Jesus at the Southwest Help Desk

Don't forget who the customer service representatives are really representing.

I’m one of the thousands of people whose holiday plans got derailed by the whatever is going on at Southwest right now. I’m pretty sour about it. The last two years, Covid got in the way of me seeing my family for Christmas. And this year, when it finally looked like I’d be able to laze the days away with the Huckabee family over the holidays, the flights got canceled without so much as a push notification. 

When I find myself in times of trouble, here are the words that come to me: It is what it is. I was fortunate to not be one of the people stranded at the airport, my luggage strewn hither and yon across the baggage claim, but I saw the videos. I also saw pictures of Southwest employees and gate attendants looking pale as death, sometimes crying, as confused as anyone else about what’s going on, flailing among dozens if not hundreds of furious customers. 

I have a soft spot for anyone with a customer-facing job like this. I spent a lot of time working retail in high school and shudder to remember the feeling of getting yelled at by total strangers two or three times my age over something that is not my fault. I also wish this wasn’t happening. And I can stand here all day and push every button on this register, but it will not fix your issue because I have not been empowered to make any real decisions. People often forget that “representative” is the operative word in “customer service representative.” We’re just standing in for the real culprit here. There’s a biblical irony there that I’ll come back to in a minute.

What I didn’t understand then is that this was deliberate on the part of the real culprits. I was hired for the least amount of money possible to act as a buffer between angry customers and the people who actually made the offending decisions. In the case of mall retail, a corporate board finds a way to make clothes as cheaply as possible in whatever country has the fewest labor laws and when someone tries to return the inevitably cheap, flawed and easily damaged product, I was around to make sure nobody in charge actually had to answer any uncomfortable questions about why everything we sold sucks so much.