more focused after a disaster strikes close to home. Then once in a grocery store line with a Swanson's chicken pot pie I remembered that Swanson's had just been busted by the FDA for having unapproved levels of rat hairs and feces. So I left the line and went back to the freezer and swapped my Swanson's chicken pot pie for a Bird's Eye. But then when I got back in line, I realized that the wake of a contamination scandal was probably the best time to buy a brand. What other company would be more conscientious about rat hairs and feces than Swanson's? 

That view has been borne out by our subsequent experiences with United. The airline has clearly upped its game in terms of customer consideration, no doubt as a result of the backlash against it. You can sense it when you call to make reservations, check in your baggage, change flights or seats at the gate. For the time being, United seems to be on its best behavior. That became abundantly apparent with my lost iPad. Frankly, I viewed filing my lost item report as sending off a note in a bottle. From the outset, however, United let me know they were taking the loss almost as seriously as I was (almost). They sent me emails once a week updating me on the progress of the search...here are two of them:











Get that: Fingers crossed! It’s such a small touch, but what an easy way to counter the image of corporate indifference.  In one email early on, United informed me that it would keep up the search for my iPad for a month, giving me complete clarity and transparency for what I could expect. Then! Almost a month to the day after filing my report, United emailed me to cheerfully announce it had found my iPad. An agent at its Dallas office then emailed me to say she had my iPad in hand and would be sending it out as soon as I told her how I wanted it shipped.
How I wanted it shipped? Overnight, of course. $21…cheap to be re-United with one of my favorite things.