Companies have become more and more sensitive to the nature of Twitter, especially since it has a tendency to spawn sudden, hilarious meltdowns. In fact, they’re so sensitive about it that even just the threat of a mean Tweet is apparently enough to get you, and your children, thrown off a flight.
The story, insofar as we’re aware right now, is this: Duff Watson, a Twin Cities resident if the fact that he goes by “Duff” didn’t give that away, had A-List status on Southwest. Unfortunately, that didn’t extend to his kids, and a Southwest rep supposedly told Watson he had to leave his kids in the terminal while he boarded, or stay with his kids. You know, because loading in the parent with two kids he has to get settled with everyone else is efficent and a great use of everyone’s time.
So we’re already dealing with a dimwit, here. As he passes the gate agent, Watson grumps to her that he’s going to totally tweet about this, which he does. And that, according to CBS Minnesota, is when things got very, very stupid:
Soon after getting to their seats, the family of three was asked to leave the plane. “[She said] her safety feels threatened at this point because of what I tweeted,” Watson said. “There was no use of profanity, there were no threats made. There was nothing other than, you know, a terse exchange between a customer service agent and a customer,” he said.
Watson says he was forced to delete the tweet.
So, just to review, the gate agent “felt threatened” by a Tweet, and booted an entire family with a customer in their rewards program off a flight. Which probably, in turn, held up that flight. All over the kind of thing most flight passengers would rather airlines do in the first place anyway so the kids don’t hold up the flight. Good work, Southwest. Maybe you should put your flight attendants in charge of gate agent training, instead.