I have been trying to think what bothered me about this whole thing. It wasn't the blogger's attack on "our national flag carrier". Qantas is just a business really, and I don't have a particular affinity for them over someone else because they are 'Aussie' (Or as the blogger may say, Os-see). It wasn't the boastful American-ness of the whole thing either. Been there, seen that before. It's a thing.
When it comes down to it, I think it's because the blogger's personality is so different to mine that I simply can't find myself relating.
I get that the internet is full of hyper-critical agents that think everything is either the absolute-best-amazingest-ever or the absolute-worst-in-the-world. Naturally everyone that feels the need to be hypercritical has some factor that qualifies them to why their opinion is so important. Great... I get that. And as a blogger it pays to say everything is rubbish too. Just look at YouTube. It is full of videos slagging off products purely to earn bias-confirming clicks from people wanting to hear someone else say what they think, just to confirm their opinion.
We've talked pages and pages about the J lounge in Sydney being dirty. I even saw someone talking about the new lounge in Melbourne's carpets already looking worn. But none of this matches my own personal experience. I get that, different times, different factors. Sure.
But what really irked me about this posting, and why I say it is because our personalities are so divergent, is that when I see something I don't like that could be easily fixed, I don't jump onto the internet and make a song and dance about it. Whenever I've been in a position where I've seen cough spilled like that all over a lounge, I've drawn attention to the problem to whoever is at the desk, or to a cleaner personally. I just think a quick 'hey, I know you're busy mopping the showers but the family that were just over that table have left it a bit of a bomb-site. I hope you get time to sort it soon' is better than jumping online and telling everyone that you've earned a lot of points through your business and because of that you're qualified to tell everyone that an airline is bad because the floors of a lounge were dirty, and that it offended you so much that you couldn't give the feedback to the company, or the people working there directly, and would rather do it publicly online.
Maybe I have too much empathy for the people working hard in the company in many other areas to have them besmirched because the lowest paid members of their community haven't done a job that is up to the standard of someone else. I'm sure there's plenty of people whose feelings are totally different to mine, too. The blogger hasn't been to Qantas J often enough to qualify that this mess is the norm but has made an assumption that it is. Something that some of our members here have been happy to back up. I'm just not keen on dragging something down for online likes. I'd rather give my feedback to the company and then judge by how they respond.
