Fliers taken for a ride?

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Fliers in Malaysia are treated like flies. They are taken for granted, akin to how flies are viewed in the wet market—an accepted but necessary annoyance. Since the emergence of low-cost carriers and the widespread use of the internet for bookings, travelling has never been easier. 

Once the enticement concludes with super saver offers and the fabricated excitement that seats are selling out quickly, and once the transactions are finalised, the ball will be in the airlines' court. They have the freedom to postpone, cancel, and reschedule any trip to meet their business requirements, ensuring maximum returns. Multiple flights can be consolidated into a single journey if there are few passengers on a specific route. They do not owe their customers any explanation. In fact, contacting them is made nearly impossible. If customers persist, they can be redirected to chatbots, but only after verifying that the customers are indeed human. Humans must also pass the Turing test. The irony is that now machines are confirming humans to be humans!

Airlines may conceal behind the pretext of technical reasons, which can vary from a pilot failing to arrive for duty to a missing jet engine. 

It was a long weekend filled with wedding invitations, one or two at a time, back to back. Amidst this, a dear friend succumbed to a heart attack, making the weekend resemble a scene from 'Four Weddings and A Funeral', though with less masala.

I had booked a flight to Johor Bahru for 2:40 pm on a Friday. I thought there would be just enough time to finish off work and rush to the airport.

 

A few days before the flight, an email arrived informing me that the flight would be delayed by an hour, to 3:40 pm. This was fine, as the wedding was scheduled to start at 7 pm. It provided ample time to settle in and join the merriment. 

Once again, a day before the journey, there is another announcement. The plane now takes off an hour later, at 4:35 pm. How convenient. Of course, they offered a refund if the change was unacceptable, but one can only imagine the inconveniences and extra costs incurred if a new order is placed relatively close to the departure date. The airline can obscure their responsibilities under the often unread contract that customers must agree to before purchasing their tickets - it is the prerogative of the airline to delay, postpone, or even cancel the flight. 

Anyway, I made the trip in time for the function.

 

My return flight was scheduled for the following morning, the first one out at 6:30 am. If leaving early and rushing to the airport at an unearthly hour to arrive before the stipulated time was not enough, imagine how frustrating it is when the flight is delayed. Why was there a delay when the airport was clear, the weather was fine, and the plane was just starting its journey for the day? It's anybody's guess—no announcement and, obviously, no apologies. 

The reason people prefer air travel over driving in Malaysia, which boasts an extensive highway network admired globally, is the convenience it offers. The unpredictability of traffic conditions makes driving burdensome, especially for short trips. Although the travel time is comparable in both scenarios, the freshness factor becomes a significant consideration. The time needed to reach the airport, check in two hours before departure, and wait will be similar if one were to drive to the equivalent destination on the west coast of Peninsula Malaysia.

 

It appears that Malaysians are being taken for fools. They find themselves at the mercy of these operators, be they local budget carriers or regular airlines. There may be a need for assertive customers with a mob mentality, rather than the compliant, submissive ones they typically encounter here.

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Air sick...

It was a necessary trip, not a pleasure cruise. It needed to be done. 

Just as the restrictions that kept us within our borders were eased, I made a dash for it. I thought everyone would be excited to fly free as a bird all over again - the passengers would be thrilled to meet with their loved ones overseas, and the flight crew with the licence to serve in the airspace, ecstatic to scale the skies.

How wrong I was! 

The powers that be probably decided to take an excellent last squeeze on travellers one more time, one for the road, before the scare of Covid dwindled away. Out of the blue (not mentioned in any pre-travel requisites), recipients of Sinovac vaccines needed to provide a negative report of their nasal swab for virus detection (PCR-Ag). New directives, it seems. When travellers expressed their dissatisfaction, the staff reassured them that they just happened to have a state-of-the-art laboratory at the airport, by the way, and results could be obtained within two hours, just in time for them to board their flights. How convenient! But the catch was that it cost RM500 when it was done for RM200 outside. Hey, if you could afford a flight ticket...

In my eyes, the flight crew did not display much enthusiasm for their newfound freedom. Maybe it was because they were scheduled on a 'graveyard route' - a route allocated to newbies, as a punishment or demotion, a trip to the Gulag. The flight (KUL-DEL) with the most number of unsettled passengers who are never satisfied and undeservedly feel flight attendants are like slaves on Captain Morgan's pirate ship, fit to be abused. To an outsider, the scene looked like a group of primary school teachers controlling many boisterous students - teachers running away, appearing busy and school whining, asking for this and that.

I remember my first international flight on MAS. Their tagline, service with a smile, was complemented with the secret to capturing a man's heart. I was puffed with a full meal, periodic snacks and free-flowing beverages. No thanks to the democratisation of air travel with the invasion of budget airlines, the flight menu on this regular flight too had been 'plebeianised'! Passing off shrivelled dehydrated chicken pieces for rendang is criminal. And a cake piece which looked like one obtained from a bread vendor? 

The return trip was no better. Two hours of delay in flight take-off but a single breath of apology, but instead, the pilot gave a lethargic description of his flight path and altitude… 33,000 ft above Visakapatnam etc. No one word remotely resembling sorry, delay or beyond control in his wasteful banter. No one was bothered that the passengers may miss their connecting flights or other pressing engagement. Oh, what the heck? They are performing a charity mission...

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Follow

Deprival Devours?

