Terry Prone: Cabin staff no longer exist to help make your flight enjoyable

As I poured crunchy cat food on demand, I realised that “now” wasn’t quite what Specs had said.

It was more “neaow” because my cat, I am sorry to confirm, has a Dublin accent, which I noticed for the first time when I returned.

I had arranged for the cat to be fed and watered while I was away, so it wasn’t really hungry, but in a competition between food and human contact, my cat is always going to go first for food.

I’ll have no nasty comments about her sharing this preference with her owner, thanks all the same. Food is the tariff Specs applies to any relationship, much like Trump. Once that’s paid up, we can move on to the finer aspects of our commerce.

I’m not saying that I’m exactly the same but when I got on the JetBlue flight in Boston, my priority was simple: Coffee. Not much to ask, I hear you confirm. As it turned out, in this particular case, it was way too much to ask.

No coffee, the steward said brusquely. Both coffee machines were broken. I was in a bulkhead seat at the top so could see the two coffee machines, neither of which was wearing an out of order label. Nor did the information come wearing an apologetic tone.

Of course, I wanted to argue. How could two coffee machines of demonstrable simplicity go simultaneously on the blink? All they consisted of was an element to heat water and they weren’t even on the same level which, to my primitive understanding of electricity, meant that they probably weren’t on the same circuit. Why would they both not be working?

This was aching to be diagnosed as laziness on the part of the steward, who was holding out an iPad to me with four pictures on it, illustrating the quadripartite free snack choices available. You could get two Biscoff biscuits gratis. Everything else would cost you.

I was slightly distracted from the coffee drought by the woman beside me, who was so old she made me feel positively adolescent by comparison and who ignored the iPad pictures, instead telling the steward she was cold and could he give her a blanket, please?

This steward was an award-winning refusenik. He could not give the woman a blanket, he told her.

He could, however, sell her a blanket. She looked at me. She looked at him. Her silent gaze spoke to a time when an airline passenger complaining of cold — in this case with goosebump proof — would be rewarded by an expression of corporate concern, an instant blanket gift, and a promise that the heating would be turned up.

Her patent disappointment availed her not. OK, she said, she would buy a blanket. How much?

He gestured impatiently at the menu card in the seat pocket in front of her and said he would return. The menu card, bizarrely, turned out to include prices for blankets and earphones amid the food offerings. The lady beside me shrugged and produced a wallet out of her pocketbook.

The refusenik never came back.

A woman — at least in her 80s, possibly even in her 90s — was left to shake with cold, to the manifest disapproval of the group around her, who shared the reproving mutual glances characteristic of the impotent customer. 

A younger woman, apparently related to the older passenger and who was seated a few rows back, arrived up to her with a cardigan, which alleviated the problem somewhat. Just as a couple of cups of hot coffee would have. But the disappearing refusenik fulfilled a job spec change in airline staff, originated by Ryanair but contagious: Cabin staff no longer exist to help make your flight enjoyable.

They’re there to sell you stuff and if you don’t want it, you can shiver right off, so you can. And — for all they care — you can go into caffeine withdrawal while you’re at it.

JetBlue was not always like this. It had a honeymoon period.

It does have an online customer service to which you can complain, not about lack of coffee or freezing little old ladies, but about a selection of things they pick for you to complain about. Not that they even mention the dirty word “complaint”.

Instead, they offer you almost 20 “help topics” to help you decide what you want to chat positively about. If your chosen topic isn’t listed, you’re as goosed as if you wanted coffee on flight B6266 from Fort Myers to Boston last Thursday, or desired not to rattle from cold as violently as does my washing machine on its final spin. It’s FAQs or frozen decaffeination.

I went like yer man on the plane. I postponed. This was a mistake, as it turned out, because of how my once-perfect relationship with Imagine Broadband has matured, not to say soured.

In our halcyon days, me and Imagine were closerthanthis. Imagine responded to my every need. (Well, OK, my every electronic need.)

Imagine sent me a lovely engineer who bored holes in my wall and improved my speed by a factor of 10. It sent me little messages to share its delight that I was now a customer. Merry as a marriage bell, we were, the two of us.

But relationships mature, and here’s how you know: No instant response. These days, they put me in a queue to talk to some poor eejit whose job is to drive you nuts by asking if you’ve done everything any fool familiar with electronic devices would do if the device went on strike. Through gritted teeth, you tell them that the problem is not inside the house, it’s to do with the incoming signal which has died.

Now, if this happens with the electricity supply and you point it out to the grid folk, you are told: “Oh, yeah. You and half the northside. Sorry. We’re on it, though, and expect to get power back to you by 5pm.”

The suppliers send you power at 4.30pm, which is called managing expectations, and that is something they could teach Imagine about.

They don’t ask me to go around turning switches on and off, or ask me for passwords to prove I’m who I say I am. Imagine doesn’t seem to be able to work out when its signal has died in a particular area. Nor does it seem amenable to trusting that their customer is who the customer claims to be.

Now why, I ask you, would someone who isn’t me claim to be me to annoy Imagine about not having a signal if I had one? Not that I’m complaining about either JetBlue or Imagine. Just raising a “Help Topic” to chat about. Over home-brewed coffee.