Where’s our apology, LIAT?
Apparently, the Caribbean airline LIAT has not learned its lesson about complaints. LIAT CEO Ian Brunton responded this week to a satirical complaint letter that was published in the Beacon before going viral. In a Monday statement, Mr. Brunton assured travellers that LIAT had phoned the letter writer, Arthur Hicks, in order to make amends. This was well and good. However, Mr. Brunton also incorrectly implied that the Beacon had taken the letter directly off of Facebook. Actually, Mr. Hicks submitted the letter to this newspaper for publication. The Beacon is not in the habit of pulling its letters to the editor off the Internet, and Beaconites felt that Mr. Brunton’s implication reflected poorly on their professionalism. So a Beaconite e-mailed Desmond Brown, LIAT’s head of corporate communications, asking him to correct the mistake. That was on Monday. As of deadline yesterday, Mr. Brown had not responded, in spite of a follow-up e-mail on Tuesday to him and three other LIAT corporate e-mail addresses — including the company’s “customer relations” address. Beaconites find LIAT’s silence unfortunate, especially considering its claim to take complaints seriously.
Successful passage
A Beaconite would like to provide a follow-up for readers interested in the fate of two sailors featured in a recent Beacon article who set off on a journey to Florida in a 37-foot Cariacou sloop on June 23: They made it. Beaconites got word that Denis Dowling and Dov Klein successfully reached West Palm Beach about ten days after setting off, and they would like to extend a heartfelt congratulations.
Late start
After praising the organisers of Summer Sizzle BVI for their record of starting events on time, a Beaconite was disappointed during a fashion show on Saturday. The event, which was scheduled to begin at 7 p.m., started almost two hours late. Though patrons were kept busy with cocktails and music, the reporter thinks that in the future she might want to hold off on praising organisers until after the show. She may have jinxed their good record in her Reporter’s Notebook item of last week.
In front of the camera
A Beaconite got a view of herself on the other side of the camera when she received a short stack of photos from a reader who often snaps the reporter’s picture while she is out on assignment. The reporter won’t be sharing a majority of the photos, but as she finds is often the case on many of her own assignments, some shots stood out for telling a particular story. In one, for example, the Beaconite is kneeling on the grass and leaning back snapping a picture. The reporter can recall well what the photo doesn’t show: her subject for that photo. It was a model of the cruise ship pier expansion as it was proposed back in June 2012. Getting low was necessary for the Beaconite to capture both the model and a pair of men looking at it. Although the reporter appreciates a bit of visual documentation of the work she does, she’s still more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it.
Personable lemurs
Just like people, some lemurs are bolder than others. They show less fear than other shier members of the same species when under stress or when introduced to new foods. And while those behaviours are usually written off as quirks of the individual animals, one researcher at the Duke Lemur Centre believes that she’s found evidence that lemurs have identifiable personality traits. A study of grey mouse lemurs recently conducted by Jennifer Verdolin, a researcher at the centre, introduced new objects such as a tiny chair, a wooden ladybug and a toy frog into the cages of a group of lemurs. She noted that several of the lemurs became more agitated, while others — the bolder lemurs — didn’t urinate, protest or bite, according to an article about Ms. Verdolin’s research published by the magazine National Geographic. The systematic reactions studied showed evidence of personality traits that the researcher speculates may be passed down in lemur families. Members of the grey mouse species are considerably smaller than the ring-tailed lemurs and other species that Virgin Islands’ resident Sir Richard Branson has on Necker Island, but a Beaconite wonders if Sir Richard has seen evidence of personalities in his lemurs too.
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