A Fist Up The @ss!
(First, to any of my Baptist friends: I apologize in advance for the profanity. Believe me when I say it was necessary and the truth of my feelings don’t come across with lesser words)
When Uber began in NYC, they were a black car hailing service. They didn’t start out as the ubiquitous car hailing service that eviscerated the taxi industry, but that was always their aim. In their earliest investor decks, they talked about how awful the typical taxi experience was for most people. The cars were filthy, the drivers were disinterested in their passengers, often chatting away on their phone, barely acknowledging their passengers. Don’t believe me? Here’s a link to their original investor presentation they used to raise $200,000!
https://www.failory.com/pitch-deck/uber
Often (at least in my personal experience), they would take the longest, most circuitous route to a destination in an effort to overcharge their passenger. Hell, they’d never see the same passenger twice, so who cared? Have a complaint about your driver? Feel you were overcharged? File a complaint with a government agency called the “Taxi Commission.” Maybe you’d even hear back! If ever there was an industry that “had it coming,” an industry that deserved to be disrupted and reduced to rubble, it was the taxi industry.
But there are others. Am I in favor of murdering insurance executives in broad daylight? No. Full stop. Luigi Mangione isn’t a hero – he’s a piece of shit. Violence is out.
Do I understand the anger people feel toward that industry? Hell yes. It’s earned. Does the health insurance industry deserve a real reckoning? Absolutely. The kind that comes from competition, transparency, and losing customers—an Uber-level disruption that strips the power, not lives. Would anyone cry if executives were out of jobs, their stock options dust, forced to compete for work like everyone else? Probably not.
But there’s one industry that’s even worse. Worse than taxis, worse than health insurance. An industry so hated that when it finally gets disrupted—routes gone, margins crushed, leadership out—there won’t be a tear shed. Any guesses?
The airline industry.
Fμck the airline industry to death. If ever there was an industry that deserved to be disrupted, that deserved a full-on, lubed up to the elbow, fist up its ass, it’s the airline industry. No other industry treats its customers with more contempt. No other industry can fail repeatedly, can suffer full-on bankruptcies due to hijackings, weather, terrorism, and have no rainy day fund to save their own asses like the airline industry. No other industry has gone to Congress, hat in hand, more often, and gotten bailed out more often than the airline industry – with our money! Your elected politicians give away our money to an industry who can’t be bothered to maintain their own reserve fund, despite knowing they will fail once every 10-years or so!
They treat us, passengers, with contempt. We are subhuman. Our personal space, comfort, our time — they don’t give a flying (no pun) fμck: * Seats don’t lean back like they used to? Fμck you, sit upright like cargo while we cram in another row and charge you more for it.
* There’s barely any legroom anymore? Fμck you, wedge your knees into the seat in front of you so we can pack the plane tighter.
You want to sit next to your own family? Fμck you, pay up or watch your kid sit next to a stranger.
You thought buying a ticket meant you had a seat? Fμck you, we sold it twice, now beg at the gate for a voucher.
Your flight got canceled? Fμck you, sleep on the floor and figure out your own way home.
You think checking a bag is included? Fμck you, that’s a privilege now, open your wallet.
You thought your miles were worth something? Fμck you, we gutted their value overnight.
You want your money back for a canceled flight? Fμck you, take a credit with an expiration date.
Want to change your ticket? Fμck you. Non-refundable.
Want a refundable ticket? Fμck you! Four-times as much!
You want to talk to a real person for help? Fμck you, scream into a bot or rot on hold.
Your luggage didn’t show up? Fμck you, suck it, we’ll toss you pennies for your stuff and call it even.
