Loose cannon Robert Kirby
A few months ago I arrived at ACSA’s Johannesburg International Punishment Camp. We were disembarked from our beautifully maintained 200-year-old Airbus and mercilessly driven up through one of those jetty things into a long dimly lit corridor. Dreadful torture music screamed out of the walls at us. Like a scene from that early film masterpiece Metropolis, long lines of submissive slave-labourers shuffled past. (ACSA, by the way, stands for Airports Company of South Africa and not Acquisitive Collocation of Southern Arseholes as is often mistakenly believed.)
To encourage air passengers in their long walks to freedom, there are a series of moving walkways in the ACSA horror corridor. I was about to embark on one of these when I saw a fragile old woman bent over, obviously trying to regain her breath after the climb up the jetty. Being the colonially hand-raised gentleman I am, I leapt nimbly off the walkway and offered to help her.
She was scared of going on the walkways because the previous year she’d fallen on one of them and broken her hip. But not her sense of independence for she had not asked for a wheelchair this time. The trouble is that if old ladies do decide to walk, at no stage in this half-kilometre ACSA-controlled corridor is there anywhere for them to rest themselves. No benches, nothing. There is, however, always a bit of wall to lean against, or they can simply just sink gratefully to the floor and listen to the shit-music.
When properly asked SAA will always supply a wheelchair, even a wheelchair pusher-person to cruise frail intruders around the ACSA dungeons. What SAA won’t do is have a spare wheelchair or two standing around just in case some ghastly old wrinkly suddenly feels a bit giddy and weak. They’ll also make sure there isn’t an SAA employee in sight to summon help for the ghastly wrinkly because this would violate the terms of SAA’s agreement with ACSA. Clause 18 states that SAA are only allowed 70 percent of total passenger-abuse. ACSA and the car-park company share the rest.
To finish off the granny endurance walk. With stops it took about fifteen minutes for our small convoy to reach a by now getting-quite-frantic daughter. And there I left them, happily reunited as I moved on to the rest of my sad tale.
Which is to say that there is simply no excuse for the crabby indifference which seems to have taken over SAA’s ground staff. I’m talking about things like 11 minute waits for a bookings telephone to be answered while being thanked at regular intervals for one’s patience and being assured one’s call “is important to SAA”. Like dialing the complaints and help number and getting a recording; the reply coming 36 hours later and which runs “Uh … oh … Hi Robert. This is South African Airways answering your call. You seem to have a problem. I see you’re not in so I’ll call some other time.” Four days later as it turned out.
Like having to sit in dirty buses breathing diesel fumes. Like having your pre-booked business class seat changed at the last minute because SAA has decided to give it to someone they think is more important than you. (Lay that pistol down, Barney. I’m not going all affirmative on you. It’s the black SAA ground staff who are desperately holding the professional line down there.)
SAA deserves better than its current degeneration into the garish rites of synthetic marketing strategies. In short, Mr Coleman Andrews and his buddies need to get their heads out of their public relations cloud and start kicking our once proud airline back into the shape it used to be. Withal its close association with the past regime, SAA is one of the few legacies of the bad old days we can still almost feel proud of.
Nowadays that’s all being eroded as they “market the image” in the form of groovily decorated airliners, flashy ad campaigns, competitions, sponsorships, all that bogus “Thank you so much for choosing SAA” courtesy. These days SAA aircraft have become flying public address systems. You get bombarded by badly read commercials about Voyager benefits and “weekend specials”. If you eat the SPCA survival kits they pass off as food, flying in them becomes quite dangerous as well.
In isolation the complaints are petty. These are peccadilloes, I know. But when they come at you as a sort of uninterrupted flow of pathetic excuses for a third-rate service, they are a royal ball-ache.