Jetstar

Pic courtesy Jetstar

I thought I had retired, gentle reader, but now I’m working for Jetstar.

I haven’t flown with them for a while, and the last time I did they were full of surprises.

That hasn’t changed.

Last time I was ignorant of their baggage policies, and I received an expensive surprise when I had to shell out for carry on baggage which I’d wrongly assumed was covered in my fare.

This time, the issue was timing. When you book a flight, There’s a golden window within which you have to tag your bags, weigh them, and go through security.

Because of an accident on the Warrego highway, my bus got me to Brisbane domestic five minutes past the closure of this golden window. The first I knew of this was when the infernal robots refused to accept my already printed boarding pass. 

The robot told me to find a Jetstar staff member, which was a task in itself. The orange garbed people I found must be trained in avoiding eye contact.

Eventually I found a polite young man who seemed to know about as much as I did. He sent me off to the Jetstar help desk. My problems were beyond his pay scale.

I had to pay an extra $85 to be booked on a later flight, even though the one I was originally booked on was sitting on the tarmac, and wasn’t going to depart for at least another forty minutes.

I got in line with my newly minted boarding pass issued by a gentleman, who was polite, but with an accent so thick that it defeated my damaged hearing.

I mimed my way through.

And whilst I was waiting for the later flight (three hours I won’t get back again) I realised that I was now working for Jetstar.

I had printed my own boarding pass, tagged and weighed my baggage, and done all of this without training and supervision. It is the perfect industrial model, and beats paying for staff to complete those messy procedures.

Instead of being paid for these tasks, I had been billed the above mentioned $85 administration fee.

I guess I could regard that as union membership.

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