Clean planes? Fμck you – we now offer you bed bug bites and you have to litigate against us to get compensated for your suffering:
There’s a shoulder-length veterinary glove — the kind used by vets and farmers to reach deep inside large animals like cows for rectal exams or calving — thick plastic that runs all the way up to a grown man’s shoulder. And there’s a bucket of lube sitting right next to it, ready to coat that glove, just waiting for the airline industry to bend over.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfZiAiYNcI8
I don’t know how it will come to pass. I don’t know what innovator or invention finally breaks it. But it won’t be another airline pretending to be slightly better. It’ll be something that goes around you entirely. Maybe it’s a network of bullet trains, underground (Hey Elon! @boringcompany?) or above ground, ripping city to city at 200 miles an hour. Maybe it’s trains floating on magnets, silent, fast, on time, every time (ever been to Japan?). Maybe it’s point-to-point vertical launch aircraft that never touch your miserable hubs. Maybe it’s private terminals where you walk in and you’re on the plane in ten minutes. Maybe it’s something none of us see yet. Teleportation? It doesn’t matter. It just has to work. It just has to treat people like human beings instead of cargo.
And when it hits, when people finally have a clean way out, nobody is going to hesitate. Not one person is going to cling to their miles, their status, their little plastic card. They’re gone. And when the executives are sitting there watching it unravel, watching their stock bleed out and their options turn to dust, there won’t be sympathy. There won’t be patience. There won’t be understanding. Because fμck you. You built this. You earned this. And people are just waiting for the day they can walk away and not look back.And just to remind people of what shitbags you are, in your hearts, just to punctuate the moment of your demise, I bring back an oldie but a goodie. A song that defined the term “protest song.”
Years ago, long before all the airlines uniformly sucked donkey dick collectively, airlines still maintained the patina of respectability. It was a facade, of course. They hated their customers then as they do now, and every so often, they’d peek out from behind the curtain of their disdain for their customers and remind us of how badly they sucked. And it took a songwriter to give them some comeuppance.
This song was written by a Canadian songwriter, Dave Carroll, in 2009. After traveling to a concert and watching the United Airlines ground crews literally throwing his guitars around on the tarmac, breaking his $3,500 Taylor guitar (and presumably his band’s other instruments) at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, and getting no help whatsoever from the airline (as remains a typical customer service experience to this day), he wrote a song and it went viral. United Airlines decided it would help him, only after the song went viral and embarrassed their airline to the point that it might affect their stock price. The moment was such a cultural touchstone it earned its own Wikipedia entry:
The song was so good, and the story so relatable, it exploded—30 million views on YouTube, another million-plus streams on Spotify. It didn’t just get attention, it stuck. It took a working musician and put him on the map in a way no label, no marketing plan ever could. And yeah, that song probably still closes his set. Not as a novelty—but because everyone in the room knows exactly what it feels like: everybody’s been fμck ed by an airline. It’s a right of passage? Travel by air? You’ve been fμck ed.
Would that kind of traction happen if he wrote his song about a bad meal at a restaurant? A hopelessly miserable brand of lawnmower? Of course not. It hit because everyone’s been fμcked by an airline. Everyone’s felt that mix of helplessness and rage when there’s nobody to fix it, nobody accountable, and nowhere else turn to. That’s why it spread. Not because it was clever. Because it was true. Because airlines suck, legitimately. Assertively.
And the industry keeps pushing it. Worse seats, worse service, more fees, less accountability. They act like you’ve got no options, and for now, they’re mostly right. You’re funneled through the same airports, the same systems, the same indifferent machine that knows you’ll be back because you have to be.
Doesn’t matter what it is. It just has to be better. And once it exists, people are gone. No loyalty. No hesitation. No nostalgia for miles or status.
And when that day comes—when the numbers drop, the routes shrink, the whole thing starts to crack—don’t expect sympathy. Don’t expect anyone to call it unfair. You built this system. You trained people to hate you. You earned every bit of it.
So yeah. For your viewing pleasure—and maybe a preview of what it looks like when one small piece of that frustration finally boiled over—here’s “United Breaks Guitars” by Canadian singer-songwriter Dave Carroll:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo
Thank you, Dave Carroll, for putting voice to our pain. God Bless your songwriting talents. I know you’re a Canadian so you probably won’t like all my swearing. But my vitriol and curses are as authentic as your lyrics. Fist up the ass for all airline executives.