Standing Room

16 May 2009

Ideally I only ever want to come across the word ‘system’ when it’s used by an astronaut and sandwiched between ‘all’ and ‘go’.

Trying to change a ticket I’d booked with British Airways — wanting to substitute my daughter for my husband — I too fell foul of the system. Unlike dear old easyJet who don’t give a toss if you’ve undergone a complete gender realignment prior to take-off (providing you cough up and pay the penalty of £22.50), BA acts like a big girl’s blouse. They would ‘like’ to help but ‘the system’ doesn’t allow them to. The only way for them to beat their own system is to cancel the original booking and reissue a completely new ticket. A simple enough procedure, except it’s actually a bit of a money-making scam. Cancelling the ticket automatically releases my prepaid seat to a standby passenger, and as the flight is already overbooked this leaves me with no choice but to buy a new (invariably more expensive) ticket.

Although it’s possible to transfer my original ticket to another date, we now live in a world where it’s technically beyond an employee’s remit to simply change an initial. The personnel are all sympathetic and willing, yet the system has rendered them totally impotent and unable to give good customer service. The poor things are manacled to their keyboards and the dumb constraints imposed by bureaucracy.

I’ve never grasped the intransigent concept behind the old adage ‘If I break the rules for you, I’d have to break them for everyone’, because it’s patently just a cop-out. Not everyone needs or indeed wants rules to be broken, and one of the reasons all systems ultimately fail is because they don’t ever allow for mitigating circumstances. Enough. All systems — go.