OFFICE OF PUBLIC REASSURANCE — INTERNAL DISTRIBUTION
FROM: The Aluminum Lady, Headquarters · Bunni Bells, HQ-DFW Inflight Discipline & Readiness Division
RE: Introducing CARRY — Our New Customer Experience Framework
SATIRE — The CARRY memo below is parody. The real employee scoring program that inspired it is documented here: American Airlines Has a New Acronym. Guess Who It's For.
Hello, faces of the company.
Bunni and I have wrapped up many months of close collaborative strategy sessions, and today we are proud to introduce CARRY, our new customer service framework. A full presentation is available on the portal, where your viewing time and any troubling pauses will be logged for coaching purposes.
CARRY stands for Composed, Accountable, Resilient, Radiant, and Yielding.
Leadership recently completed a thorough review of our operational challenges and the changes required to address them. After careful analysis, we determined that fixing the operation would involve spending money on the operation. That money is spoken for. It supports leadership pay packages and other upwardly flowing funding initiatives. Measuring you, however, is nearly free. We are choosing to let you do the heavy lifting. So rather than restore staffing, schedules, or service, we are proud to introduce a framework that tracks how gracefully you carry it.
We call this precision accountability. It replaces expensive solutions with affordable observation. It was easier. That is why we picked it.
For flight attendants, CARRY comes to life through three key actions:
PERFORM: Deliver warmth at or above your assigned Radiance Baseline, which will be established during your first full year of monitoring. (We’ve already been monitoring you for the last year)
SUSTAIN: Maintain that baseline regardless of staffing levels, delay length, or catering shortfalls. The conditions are not scored. You are.
IMPROVE: Exceed last month’s numbers. Metrics that plateau are flagged for supportive conversation.
No one spends more time with our customers than you do, which makes you the most measurable part of the operation. We could have fixed the operation. We measured you instead. Every interaction now generates a score, and every score lives in your file, where it will provide helpful context during future staffing decisions.
I want to be clear that this expanded visibility is not disciplinary. Discipline is simply one of the many outcomes visibility makes possible.
A note from Bunni Bells:
“Good morning, cabin personnel.
Before joining Flight Service, I spent a decade in the Army enforcing morale across a logistics command of thirty thousand troops, and I want you to know those instincts have not left me. Effective next month, I will be conducting cabin readiness inspections at DFW alongside our new Cabin Sentiment Sensors, which detect smile duration, tone warmth, and unauthorized sighing. You will treat every leg like a deployment: hydrate, stow your feelings, and hold your Radiance Baseline until relieved. If your numbers dip, you will not panic — panic is a scored behavior. You will report to Radiance Recovery, a supportive one-on-one session scheduled at management’s discretion: you may be removed from your trip, or invited in on your scheduled day off, depending on management’s mood that morning. I kept thirty thousand soldiers supplied in a German winter. You can smile through a catering shortfall.
That is all. Carry on — and have a blessed day.”
You’ll soon see more about CARRY through a Crew CARRY video series and a Moments That Are Monitored newsletter, highlighting employees whose scores photograph well. Problems of the operation will not be featured — only the strength of your smile.
These actions aren’t about perfection. They’re about measurement — and measurement lets us manage you, motivate you, and maximize you. Measurement is how management molds you meaningfully. And as long as your metrics trend upward while our investment in you trends downward, we look forward to embedding this logic into every aspect of our operational DNA.
Thank you in advance for your alignment and participation. You are fixing this for us. Your cooperation will be noted. Your hesitation will also be noted. Everything, going forward, will be noted.
Keep climbing,
The Aluminum Lady · Headquarters
Bunni Bells · HQ-DFW, Inflight Discipline & Readiness Division
❤️✈️💋
