Iowa City

Now contrast this with a trip going the other way, this time by a relative of ours returning to the UK after staying with us. When we got to Miami airport we were greeted by the depressing news that the flight had been delayed four hours  just what you need with a long, overnight flight ahead. Everybody was tense and wandering about moaning and groaning, until a bunch of folk in airline uniform started handing out sheets of paper to everybody. It was a copy of a fax, which had just been sent from England. It was a copy of a fax, which had just been sent from England. It was a personal note signed by the chairman of the airline  saying what had gone wrong, what they were doing to fix it, and some things to make life as comfortable as possible in the interim.

The fax was timed in the early hours of the morning (UK time), and the effect on my relative was astonishing: you would think she’d just been handled a win on the lottery.

Now crowd in a bit here because I’m only going to whisper the next bit. You know what I don’t think? I don’t think they got the chairman out of bed at all. I may be totally wrong here (in which case the example is even better) but I think they had devised a process in advance so that whenever they had a problem any where in the world a personal fax from the chairman winged its way to the trouble spot. They just kept a supply of pre-signed ones ready to go. Brilliant.

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