They have you by the short & curlies, and they own air travel in Memphis. You can’t avoid them. Memphis is their hub city, and they’re going bankrupt very quickly. They is Northwest Airlines, an airline I affectionately call “northWorst” (as did my father before me). They can, and will, screw you rotten because, Memphis, they can.
If you fly with them, you pay a premium cost to travel to any real destination city. If you don’t fly with them, your only option is connecting in another city when you fly another airline or to drive 2 hours east to Little Rock or 2.5 hours west to Nashville, almost worth it when many flights are nearly half the price by doing so. How they have the Memphis market so completely on lockdown is a fascination of mine, a question of just how much money they spent to have that freedom and what happens to all of us as a result.
I’ve never met anyone that works for Northwest Airlines who is happy. I have been to dozens of destinations the world over and I have yet to meet a happy Northwest Airlines counter rep, ticket person, airline attendant, captain, or anyone else really that works for the airline. Clearly, the union members are so unstable, miserable and pissed off and they pass the joys of their pain along to us, the customer. I have never had a truly satisfactory experience with the airline, and I don’t expect to have that experience any time soon.
But then, at least right now, the travel industry as a whole is in deep trouble. The remnants of 9/11 culture that we had all hoped to move ahead of have, at last, come back to bite us in the form of Oliver Stone’s nostalgic and widely-praised World Trade Center. Conveniently coinciding with the film’s release, a terrorist plot was broken up in the U.K. involving plans of using liquid explosives to harm and kill Americans. It has set air travel back a couple of years, and one has to wonder what all the mishigas will eventually turn to.
Without launching into a tirade about “our horrible fucking President and what he’s done to destroy the unification of America”, I focus instead on the more pertinent and current problem: what to do in the Indianapolis airport for six hours because nobody is nice enough to let me skip them in line so I don’t miss the 30 minute before flight cut-off that keeps me here for another six hours.
Or perhaps I should complain about the pinched, bitter, severely-overweight and sour woman who, when I asked her for help, told me first “well, I’m not a ticket attendant so I can’t help you” before pointing to the self-service terminal I had already gone to and saying, “That’s where you check in.” Clearly, you aren’t required to pass any basic competency test to work for Northwest Airlines because, clearly, you can be replaced by the internet and self-service check-in terminals.
My friend Todd works for Airlink (unless, as of this writing, he’s been furloughed again for some reason) and even he, whom I have never seen as an unhappy person, seems miserable working for a company destined to fall apart on any day.
My big fear is that they will suddenly go bankrupt while I am sitting in an airport someplace only for me to find their ticket counters closed, nobody at work, and no way for me to get home. Every moment between take-off and landing, I have to wonder if I’ll be able to make the next plane without getting re-routed or having a flight cancelled.
The answer: when they were handing out brains, perhaps I believe they should have been handing out trains instead; therefore, I suggest that I take Amtrak everywhere from now on. Yes, it takes three days to get across the country. Yes, it’s uncomfortable. Yes, you can’t sleep. But at least I know it’s going to keep on running, and that’s a guarantee I can use when trying to manage my time and, at the same time, wrestle free of the burden of Northwest’s kung-fu grip on travel to and from Memphis.
