Northwest Airlines

Airline companies are perennial punching bags for customer complaints. And for good reason: Virtually without exception, they’re all horrid—at least at times. One needn’t expect the royal treatment to be irked by the sort of paltry service these companies offer their patrons.

Accordingly, dear reader, it’s more than a tad obvious to rip on Northwest Airlines. We mean, come on: It’s an airline, isn’t it? You shouldn’t expect it to be good. In fact, it’s kind of like Ike Turner: It ain’t exactly a news flash when it treats you badly.

If you ask us, excoriating an airline is about as lame as discussing the traffic in Los Angeles. We know, we know—it’s bad, right? Gee, thanks.
But, frankly, dear reader, we just can’t stop ourselves. Having recently embarked on a few Northwest flights, we simply must discuss the horrors we’ve encountered. Think of it as a kind of e-therapy—“weblogging” that may keep us sane.

What, you may reasonably be asking yourself, makes Northwest a cut below the rest in the world of air travel?

Well, we suppose there are many answers to that fine query, but we’ll manage to mention a few. Simply put, Northwest does just about everything wrong.
Here’s an example: Whereas other airlines offer you a paltry snack—say, a miniscule bag of ultra-salty peanuts—Northwest offers food for sale. Two bucks for a mini-can of Pringles, for crying out loud. And, naturally, the flight attendants never have change, which invariably means that you must bring exactly two single dollar bills with you to get your hands on those wretched Pringles.

To make matters worse, Northwest offers you too much to drink: A full can of soda or juice. You’ve got to spend three hours on a flight to Dubuque, you haven’t been served any food, and they thrust a full can of Mountain Dew at you. All this accomplishes is the establishment of an extremely long line to the bathroom at the back of the plane.

Then there’s the trifling matter of flight delays. Sure, darn near every airline is king of aviary postponement. But Northwest seems to go that extra mile (if you will) to ensure that your trip is later than it should be.

But that’s not all. Not only is your flight ineluctably late; the folks at Northwest also routinely lie to you about the time involved in a given delay. When your 4:00 pm flight is delayed to 4:30, there’s a darn good chance that you won’t take off until somewhere around 6:30. After three gate changes, naturally.

For these and many other reasons, we, the crack young staff of “The Hatemonger’s Quarterly,” solemnly believe that Northwest is amongst the very worst in a solidly disappointing field of competition. As far as we can intuit, the only benefit of Northwest is the name of its “website”: To old-school folks like ourselves, nwa.com conjures up images of a rather foul-mouthed rap group.

And the idea of flying with Niggas’ With Attitude Airlines is pretty funny to us.