Sometimes threads are purposely derailed. It used to have something to do with cupcakes, but lets not go there again…
Sometimes there’s something illuminating off to the side of the path or sometimes you see maybe there’s a better path to take instead.
It actually is hard to believe this thread is at 43 pages already…and now with dstark and possibly sorghum off, is there anyone left to argue with?
And it’s not cupcakes, it’s coffee cake vs crumb cake. If it was cupcakes, they’d win every time.
Maybe we should argue dogs versus cats? Wine versus beer? Tea versus coffee?
I’ll stick with the coffee drinking dog lover, I don’t know if I can trust a tea drinking cat person…
But the good thing is that while I was wasting time here, I picked up an awesome trip entailing little work for good pay. Definitely more useful than cleaning toilets!
Wine drinking cat lover?
I’m always up for a good argument. 
I’ve read every post and most of the links and I’ve got some pretty strong opinions.
My first instinct, before knowing any facts, was to sympathize with the family, for the simple reason that United’s been my least favorite airline ever since one of their representatives threatened to call security for trying to ask them a question.
It didn’t take long for me to turn. It was quickly clear to me, with her disingenuous explanations and her vow to see the FA unemployed, that the mom had a malicious agenda.
While I agree with the general consensus of most posters here, I’m perhaps a little more willing to see things as a series of misunderstandings that escalated into a disaster than to ascribe any ill intent to the family. I’ve never viewed it as an attempt to scam United.
Speaking of misunderstandings, that’s what’s prompted me to post. I watched a misunderstanding evolve here and can see it hasn’t been resolved and want to try to help.
In post 585 @sorghum wrote “I don’t see that how the adult acquired a broken leg has anything to do with their comfort level on a flight.”
I think @jym626 (to whom I owe my unending gratitude for suffering through 2 hours of Atlanta rush hour traffic on my behalf) misinterpreted this as “I don’t see how a broken leg has anything to do with their comfort level on a flight.”
They’ve gone back and forth a few times, but It seems the misunderstanding remains. In post 638, jym66 wrote “HOW they got the injury is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT, sorghum…Not seeing that I am the one who doesn’t understand.”
I think that was sorghum’s point. “I don’t see that how the adult acquired a broken leg has anything to do with their comfort level on a flight” and “HOW they got the injury is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT” are logically equivalent. In retrospect, perhaps sorghum should have put HOW in all caps.
Similarly, I imagine a series of small misunderstandings on the plane that day. “She needs be in her own seat” could have been interpreted as “she needs to sit in her own seat”. Upon learning the hard cold fact that the girl had an economy boarding pass, the FA may have made some assumptions that turned out to be erroneous.
In the end, as much as I dislike United, I believe the FA and pilot did the right thing.
I envy you your Cavaliers, teriwt and busdriver! I love that breed, they’re so sweet and cute. My sons are allergic to dogs and so am I, unfortunately.
Oh my goodness, you MUST have coffee cake/crumb cake with softened BUTTER spread onto it…
Anyway, yes, KCC (or is is CKC?) spaniels are so cute.
This thread reminds me a little of the Michael Brown video where he is pushing the clerk down in the convenience store, possibly (not proven) after stealing cigarillos. That made people think, aha, he was a THUG! So live by the sword, die by the sword. But when it comes down to it, NO ONE I know of would want to kill someone for stealing a few cigarillos. Or even pushing a smaller guy down to the ground. So like with this family, maybe they did a few things wrong, but the way the flight attendants responded was kind of extreme.
If you can’t fly without her in her seat, and she can’t physically sit in a seat due to a disability, and the family doesn’t have a car seat, they can’t fly with her on the plane. Not sure why that is worth any kind of discussion, do they need a FAA rep to tell them that?
@busdriver11 – I just put my dogs in harnesses and use seat belt clips like this - http://www.amazon.com/Petmate-11480-Tether-Small-Medium/dp/B00DJRAVX2/ - to fasten to their harnesses. with the dogs in the back seat. Same harnesses I use for dog walks – they are small dogs, so I always put them in harnesses rather than fastening a leash to their collar anyway. I am using the soft stretchy mesh type harnesses with them.
I have no idea how safe this arrangement would be in the event of a serious crash – it is possible that in such a case the arrangement would not protect them adequately and they would suffer injuries from the restraint or harness itself. But it is effective for keeping the dogs out of my lap & from distracting me when driving, and obviously they would not be flying through the front windshield in an accident. They still have plenty of range of movement in the back seat – they can move around, look out the window, poke their heads through the gap between the front seats to get a pet when I’m at a traffic stop.
I’d add that one of my dogs is probably smaller than a Cavalier – he’s about 8 lb. – the other one is somewhat larger -about 17 lb.-- so size-wise my solution would work with small to medium size dogs.
Anybody else drive with their cat in the car? I used to have a cat that liked to sleep in the back widow area. He hated the crate…
Well, my take on the thread hijack is this: Some of us care more about our dogs’ safety than Ivy’s mother cared about her daughter – that is, we think about the safety issues, we take the time and effort needed to find some sort of restraint system for our pets, given that they can’t use the seatbelts designed for humans.
Others rationalize and stick to what’s comfortable (dog in driver’s lap)— and I am sure that somewhere in this world there are people who would leave their dogs confined in a car on a hot sunny day and then angry at well-meaning humans who point out the dangers to them … perhaps even blog about it? I guess that’s pretty much what is happening when a Starbucks employee decides to post a rant about her dog-bringing customer – though I don’t’ know whether her rant was focused on the dog safety or the issue of the distraction and the risk it causes to others on the road. (How does dog-management and driving compare with texting and driving? My cell phone has never tried to lick my face when I am busy doing something else – can’t say as much for the dog who is tethered in the back).
