After one customer cursed out an airline employee over the phone, she suddenly received a pair of abusive text messages from an unknown number.
I’m not going to defend the conduct of Marla Margolis. She flew from Boston to Miami on American Airlines with her family with plans to celebrate her son’s bar mitzvah on a cruise. But Margolis discovered that a garment bag containing her son’s suit and daughter’s dress had been left onboard the aircraft.
She called AA Customer Service and asked for a direct telephone number to Miami to inquire about her bag. Instead, the agent referred her to AA’s online claim system and instructed her to wait 48 hours for a response. With the cruise ship departure imminent, there was no time for that. She had also just stepped off the aircraft an hour ago…the plane may have still been at the gate.
She told local TV station WCVB:
All I needed to do was to talk to a human being at the airport. I didn’t need to file something and find out 48 hours later if it was found.
When the agent refused to give her the local telephone number for Miami lost and found, she cursed out the agent.
One minute later, she received the following text message:
I will put my foot up your a** you f***ing w**re.
Of course I’ve added asterisks…
Margolis responded immediately:
This is going right to the CEO.
She also tried calling the number back, but it went to voice mail. The area code, 336, is for North Carolina. AA has a call center in Charlotte and Winston-Salem.
Eight days later she received this response:
Are you enjoying my foot up your a**?
She complained to AA, who promised to investigate. Thus far, while AA has “thoroughly investigated” the incident and interviewed the employees who dealt with Margolis, no “smoking gun” has been found. AA also confirmed that her call was answered by an agent in Phoenix, but then transferred to a supervisor in North Carolina.
CONCLUSION
Circumstantial evidence suggests this was the agent. Who else could it be? But it seems the agent was slick. While there is absolutely no basis ever for these type of vulgar text messages, I hope it will be a lesson to Margolis not to curse people out. By the way, she returned to the airport and retrieved the garment bag. Cleaning crews found it and placed it in lost and found.
What kind of idiot calls the airline’s call center thinking she’ll get redirected to an airport employee on the ground?
That doesn’t even make sense. And then cursing the guy on the phone out because he can’t honor a truly unworkable request? Call center operators are human… we often forget that.
So she was able to just go back to the airport and get it… novel.
Common sense dictates running back to the gate.
We had a similar situation arriving ex DL at MIA. Passengers were still deplaning and yet our used sweaters were ostensibly gone. I do understand some security concerns regarding us reboarding to search yet it could have been done. We were still sterile as never having left airside.
Thank you DL for helping. NOT
Seems like she is the type of person that has made many enemies, who is to say it had to be the most recent one. It’s just a shame she can be a horribly rude person and still be treated as a victim and given the attention a narcissist craves.
If something like this happens, you call the airport communications center, and use as much lube as you can stand while asking them to pretty please contact the AA staff at gate XX to ask if they found the bag YOU foolishly left behind. You don’t curse anyone because you made a mistake.