Late on Friday Virgin Blue made a lot of their frequent flyer customers very happy when they announced free upgrades to Gold status in the program. And when we say 'a lot', we mean every single person on their frequent flyer database. Oops.
Before their flight lounges were overrun with rabble, within three hours they had rectified the situation with a short, not-so-sweet retraction and apology. Sorry, you're totally not cool enough to be Gold. Bad luck. See you next time. And as a catch all that showed they'd really stuffed up, they apologised for emailing you even though you'd opted out of being contacted via email. (Whether you had or not, they apologised for this anyway).
Naturally, thousands of greedy self-righteous desperados claimed they deserved to be compensated for the error. That somehow they were now so put out by the error that they should get something for free to make up for it.
We'll give the closing words to the amusingly direct commentator Stilgherrian:
"Compensated for being too stupid to realise the email was obviously a mistake? Compensated for having a vastly over-inflated sense of entitlement? Compensated for being so much of a consumer-puppet that you validate yourself by bragging about some confected faux-status symbolised by which colour plastic card sits in your wallet and then being embarrassed because, oh sorry, you're actually still just another cheap-arsed prole after all?"
