I was stranded by Southwest on December 21 and have yet to have them acknowledge any of my requests for reimbursement for extra expenses incurred, let alone process those requests. It was past midnight when our flight was canceled after three hours of delay after delay. The Southwest gate agent was rude and remarkably defensive throughout the process — her tone and actions made it clear that there has been a cultural breakdown at Southwest. They no longer treat their employees well, and those employees have either stopped showing up to work (as was the case for the ground crew in our situation), or are just going through the motions.The blame for all of this lies squarely with Southwest's senior leadership. The have been practicing "strategic incompetence" — delaying critical infrastructure investments in the name of boosting quarterly profits. And an inbred board of directors has given all of this their blessing.A new management team and board needs to be put in place. Secretary Buttigieg in what is clearly a failure of the marketplace. This team of people should not be allowed to claim lavish salary and equity rewards when so many people like me are out hundreds (even thousands) of dollars, let alone the misery of wandering a closed down airport at 2am in search of a power plug in order to charge one's phone with enough juice to be able to call an Uber charging 1.5x surge pricing to drive you back to your relative's house in a -10F blizzard.

I was stranded by Southwest on December 21 and have yet to have them acknowledge any of my requests for reimbursement for extra expenses incurred, let alone process those requests. It was past midnight when our flight was canceled after three hours of delay after delay. The Southwest gate agent was rude and remarkably defensive throughout the process — her tone and actions made it clear that there has been a cultural breakdown at Southwest. They no longer treat their employees well, and those employees have either stopped showing up to work (as was the case for the ground crew in our situation), or are just going through the motions.The blame for all of this lies squarely with Southwest's senior leadership. The have been practicing "strategic incompetence" — delaying critical infrastructure investments in the name of boosting quarterly profits. And an inbred board of directors has given all of this their blessing.A new management team and board needs to be put in place. Secretary Buttigieg in what is clearly a failure of the marketplace. This team of people should not be allowed to claim lavish salary and equity rewards when so many people like me are out hundreds (even thousands) of dollars, let alone the misery of wandering a closed down airport at 2am in search of a power plug in order to charge one's phone with enough juice to be able to call an Uber charging 1.5x surge pricing to drive you back to your relative's house in a -10F blizzard.

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