Wednesday, January 17, 2018

SkyWest: A Story of Malicious Identity Theft

Not to get all Oprah on you, but my favorite thing in the entire world is that people think Skylar is SkyWest (the airline) on Instagram because his handle is @skywest.

Let's all take one quick moment of silence for the airline, who couldn't get their crap together enough to secure a handle from someone who had exactly 387 followers at the time of this writing.

Because people think Skylar is the airline, pretty regularly he gets tagged in posts from people complaining about flight delays, poor customer service, or just including pictures of airplanes and thanking SkyWest for making their upcoming trip possible.

He feels it his sacred duty to respond to at least some of these, lamenting on occasion that "not once" has the airline paid him for his services.

I don't know the fair market value of these "services," considering that the majority of his responses to people's inquiries just look like this:





And before you go on feeling bad for these poor customers, everybody knows that Instagram is not the social media platform to complain to a company about a bad experience. Instagram is for posting naked pictures of your body with a fake quote from Martin Luther King Jr. so your followers will know you're like totes woke.

A while ago Skylar got tagged in something or other and so, although I was coming in and out of naps and in a half-stupor on the couch, I took his phone and responded for him. I have almost zero memory of this, now several months later, but just this morning I was looking for a picture on my phone and I came across the below screenshot, which Skylar later texted to me when he saw the comment.

A woman posted a photo of herself with a friend on a plane and wrote about what a fun trip they had.


The point is, kids used to listen to their parents.

~It Just Gets Stranger

17 comments:

  1. Please get more screen caps like this. Just pretty much people complaining about their flights and Skylar responding "Vroooooooooooooom!". At least one a day. Thanks in advance.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Can I follow Skylar on instagram?! #skylarismyfavorite

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hysterical laughter!!! Vrroooooommm

    ReplyDelete
  4. Now every time someone near me complains about anything I'm just going to scream "VRRRRRROOOOOMMMM!!!"

    ReplyDelete
  5. I sent this to everyone I know who works for SkyWest. We all need a chuckle. :)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Skylar has one more follower now.

    ReplyDelete
  7. I wish you had a search feature on your blog. You still use the blogger platform, right? I know they have a widget for being able to search for words within blog posts. I really want to reread your other post where you mentioned the SkyWest handle, but I don't want to look through the 76 posts you've tagged has mentioning Skylar. Because lazy.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. You can search at the top left.

      I thought I had written about this before but when I searched Stranger for any mention of it, I couldn't find any other post. So maybe you and I are both having the same trippy memory?

      Delete
    2. Because lazy and tv and probably food.

      Delete
    3. I also remembered you talking about this before. Now i have to clear my schedule of laziness and tv and search the whole internet’s for an answer.

      Delete
    4. Maybe I posted about it on the FB page once?

      Delete
    5. Ooooooh, thank you. I thought that search bar was for all of blogger, but I haven't used it since like 2005, so either I've always been wrong, or its function has changed. Thank you! And sigh. That didn't help me find it. I SWEAR (not that I know any swear words) that you've mentioned it before just in passing. Hmmm . . .

      Delete
    6. You were right! It was on Facebook. I feel relief having found that. I took a screen shot and will email you, in case you are also curious.

      Delete
  8. Michelle - you can use google to search for specific words within a single site by typing in your search term and then site:whateversiteyouaretryingtosearch. For example:
    "Skywest site:itjustgetsstranger.com"

    It only pulled up this one post, though. I also tried looking for "skylar handle" on this site, but it didn't pull up another post about skylar and Skywest, either.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, wow, that is very useful knowledge. Thank you for knowing well the ways of the interwebs.

      Delete
  9. Haven't laughed this hard since the Snuggie texts. And by laughed I mean laughing so hard I almost passed out.

    ReplyDelete