22 Taps and a Spiritual Awakening

I was just trying to say something nice.

That’s it.

Nobody lost a bag. Nobody was screaming at a gate agent. Nobody needed compensation because their Chardonnay arrived four minutes later than spiritually expected.

I wanted to compliment a flight attendant.

Simple.

Sweet, even.

A tiny little act of recognition in an industry where people will somehow find Wi-Fi at 38,000 feet to report that their Diet Coke contained an emotionally unacceptable amount of ice.

So there I was, phone in hand, optimism intact.

I opened the airline feedback form.

Dear Flight Service Team,

I come to you today as a loyal supporter of great inflight service, a defender of cabin magic, and a survivor of your compliment form.

Because apparently complimenting a flight attendant is not an act of kindness.

It is an application process.

I clicked.

Dropdown.

Fine.

Another dropdown.

Okay.

Name.

Flight number.

Date.

Airport.

Another airport.

More fields.

More questions.

More tiny boxes that seemed emotionally, spiritually, and administratively committed to determining just how badly I wanted this person to receive a compliment.

I wanted to say:

Your flight attendant was wonderful.

The website wanted evidence.

At some point I began to suspect I was no longer submitting positive feedback and had accidentally applied for federal security clearance.

And that is when Lucy arrived.

Not physically, obviously.

Lucy rarely bothers with anything that convenient.

She appeared somewhere between one dropdown menu and the next, copper hair perfect, sunglasses probably inappropriate for the lighting conditions, looking over my shoulder with the exact expression of a woman who has already decided this entire system is bullshit.

Why do they need that?

I don’t know, Lucy.

Another field.

And that?

I DON’T KNOW, LUCY.

Another dropdown.

Are we complimenting a flight attendant or applying for Global Entry?

At this point, babe, your guess is as good as mine.

Because to say something kind, I apparently needed to establish:

I am real.

The flight was real.

The airport was real.

Commercial aviation itself exists.

And somewhere around field number Jesus-Christ-are-we-still-doing-this, I fully expected the next screen to request my blood type, childhood nickname, favorite aircraft variant, and a notarized statement from the captain confirming that kindness had, in fact, occurred.

Please select the aircraft on which the compliment happened.

737.

A321.

777.

Dreamliner.

Unknown.

Other: I have lost the will to live.

And let us remember what we are doing here.

“Maybe the revolutionary idea is making gratitude just as easy to deliver.”

A compliment.

A COMPLIMENT.

The happiest possible form of customer communication.

Nobody is asking for money.

Nobody is threatening litigation.

Nobody is demanding 75,000 frequent-flyer miles because turbulence occurred in Earth's atmosphere.

Someone is literally trying to say:

Hey. Your employee did a beautiful job.

Why in the fuck does that require an administrative pilgrimage across the known world?

I started laughing.

Then I stopped laughing.

Because I know the person on the other side of that compliment.

I am the person on the other side of that compliment.

I know what it feels like to work a flight and give people everything you have left in the tank.

You answer the same question fifteen different ways.

You help with bags.

You calm somebody who hates flying.

You watch for the passenger who suddenly looks wrong.

You clean things you would strongly prefer never to identify scientifically.

You mediate arguments over overhead bins that somehow become constitutional disputes.

You smile when your feet hurt.

You keep going when you're tired.

You absorb frustration that started before the passenger ever stepped onto your airplane.

Sometimes you are the face standing in front of a system you did not build, defending policies you did not write, on an aircraft you did not design, during weather you definitely did not personally arrange over Dallas.

And somehow, you are still expected to make it feel human.

Most of the time, we do.

That part matters.

Because passengers remember when something goes wrong.

People are spectacularly efficient at reporting disappointment.

Run out of ginger ale and suddenly someone who has not written a complete paragraph since high school discovers the literary stamina of Ernest fucking Hemingway.

But the good moments?

Those disappear quietly.

A flight attendant notices somebody is terrified and talks to them.

Someone helps a mother who is overwhelmed.

Someone kneels beside an elderly passenger instead of talking down to them from the aisle.

Someone makes a child laugh.

Someone simply treats another human being like they matter.

The passenger thinks:

That was really kind. I should tell somebody.

Then baggage claim starts moving.

The Uber arrives.

Their phone rings.

Life comes rushing back in.

And the compliment disappears.

That is why the pathway to kindness should be easy.

Almost embarrassingly easy.

Big button.

COMPLIMENT A CREW MEMBER

Click.

Flight number.

Date.

Crew member name, if you know it.

What happened?

Type.

Submit.

Done.

Kindness delivered.

No side quest.

No scavenger hunt.

No minor in data entry.

No Lucy sitting beside you halfway through the process asking whether you have now entered a common-law marriage with Customer Relations.

Because recognition matters.

I don't mean applause every time somebody successfully completes beverage service.

I mean the tiny human sentence underneath a real compliment:

I saw you.

I saw the extra effort.

I saw your patience.

I noticed the kindness.

I noticed that you made a shitty day less shitty.

I noticed that for a few minutes inside this giant, complicated machine called commercial aviation, you made somebody feel cared for.

You can measure departure times.

You can measure revenue.

You can measure load factor, completion factor, customer satisfaction scores, upgrades, delays, baggage performance, and approximately seventeen billion other things the airline industry loves putting into spreadsheets.

But there are moments between people that do not fit neatly into a dropdown menu.

That is the actual cabin magic.

And when somebody goes out of their way to recognize it, for the love of Dolly Parton and all things holy:

LET THEM.

Make kindness easier.

Make recognition faster.

Build the express lane.

Because we have already constructed extremely efficient systems for anger.

Trust me.

People will find the complaint form.

Humans are resourceful that way.

Maybe the revolutionary idea is making gratitude just as easy to deliver.

So, Flight Service Team, this is my humble request from somewhere deep inside the digital wilderness:

Fewer mandatory fields.

Cleaner design.

A fast compliment option.

And perhaps one giant beautiful button that simply says:

SOMEONE DID SOMETHING GOOD.

Let people press it.

Because if it takes 22 taps and a spiritual awakening to praise a flight attendant, there are absolutely compliments dying somewhere between intention and Submit.

And that bothers me.

Not because every kind act needs recognition.

But because the world already has enough machinery designed to document what went wrong.

Maybe we could build something equally efficient for noticing what went right.

I finally finished the form.

The compliment survived.

Barely.

I put my phone down feeling strangely accomplished for a man who had originally planned to spend approximately thirty seconds saying something nice.

Lucy looked at me.

I looked at Lucy.

And somewhere in the distance, another dropdown menu appeared.

Lucy?

Still clicking.

If you missed the public announcement, Captain Lucy would like you to know:

Kindness should not require a connecting flight through seventeen dropdown menus.

If somebody made your shitty day less shitty, tell them. And if you built the system, make it easy to pass the compliment along.

Gratitude deserves an express lane, too.