Working for an airline automatically puts you in a delicate position where you are exclusively dealing with customers at their most ragged, frazzled and annoyed. While it is, of course, preferable to deal with mild-mannered and respectful people, it’s inevitable that you’ll have to put out customer service fires at some point or other.
Evidently, one American Airline employee didn’t quite get the memo on this reality, and took revenge on a frustrated customer by sending her some crude and mouthy texts.
Marla Margolis flew from Boston to Miami with her family in February to celebrate her son’s bar mitvah by going on a cruise. However, a few hours after landing, she discovered that one of the family’s garment bags had been left on the plane. She called the American Airlines customer service line in the hopes that the plane might still be at the gate. However, she was told to simply make a claim online and wait.
“All I needed to do was to talk to a human being at the airport,” Margolis told WCVB. “I didn’t need to file something and find out 48 hours later if it was found.”
Margolis says she uttered something “not nice” as she hung up the phone.
Much to her surprise, she received a text a moment later from an unknown number saying, “I will put my foot up your a** you f**king wh*re.”
Obviously, Marla was flabbergasted and assumed that the message must have come from the customer service representative or another person at the airline.
“I think it was the rep or his buddy sitting next to him,” Marla says.
“This is totally, off the books, crazy,” she adds. “I was very, very upset by the text. It wasn’t that I couldn’t get my answer. It was insult to injury to get this offensive text message.”
The area code of the unknown number is indeed 336, which is North Carolina — where American Airlines has a call center.
American Airlines claims to have investigated the incident but says that they cannot trace the number since the call center employees immediately took other calls after speaking to Marla.
Roughly a month after the incident, Marla received another text from the same number, saying “Are you enjoying my foot up your a**?”
Marla has apparently contacted local police, who are investigating.
Correction: An earlier version of this post claimed it was American Airlines who forcefully dragged a man from a plane. It was United Airlines who was responsible for that. We regret the error.