One bad apple doesn’t spoil the whole group of airport workers

Let’s back up.

On April 30, I went to pick up my dad from McCarran International Airport as he returned from his 60th reunion at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md.

I parked in short-term parking and waited in the baggage claim area. After collecting his bag, we went to pay, but my parking ticket kept popping out of the machine.

After several tries, a male parking attendant saw my struggles, and he tried another machine. No luck. I had a malfunctioning ticket.

He told me where to go so I could deal with a live parking attendant at the exit gate. I thought it was admirable he didn’t just watch me struggle with the ticket but actually helped me.

That changed at the exit gate. When I explained what happened, the female parking attendant spent some time fiddling with it, trying to get the ticket to work. Then she needed my license plate and ambled around to get the information. We were at the exit gate a few minutes but had spent at least five minutes upstairs trying to pay and then leaving the garage.

I had money to pay her when she announced it had been one hour and one minute and would be $4 because of the extra minute, rather than $3 for the first hour.

I mentioned that more than one minute had been taken up trying to find out how much to pay, then I asked whether she had discretion to waive the extra dollar.

Her nonresponse? The aforementioned contemptuous shrug.

Now, the $1 didn’t break the bank. But I was infuriated by the rude treatment, the question of fairness and worst of all, her refusal to answer a yes-or-no question.

She didn’t say she didn’t have discretion because that would have been a lie.

But she didn’t say she did. She delivered The Shrug.

Parking attendants don’t have exciting jobs. The salary range starts at $28,204 a year and peaks at $43,680. It’s a union job with decent benefits.

In my business, if someone doesn’t answer a relatively simple question, I get the answer elsewhere.

After all, I can’t be the only person who was charged $1 for one extra minute when it was not the person’s fault.

So I called and asked to speak to a parking manager.

I explained to the parking shift supervisor what had happened, and she politely answered my question, without knowing I was a columnist.

Yes, the parking attendant does have limited discretion, especially when the extra time is not a person’s fault but the airport’s.

The parking attendant cannot override a ticket, but she could have called a manager, who could have handled it in about three minutes from the office. That’s not long, unless you’re in the car behind.

“No one should expect to be treated like that,” she told me, saying the magic words that made everything OK.

It would be easy to rant about county union employees who have job security and treat the public like dirt. But I was treated professionally by two airport parking employees and rudely by only one. Actually, she is the first airport parking attendant who has been rude to me, not a bad record.

I won’t let one person taint an entire group of people, whether it’s people working for the county airport, TSA, U.S. Customs, or the parking attendants who shoo people away from parking in the passenger pickup area.

There are good ones and bad ones, and inevitably the bad ones with attitude get more negative press than the good ones.

And they bring it upon themselves.

Jane Ann Morrison’s column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. Email her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call her at (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/Morrison