The lighter side of customer opinion: Just what questions did they ask?

Remember those cartoons in Gary Larson’s “The Far Side” with one panel labeled “What We Say to Our Dogs” followed by “What Our Dogs Hear”? Maybe this is a little like that.

Or maybe it’s more like one of those workplace staff meetings where management supposedly listens to staffers’ ideas and concerns, then sends out a memo summarizing what management pretends to believe it just heard. (Or maybe things like that don’t happen where you work … but never mind.)

Anyway, two major American commercial institutions have recently reported on what are supposedly major concerns of their customers. And they probably are. Whether they are the ones those customers would put at the top of their own lists, given the choice, is another matter.

The first of those institutions is the U.S. airline industry. According to an October survey of more than 10,000 travelers by the International Air Transport Association, an industry group, the biggest “pain points” of air travel include the “intrusiveness of having to remove personal items,” unpacking electronic devices, and other security screening measures.

Those are inconvenient and time-consuming processes indeed. But those are post-9/11 realities to which most air travelers have surely adapted.

Is the stuff that happens before you get on the plane really the biggest “pain point” of commercial air travel? Did the misery of being packed into stiflingly hot, cramped cabins, shoehorned into seats that would make a Mercury astronaut claustrophobic, pop up anywhere on those surveys? Just asking.

The other aforementioned American institution is baseball, which is looking — supposedly in response to fans — for ways to speed up the games, which this past season averaged more than three hours. (Most serious baseball fans would likely point out that the length of a game and the pace of a game are two different things … but never mind.)

Among the ideas, and they’re not bad ones, are limiting catchers’ trips to the mound and using a pitch clock. (One of baseball’s distinctive charms as a sport is that it doesn’t have a clock … but never mind.)

Meanwhile, the single worst intrusion that brings even the fastest-paced game to a screeching, grinding and often interminable halt isn’t mentioned — baseball’s abysmal version of “instant” replay, which requires the umpiring crew to leave the field, link up on headsets with people watching screens in New York (yes, New York), and wait for ridiculous stretches of time for a ruling on safe or out, fair or foul, caught or trapped, home run or ground-rule double. A replay clock might speed up games at least as much as a pitch clock … but never mind.

There’s no reason to think the answers and opinions attributed to air travelers in the first instance, and baseball fans in the second, are anything other than what the airline industry and Major League Baseball, respectively, say they are. Still, what exactly were the questions?

This story was originally published November 15, 2017 at 4:41 PM with the headline "The lighter side of customer opinion: Just what questions did they ask?."