A while back there was a long thread on CC because of some toddler-mom’s blog rant because she had been cited after leaving her toddler unattended in a vehicle while she dashed into a store. As I recall that was also a pretty long thread.
I agree @sherpa that the whole thing was an “escalation” that just spun out of control. I do not think it was ever about the “rule” as Elit acknowledged early on that she believes safety rules are there for a reason and they would have complied if they had been aware of it. I think most of the posters here do not believe she was unaware of the rule, but she reiterates that was the case in her interview yesterday with a northern NJ newspaper linked below.
I think her latest statements in that article and the final interview she did made it clear that for her, it boiled down to feeling that the family was shown no “respect” or “kindness” for the difficult predicament they were in - having a disabled child on board without the appropriate equipment. She appears to be willing to take responsibility for the lack of equipment for the child as the last sentence of the linked article states that she said she will have the equipment on their flight next month because “a rule is a rule is a rule.” But she remains firm on the “respect” issue saying “It’s o.k. to demand respect and that’s it.”
At the end of the day I will reserve judgment in that I was not present to witness exactly what was said and in what tone or manner the family was spoken to. There is nothing that will make a woman more crazy and send her off the edge than perceiving (wrongly or rightly) that someone is being unkind to their child. I imagine that is doubly true with a disabled child and reason might not always prevail when a third party is telling her what she has to do. Especially since that “something” she has to do highlights that she did not bring the appropriate equipment. So in the end whatever words were exchanged led to a standoff where everyone lost. I believe it was the husband who implored the pilot to intervene.
So if Elit is smart (and I think she is) she will let this matter die and offer no more interviews or statements. She is an affluent, good looking, articulate woman with a successful husband flying her family first class from a resort who lost her temper with a FA. She is not going to win the court of public opinion.
http://www.northjersey.com/news/health-news/millburn-family-makes-national-headlines-1.1186815
We keep our pets in carriers, two each (because they are friends), and the carrier handle is designed for a seat belt. We would no sooner leave our pets in ethe car without being “buckled in” than our kids. If we moved somewhere within the US, we’d drive them to our new home. If we moved overseas, I’d contemplate taking a boat with them if it was allowed somehow.
That being said, both us kids and our pets would run rampant in the station wagon growing up. Crawling around, standing up, the dog laying on the floor, walking on our laps, etc. Then again, the dog went to the vet once for a rabies shot and that was it. Who knew pets could get cancer? As adults, one of our previous pets got chemo and we had to travel a few hundred miles to get MRIs of her tumor.
For me I can get on board with almost everything you said until I remember the fact that she did not just lose her temper with the FA, she followed it up with a focused and deliberate campaign to disparage the FA, and further, to deprive her of her livelihood, or at least her job at UA, and did so quite gleefully if the tweets/statements credited to her are true. She paints a picture of herself not just as a caring mother, but a nasty, vindictive woman who has no interest in furthering any cause related to children with disabilities, but is more interested in getting her pound of flesh.
We all know the FA has no power to make any kind of rebuttal if she values her job, and maybe those of us in service positions sympathize and feel like the Mom knew this full well and attempted to exploit that imbalance of power way beyond what the situation merited.
"That being said, both us kids and our pets would run rampant in the station wagon growing up. Crawling around, standing up, the dog laying on the floor, walking on our laps, etc. "
Ha! Well, I will fess up that when our twins were probably 4.5 pounds and newly home from the hospital (on apnea monitors and prone to apnea/bradycardia episodes), we had an incident in which D would not respond and had apparently stopped breathing. H (who is a physician) called our ER (which is 2 minutes away from our house), yelled “This is Dr. PG, I want a pediatrician and a neonatalogist waiting for me in the ER STAT” (click), threw her into the footwell of the passenger side and tore off to the hospital in absolute record time, woe to any car that was in his way. Naturally, by the time they arrived, D was screaming her head off, which meant that she was perfectly fine. But yes, we took a chance!!
Well since many posters seem determined to derail the thread, with the exception of sherpa, to whom I also owe a massive gratitude for purchasing something for our family in his locale, Harvestmoon, Nrdsb4 and calmom who are also trying to bring the thread back on topic, it seems it is, at present, a downhill ride. IMO, regardless of the type or cause of a disability, all people with disabilities deserve sympathy.
Yes. And dstark in particular - knowing the challenges that you have faced with your children - I wish you and your family nothing but the best of health and happiness.
@harvestmoon , I cannot believe that she didn’t know the rules. She has 3 older children, and I can assume that she knew that each of them had to be buckled in and secured after they turned 2.
I agree. These people fly ALL THE TIME. Most of us who have traveled by plane with young kids have experienced the child who doesn’t want to sit in his/her own seat because it is next to a stranger/not by the window/whatever. It’s not like they turn 2 and suddenly become 100% compliant with both our rules and the FAA’s.
What “respect” was she showing the other 100 plus passengers on that flight? How many of them missed connections due to her lack of “respect”? Puhleeze, she is back peddling now that the majority of the public thinks she was wrong.
Agree that anyone that tries to get another person FIRED for doing their job and enforcing rules does NOT have my sympathy, especially when they try to get their way and delay an entire planeload of passengers for over an hour by arguing how the rules of each person belted into their seat doesn’t apply. Agree also that it would be best if the mom would just go quiet and let things blow over as best they will instead of continuing to grant interviews and make herself look worse.