Letters to the Editor
MWise
Published Letters: 253 Editor's Choice: 19
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service begins at the airport
[Read the article: Ask the pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I typically fly short domestic flights for business with a few longer international flights for vacation, and truthfully it wasn't the experience in the air that turned me off. It was the lack of service and communcation at the airport. I know that the airlines don't have control over security or customs, but they do have control over their check-in and ticket counters. Case in point was a vacation flight we I had on a big US carrier that departed from Cancun airport and arrived at Charlotte-Douglas airport. If you've ever been to Cancun airport, it is a crazy insane place to try to check-in for your flight, many times 3 hours is not enough time to even travel through the lines to get to the check-in. And I use the word "line" very loosely, typically it's a crush of people not knowing which "line" of people some 50feet away from the desks going to which desk. So you end up standing in the wrong group of people for an hour until you realize that you were supposed to be in the innermost snake of people, not the outermost. The could be fixed very simply with a few airline personel with signs and rope or tape. After fighting through that mess, I was hoping that my transfer in Charlotte would be a lot smoother, but instead after going through customs, the airport makes you go through a non-secure area, thus requiring a second security check. Obviously the airline knows about this set-up since it is standard in Charlotte, but they do nothing to help their passengers. The flight that I was on contained about 90% transfers, and several of them missed their connecting flight because of the delay in going back through security. The airlines could have simply avoided this by either recommending or enforcing a minimum layover time in Charlotte when the tickets were purchased or by having an airline employee available at the congested security station to contact the gate to let them know that they had passengers at the airport that would be late and could either hold the flight or help their customers get ahead in the security line or direct them to the correct location to be re-ticketed on a later flight. Instead we are all left to fend for ourselves with security and airport personel that didn't know anything and couldn't help anyone. It was even more fustrating because after we got through the security check, there were no signs directing us to the correct gate so everyone had to run back and forth looking for their flights. After that experience I was just happy to get into my very uncomfortable economy seat.
As far as ammenities on the flight, I love Airtran's in flight XM radio. For food, I'd be fine with having to pay for it as long as the selection is decent and the food is tasty. For short flights where storage capacity is an issue, the airport in conjunction with the airlines should have to-go boxes available at the terminal or gates, and I'd suggest special low pricing for passengers where they could use their boarding pass as a discount coupon.
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i remember
[Read the article: Is parenthood boring?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the summer when I was 10 and bitched and moaned about having nothing to do. "Mom-om, I'm bored." "Mo-om, there's nothing to do." That's when she handed me a scrub brush and a bucket and taught me a new game. Next summer, I happily went off to three weeks of overnight camp.
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special favors vs discrimination
[Read the article: "The woman would most likely get pregnant and leave"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Women, you can bitch about it all you want but it will never change until we women take responsibility and stop asking for special favors in the work force. Period."
--- Nekrasova
1. Adequate leave for personal/family care is not a special favor
2. Being hired based on your qualifications instead of someone's perceived notions about the "group" you belong to is not a special favor
3. Not having to be subjected to sexist/racist actions and commentary at your work place is not a special favor.
I think where women have to take responsibility is actually by sharing (if they can) child-rearing with their partners. If we share that responsibility then the time away from work is lessened, and there are more people to support and advocate for a better work-life balance. But it also means that men need to step up to the plate and make child-rearing as important as getting the corner office.
As far as hiring practices go, people change jobs or leave the work force for all kinds of reasons. It might be because they go back to school, or have kids, or retire, or find a better job. So if you aren't going to hire women of child-bearing age, they I guess you shouldn't hire any person in their 50's (they might retire soon or die), or young African American men (they might end up in prison or die), or 30 something white men with only an undergraduate degree(they'll head back to graduate school), or people who like to sky dive (they might end up dead or disabled), anyone in the reserves (sent off to some Middle East war) etc, etc, etc. So basically you end up with no employees then!