Do You Like Urine on Your Feet?

So we've blogged about etiquette before (check out that word cloud to the right), and we'll do it again.

Today.

We have a real problem with people who bare their disgusting, filthy, traveling feet in public. Airline lounges and clubs are a prime place to spot this repulsive behavior.

Here are two photos we've taken (in United Clubs) in the last few months.

This appealing young (gross) lady was at O'Hare...

Bare feet up on the furniture. Nice.

And this lady was in the International Terminal at SFO:

That's her loving husband ignoring her crass ways.

But we saw something on an ORD-SFO flight last week that was truly appalling. Across from us in 21D was a 50 year old dad traveling with his wife and two kids (scattered among nearby rows). He took off his shoes as soon as we pushed back, and was barefoot.

This is bad enough. However, it gets much worse.

Three times during the flight, he got up and used the lavatory. In BARE FEET.

It is beyond appalling to imagine knowingly walking into a space that is splashed with man urine. That's what airplane lavatories are, let's just face it. Even walking in wearing the socks from your BusinessFirst amenity kit is pretty horrific.

But barefoot?

Take a hint from us: Never - NEVER - display your bare feet in an airport or on an airplane.

And if you do, for God's sake – don't visit the lav in your bare feet?

Please?

CO: Gone But Not Forgotten at the Gate

We know that the Continental Airlines name is gone, but even post-merger, the "new" United is stuck with a lot of CO swag and material. 

One example is the BP stock which the GAs are using to print boarding passes at the gate. 

 

Post-merger, I received an upgrade right before boarding at ORD, and here's the boarding pass I was handed:

How long before the CO stock is gone completely?

I Survived Too: Merger Day at ORD

When I booked this weekend's travel, a few months back, United had announced that it planned to merge all its systems with Continental's at end of business on Saturday, March 3. So I was pretty certain that by flying on Saturday afternoon I'd be in the clear.

Later, they switched up and announced that everything would merge overnight/early Saturday morning. So I prepped for disaster, leaving home on Thursday for ORD, ticket numbers documented offline, mileage balances recorded as proof, and reservations printed in hard copy. Saturday morning I tried to check in online, having totally forgotten to do so the previous night (rookie mistake!).

But online check in via iPhone app was broken. I tried on my laptop using the Continental-fied pss.united.com website. No dice. I'd have to go try a kiosk at the airport.

When I got the ticket lobby, I hit the nearest kiosk. It couldn't find my reservation. Not good. So I found the Premier Access 1K line, which only had about 10 people in it. The Economy & international check in lines were longer, but not horrible. And UA staff were out in force: greeting people, answering questions, and most of all, manning the ticket desks, with supervisors looking over their shoulders. The problems of the non-GUI HP SHARES system are documented elsewhere, but based on what I was seeing today at ORD, it didn't seem like there were major problems they couldn't handle on day 1.

Best of all, though, were the t-shirts UA ticket personnel sported, as seen in my photo above. The front said, "Merger Day One," and the back said: "I Survived."

I chatted with a service rep who said that while the scene wasn't too bad now (mid-day), the morning had apparently been horrendous. Lots of angry pax, confusion and broken systems. She also said that it was just as well that I had forgotten to check in online the previous day: all the people who had done so arrived at the airport to learn that their check ins were not in the system and they had to hit the ticket counters anyway.

One way or the other, when I made it to the counter, the agent found my res, gave me my boarding pass, and sent me on my way. By the time I got online here in the United Club, my current year and lifetime mileage balances had shown up in my MileagePlus account, along with my upgrade balance.

I logged in to the Club wifi network (the "T" in T-Mobile is for "tortoise") using my old MileagePlus number, not my new alphanumeric OnePass-ish number. Not everything has been updated yet, I guess.

Something to Drink, Sir? Also, You're a Pig.

Yeah, OK. We've been over this whole feet-on-the-bulkhead thing already. But we're going to keep beating this drum until airline flight attendants get up the nerve to tell passengers who do this that it's not OK, and make them stop.

I took this photo in the first row of a United A320 today on a four hour jaunt out of ORD. The guy with his nasty feet on the wall wasn't some wayward slob on his way back to campus after a snowboarding weekend. He was a 40-something business man in a nice suit and tie.

And he was a disgusting pig for doing this.

There's your rant for this week.