Out of the Blue

A friend posted online whether she thought it was wise to book a ticket Rome-London with (the new!) Alitalia. It was posting the best rate. After all, the CAI – Alitalia’s new owners – have been in business for a couple of weeks now, and, the results are in. Just like with their overhaul of the decrepit carrier, she got mixed reactions (and you can take my little poll on the left hand side):

One Brit who has lived here most of her life said, 'Sure, give ‘em a leg up! We should support our national carrier.' An American in the U.S. said, ‘No way’, and someone else said, ‘go for it, even though you may find yourself stranded in one place or the other, how bad can it be?'

Well, I’ve also polled a few people about the results of the Under New Management Alitalia. The answers run the entire gamut from quiet optimism to absolute preposterous:

- One guy was rehired and said it was ‘business as usual’, meaning that nothing had really changed; neither for him nor for the Company. Things were plodding along just as haphazardly as before.

- A friend says people in her toddy neighborhood are now spending the proverbial “time with their kids”. She sees these poor fired souls out and about, worrying about their demise, even though they’re up for 7 years home leave – with pay. They're probably all taking off to trips to the Maldives and Thailand. I wonder if they’re flying Alitalia.
Now wouldn’t that be the world’s great irony? It’s the thousands of laid off workers from Alitalia who are actually gettisoning the revival of Italy’s frail economy?

- And then, there’s a friend’s husband who is counting his lucky stars they don’t have kids. Having filed bankruptcy, he’s one of the stay-at-homes-with-pay until the NewCo. gives him a new contract. Except that the old one finished, the new one hasn’t kicked in, and he has not seen any pay in over 3 months.
Why is that? The slow plodding of bureaucracy? No – as if they hadn’t see it coming (they’d been talking about ditching the Company for the better part of 2 years), someone – somewhere - simply forgot to put in the paperwork. For the thousands of employees.
Adding insult to injury, he got a strange notification in December. His tredicesima extra Christmas payout? No. Because the OldCo. didn’t finish out his year, he actually owes Alitalia money! Needless to say, he is at wit’s end.

You can’t make this stuff up.