Director and comic book writer and retailer, Kevin Smith, took to his Twitter account and vlog to denounce Southwestern Airlines' treatment of him following an incident in which Smith was disallowed boarding on a Southwestern flight. The Cop-Out director was seated on another Southwestern flight and made it to his destination, but quickly took to his Twitter account and has been denouncing the airline and its service for days now.
Apparently, Southwestern has a policy which forces overweight passengers to pay for two tickets. However, Smith was bumped from his original flight and had to buy new tickets, for which only one was available. When attendants saw that Smith could not fit comfortably into one seat with the armrests down - their means for determining such things - they could not allow him to continue on the flight.
I empathize with both sides in this dispute. After all, I'm no fan of fatties... sorry. I know a ton (ha!) of them and none of them are happy, none of them are healthy, and every last one of them would lose that weight in a heartbeat... if only there wasn't so much work involved. And, by saying that, I do not mean that fat people are "lazy," simply that few of them are willing to go to the lengths necessary to - specifically - lose weight. It is unhealthy all the way around, affecting them physically, mentally, socially, and emotionally. Of course, I'm no fan of public humiliation or separatism.
Two things here, right off the bat: Southwestern has an understandable policy, but this was a special case - and not because Kevin Smith is a celebrity, but because he was bumped from his original flight! Southwestern absolutely should have made an exception in this case specifically because it was their problem which caused this fuck-up in the first place!
When your company gets so large that it cannot reasonably accommodate one customer without upsetting the entire business, you have a serious internal issue - talk about bloat! Like Smith said, he knows he's overweight and he usually buys two seats, but this was a situation out of his control - and Southwestern's, too, apparently - so everyone should have been forced to compromise... because Southwestern screwed-up. His next-door passenger would have been no more considerably distressed for having to spend a few hours in somewhat uncomfortable seating than Smith was by having to take another flight, and if he was, then Southwestern should have taken the hit and offered him compensation for an unfortunate situation for which the company was responsible.
Kevin Smith does need to slim-down, he usually does buy two tickets, and Southwestern is the one to fault for the entire incident. Is Smith making too big a deal of it? Possibly, but these corporations are consistently taking things too far these days, so - like Christians - it's far past time we all started making major incidents out of rather commonplace "misunderstandings." God knows the airlines do.
© C Harris Lynn, 2010
A rambling melange of pop-culture.
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