> I’ve been on over 30 flights, and never has a company come close to this.

As some one who has been on over 100 flights in 2012 alone I can tell you that your experience is not unique.

The one factor that I think you are over looking is you need to speak up about things and not have such a passive aggressive attitude.

If the seat sucks, simply find an empty seat somewhere else on the plane.

Good luck with your future flights.

You should have drawn the line with the couple and the baby. If the baby was brought on as a lap-rider, then that's where the baby goes.

Also, I find it somewhat hard to believe the FAs let you stand in the aisle during takeoff and ascent.

Small typo: over 30 flights in the past year. Updated my post.

I thought it would be obvious from it taking forever to place me in a seat, but there weren't any empty seats in sight, at least in that section.

I will definitely keep that in mind though.

Never had this experience on United, before or after Premier status (the latter being much better, obviously). Their customer service should have been more understanding, but if the complaint was in the spirit of the article ("..and this couple sitting next to me kept DRINKING WINE and USING THE BATHROOM!") I could see them perceiving it as a complaint from an unreasonably irate customer. Wasn't there, so I can't say. I can say, however, that pressing the flight attendant button is a better method of getting someone to come back to your seat rather than just waiting and hoping.

Oh I should have clarified. I definitely did not complain about the couple. It wasn't their fault, and it wasn't United's fault.

I did complain however, about their service. I did use the flight attendant button, forgot to include that. But overall, United handled it very poorly.

Fair enough, from everything you've said it sounds like you were in the right. Sorry to hear about the troubles.

> Almost no flight attendants walked by that seat during the whole 15+ hours of the flight, but I got up multiple times to look for an attendant

> The couple beside me ordered wine, and drank for most of the flight

> I won’t even talk about the small “breakfast” they served just before arriving in Sydney.

Given the tone of the blog post and the various offensive remarks strewn through the post, it is likely that the author was being a dick on the plane and was given the broken seat by the flight staff deliberately.

You're making an impermissible correlation. Just because there's an element of vitriol in the author's language, doesn't imply that he wasn't also a victim in his story.

Inferring that the author's language is coarse and therefore he deserved what he got is tantamount to saying that those who aren't well-spoken deserve ill treatment. This is decidedly untrue.

If I seemed offensive and "a dick" in my post, that was certainly not my intention. However, one's poor writing does not necessarily translate directly to real life.

I was calm and polite throughout the trip, but the experience was definitely frustrating, and re-living it through the post brought that out.

I'm sorry about your shitty flight, but this rant does not belong on HN.

I'm surprised they let you sit in a different seat for take off.

I hate that HN is now a stream of crappy "I hate <company du jour>" posts. Ugh.