Untied Airlines

Happy Monday to you, and unless your name is Oscar Munoz, no one in America had a worse week than you did last week.

Most of us have no idea who Oscar Munoz is, and if you guess he's a backup infielder for the Minnesota Twins, you'd be wrong, but still funny.

Oscar is the CEO of United Airlines, and man oh man, did he have himself a week.  You have to figure he went home on Monday benumbed by the horrible thing his employees did to a family's pet French bulldog. I'm sure you saw the story - a flight attendant forced the dog's family to put it in its carrier into an overhead bin in the plane, and the poor little pooch suffocated.

And remember, it hasn't even been a whole year since the world saw airport officers, at the behest of United staffers, physically dragging a passenger down an airplane's aisle.

Map shows flight path
 between Kansas and Japan.

So home he went, and figured Tuesday would be better.

Guess again, Einstein.

On Tuesday, some gozzlehead who sorts baggage for United, charged with sending a German Shepherd home to Kansas, managed to put the dog on a flight to Japan.

“We apologize for this mistake and are following up with the vendor kennel where they were kept overnight to understand what happened,” the company sputtered.

United promised to bring Ole Shep home, and wound up putting him on their corporate jet and eating the $90,000 + cost of chartering such a flight. He got home late Thursday.

Would you have blamed Oscar Munoz if he had just taken off the rest of the week?

For those of you currently studying to become Captains of Industry, please learn from the mistakes of others, and Oscar's history is dotted with errors like shells on a beach.

Last year, when United wanted to make room on a flight to Louisville for four of their employees, and not enough people took the offer of free vouchers and deplaned, they forced Dr David Dae off the jet, dragging him down the aisle screaming.  

And at first, Munoz criticized the doctor, who had to make the flight to be at work at a hospital, but soon changed his tune and made a big deal of promoting big changes in his company's customer service practices. And shortly thereafter, United started a training program called Core4, which was supposed to encourage more compassionate service.

It's hard to believe that "killing a dog" or "shipping a pet to Japan" were topics covered in that training, but I can't say for sure.

And, true to form, the company's initial reaction was to say that the flight attendant did not know there was a dog in the dog kennel she was handed by a little girl whom she asked to move her dog to the bin above. They soon backed off of that stance, though.

Perhaps United wants you to think that the baggage handler thought "Japan" was a city in Kansas.

And then people ask why I don't like to travel.