Dear Equifax. Yours, United Airlines

It looks like a bunch of canceled flights, doesn’t it?

CREDIT: Getty Images

Absurdly Driven looks at the world of business with a skeptical eye and a firmly rooted tongue in cheek.

Hey there, Richard F. Smith, Chairman and CEO of Equifax.

Oscar Muñoz here.

Remember me? I’m the CEO of United Airlines. Yes, still. Can you believe it?

I hear you’re having a few difficulties. Something to do with allowing hackers to steal the personal data of 143 million people.

Maybe that doesn’t seem quite as bad to you as getting cops to drag a passenger down the aisle of a plane because he didn’t want to get bumped.

(Boy, did we bump him. Face as bloody as Conor McGregor’s.)

But, you know, I thought I’d write to tell you that you guys aren’t looking too good right now.

I know the feeling. I learned the hard way.

You see, at first I blamed the passenger. I told my staff they’d done nothing wrong.

The lawyers thought it was a good idea. Then I went on TV and made things worse. Why, even competitors were laughing at me.

Look, I don’t mean to tell you what to do. But I will tell you that, right now, you’re coming across as some of the most ignorant, arrogant numbskulls since, well, since me.

I can’t believe you would actually charge people to have their credit files frozen when you were actually responsible for their data being stolen.

And if I can’t believe it, just imagine what someone who isn’t running a nickel-and-diming, money-grabbing, oligopoloy-loving airline must feel.

I know many of these people aren’t technically your customers. You just take their data and make money out of it.

But even that millennial whose face rarely moves — the one who runs Facebook — wouldn’t be quite so thoughtless, witless and heartless.

I mention heartless, because our heartlessness cost us a lot. We came across as plain inhuman.

(Well, we’d also launched Basic Economy, or, as we like to call it internally: Worst Class.)

Even when we tried to clean up the mess — the blood took a lot of shifting — we became the poster people for, well, hating people.

Customers — and those conscience-free heavy drinking perverts in the media — went out of their way not only to catch us out behaving badly, but to film us so that we couldn’t deny it.

At some point, you see, people get mean right back. I mean, they don’t even love our Worst Class.

Now I know you don’t really care too much about that. Well, you don’t seem to.

Why, I hear your Dann Adams just told that nice and clever Ron Lieber of the New York Times that he was thinking about changing his subscription from the Times to the Washington Post.

And all Lieber had done was ask him good questions.

Not funny, Richard.

Dann Adams is president of global consumer solutions. Arrogance isn’t a solution. Ask anyone globally. Ask me how it felt.

You guys have got no excuses. We didn’t have any either. But you’ve had months to prepare for this and you’ve done nothing.

You haven’t prepared your people. You haven’t even prepared your systems for, you know, people calling and maybe getting mad.

At some point, you’re just going to become hated. Actually, I fear it’s happened already.

Once you get hated, you’ll get probed. We’re getting difficult questions from Congress, you know. They usually don’t know anything. They all fly First Class, after all.

And once you get probed, well, you ever had hemorrhoids?

I suspect you think you can just ride out the turbulence and get on with doing exactly what you were doing before.

But it might not work out that way, Richard. I just wanted to warn you.

Best,

Oscar.

PS. Was my data stolen? I’m having trouble finding out.