If you’re going to have a miserable air travel experience—and, thanks to airline consolidation, you are!—at least you can make the best of it by trolling the heck out of the airline’s customer service on social media. A man who says he got “screwed” by United Airlines received some small consolation from a very good Twitter exchange.
United apparently left Sonar Jose in a bad spot, far from his destination and out significant time and money.
Enter Doug Exeter, one of those dudes who primarily uses Twitter for comedy one-liners. Even though his account has nothing at all to do with United Airlines, Doug is a nice guy and happy to help.
This joke tweet is good because it has all the hallmarks of actual Twitter customer service—misspelling the customer’s name, signing off with the employee’s initials—but is obviously very fake. What airline would ask for credit card credentials over Twitter?
Jose, being clever and having nothing better to do now that he was apparently stranded by an airline, decided to play along.
This is an extremely fake credit card number, something United Airlines didn’t bother to check before jumping in to expose Doug as a no-good scammer. Although they’d apparently botched the customer service for Jose’s actual flight, they were definitely going to protect him from this joke. Heroic!
And now that Jose had United on the line, he was free to enact his revenge by taking the joke even further.
United, convinced that Jose was an idiot who was not joking, advised him to quit being stupid and cancel the “stolen” card.
Note the different initials on this United tweet. They’ve got two people working hard to stop a fake scammer. Next, Jose tested how absurd he could get before the airline caught on. Here, he threw in a reference to a classic Dril tweet.
Surely, that would give him away?
Nope! Now a third customer service rep was on the case. And Doug was still playing, too:
That’s the fakest card number ever. It’s got all the good internet numbers: the sex number 69, the weed number 420, the boob number 8008, and the historic American tragedy 9/11.
At this point, United finally got the idea and stopped responding. They did, however, ask Jose to rate the service they had provided:
The airline may have failed at the core part of its business—air travel—but Jose rated himself “pretty satisfied” with the Twitter response. Great work, United.
