no free lunch

When working in a call center a sense of humor is mandatory. This might not seem evident when you call us but that's mainly because we're laughing at you, not with you.

One of my pet peeves is the "voluntary upgraders". These are those who believe due to their "special" circumstance that they are elligible for a free upgrade to business class. There seems to be this sense that as an airline we are obliged to give these upgrades.

Let me clear this one up here and now: the only time an airline will ever offer and upgrade is when we f*cked up, badly, and its a last ditch effort to save our asses.

So the ""voluntary upgraders" call and assault us with a variety of reasons why we must upgrade them. My personal favourites include:
But my children are in economy (WTF, they're your children you should suffer along with everyone else.)
My wife has her period (Yes really, men actual say this)
I have fear of flying (Shame. So its less like flying in Business? Are we forcing you to fly?)
I broke my leg (We get this a lot as we in a Ski-ing destination. Did we break you leg? Did we send your clumsy ass ski-ing and not buy insurance?)
I have DVT (This has become widely poplar for every favour under the sun. Hello people the cabin pressure is really the same in all cabins! They ride this one until informed that passengers with medical conditions require clearance and may be denied boarding at which point they miraculously recover.)
I have back problems (These are my personal favourites. We do not cause your back problem. The size of the seat in Economy has not changed since you reserved it. If you are in so much pain that you can not fly why did you book a ticket? )

When declined the upgraders the next question, accompained by much sighing and pouting, is Well what about an emergency exit seat? People seem to completely overlook the emergency part of the emergency exit row.

Imagine for second if an emergency actually occurred: the lights flicker, turbulance rocks the plane, smoke begins to fill the cabin, the aircraft slams into the runway screeching to a halt.
Now imagine if we'd seated the guy with the broken leg complete with crutches, the lady with the twins who needed space for her baby car seat (in her dreams) and the elderly gentleman with the cronic back pain in this row. Passengers race down the aisle toward to emergency exit in a desperate bid to escape. Broken leg guy struggles out of seats flingling his cruches about in an obscene dance in a vain attempt to reach the exit clubbing various passengers in the progress. Old guy is unable to get up at all and it blocking exit and mum is manhandling the twins while trying to avoid the flying crutches and get to the door. See any of these 3 candidates ablely assisting the other passengers to exit the aircraft? See any of them even managing to open the door?

So no - under no circumstance will we upgrade you to business class - unless it is to our benefit.
And the emergency exit rows are actually really important in case of emergency and are not there for the comfort and convienience of the fat, tall, broken, paining or overloaded passengers.