A thought flew past me as I was sitting through a lavish wedding dinner in a posh establishment recently. A doctor in the infant years of his career was proudly showcasing his catch to the world to ogle. Set with the high-brow society setting and the ambience to match, we, the mortals were given a sneak peek into the lives and times of the groom and bride through a montage of a roll of photos that was rolling during the function. We gathered that the respective families went through thick and thin, scaling the waves of obstacles to attain the comfort that they had acquired in life. 

Well and dandy, all these...

But how is a measly paid medical officer in the notoriously underpaid system of Malaysian civil service going to sustain the same type of lifestyle? Is he still going to be that dedicated doctor who will weather all kinds of resistance to put wellbeing above everything else as he chose the profession, not for the glamour but the calling? Is he going through grind those hard times dealing with difficult cases in the wee hours of the morning? Is he going to pacify his anger nerves as he treats drunks with avoidable wounds? Is he going to tell himself that it is a calling to be a physician as he slogs through the long New Year weekend as the rest of the city embroil in stuporous revelry of the Season? Will he think that his good deeds would earn plus points for his afterlife or that the divine forces throw him a bone to lead a comfortable family life? As the demands for modern living becomes more expensive, is he going to sacrifice the comforts of his early life for an epicurean one?

At a Klinik Desa, the reality.

Bordering on stereotyping and over-generalisation, it is probably going to be a ‘no-no’ to the above. Living in comfortable times deprived of the valuable lessons from the School of Hard Knocks of Life and acquisition of a degree through the back door means would hamper his tenacity to face the realm of the unknown. 

Now, whose fault is this? Are poverty and deprivation the only way to strengthen the mettle of Man? Will the comforts of life only create snowflakes much like how a sterile environment lowers one’s immunity guard?

Should medical vocation be reserved for those with aptitude only or to those with undying zest to serve despite adversities? Are these mere statements of assumptions?

I envisage the groom, ten years down the line, abandoning the real call of the profession to serve the needy of medical attention who are invariably the ones least deep-pocketed, to venture to something less demanding with better remunerations, like rubbing shoulders with bankers and financiers. At least their clients do not come with tales of melancholia and hopelessness but with tall stories of the impossible of pots of golds and pink unicorns. 

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Nothing personal, it's just for the nation.

Tun M tried it once, and now in his second lease of life, he is at it again - wanting to change our mindset to be tuned to the frequency of the Japanese. Their zest for improvement and perfection cannonballed them up from a nation devastated by the pulverising effects of a mushroom cloud to morph into the second biggest economy in thirty short years.

Somehow, we are deeply immersed and soaked in our mediocrity and lulled with self-glorification that even if we look at the Land of Rising Sun with awe, we remain faithfully as the Land of Twilight. For it is at the twilight of times, do we all become lethargic.

Gandhi, among the many things that he admired about the Europeans, includes cleanliness and punctuality. He went as far as to say that stickling to time made them able to rules countries timezones away (paraphrasing).
One of the virtues that skyrocketed the Japanese to great heights in discipline and keeping time. Go to any railway station and one can understand. A minute in the arrival of their train is a national crisis. Trains come on time at the dot of a second.

We, Malaysians, shamefully prescribe to the dictum, 'better late than sorry' but with a twist. We are late, we say sorry profusely but mean not a single word of it, and we would do it again without an iota of guilt. We do not bat an eyelid when we are stood up because we do the same. We apologise and a new slate. Queserasera.

Should it also be happening at a public domain level? Go to any bus or even no-frill airport terminal? One should think that, at least in the aviation industry, with their association with multinational concerns, some of the traits of timeliness would have trickled down. But hell no. I guess the lackadaisical Asiatic outlook and the humid tropical lethargy overpowers the desire to be prompt.

Try flying Firefly or Malindo from Subang (SZB) like I sometimes have to do for short trips. I think I may have some authority of sorts to vouch for their laggard performance on the punctuality department. Passengers would soon realise that the joke in on them after weaving and needling through the streets of KL to reach the airport just to be informed that their flight has been delayed. (Reasons: Pick your choice, as if anybody can fact-check; non-arrival of the shuttling planes from the other side, technical problems, inclement weather and the latest I heard is: a traffic jam in the KL skies!) You will end up arriving too early after all, for the umpteenth time.

More flights tend not to fly on time. No amount of profuse regrets is going to improve the hospitality. Both sides know it just lip service, mere little pacifiers. The apologies do not reflect the service providers' genuine inadvertent lapse in exemplar spotless work record but their inefficiencies. We all well versed with the Malay 'bangsawan' movie dialogue that goes, "beribu-ribu ampun, sembah patik harap diampun..." And we know they say it as a matter of figure of speech to think of an excuse to their undoing.

Have pride in your work. If you find it too complicated, perhaps you could leave it to others to manage. At this juncture, Peter's Principle comes to mind. In a hierarchy, people tend to rise to "their level of incompetence." Thus, as people are promoted, they become progressively less-effective because good performance in one job does not guarantee similar performance in another. In Malaysia, we also have a term. It is called 'jagoh kampong'.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."  Arjuna, upon being shown the power of the Vishnu (Vishwaroop) in its full glory, is told by Krishna, "kalo'smi loka-ksaya-krt pravrddho" [Thou seest Me as Time who kills, Time who brings all to doom]. Is the scripture telling time is the One which controls the worlds? Hence, God is Time and Time is God. 

 https://asok22.wixsite.com/real-lesson 

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Post #2000