Capot,
With one already highlighted exception, I have to say that I agree with everything you say. I am not familiar with the circumstances of the topic incident and am only replying in response to your posting.
To get the one exception out of the way first, and in response to the other comments concerning the safety briefing, I would point out the following.
In a serious emergency and consequential "high stress," one of the common "fight or flight" induced responses of the human brain, is to shut off all the deep reasoning and long term memory functions, leaving the person reliant on their basic instinct and their very short term memory. This is evolutionary and essential to our basic survival. In effect the mind trips all the non vital circuit breakers, then brings back online the essential ones in a priority order over a period of time. If that period of time is short then the most likely ones you will have will be ingrained instinctive behaviour and short term memory. Our ancestors had an ingrained and learned blueprint that the Sabre tooth Tiger was a life threatening danger, and they remembered the esacape route as being the recent way they had arrived at that position.
There is a very high incidence of passengers who delay evacuating an aircraft in a high stress emergency, because they cannot undo their seatbelt. For those who watched and noted that part of the safety briefing it should have rooted in the short term memory. For those who rely on the instinctive response, the likely response is to try and undo the seat belt they undo instinctivly every day of their lives. The one in their car and surprise the mechanism is in a different place.
Given time ( and it varies in person to person) the higher reasoning centres will make sense of the confusion although panic may result if the stress level is maintained or as is often the case, increased.
For this reason it is in your best interests to listen and watch the safety briefing no matter how many times you have heard it before. For much the same reasons it is why the pilots also brief and mentally recap the departure and arrival procedures and recall emergency drills for every takeoff and landing.
If you don't want to listen, then nobody can make you, but it is idiotic behaviour, and certainly you should not give the impression that you might impede anybody elses better chances of possible survival.
That said, you are right about the whole mentality and attitude of behaviour in the air transport industry. From a customer service point of view it is often (not always) dire. Unfortunetaly, commercial aviation is a high profile, undoubtably the highest profiled transport industry in the world. It is very labour intensive, has a high turnover of personell and often attracts relatively young and consequentially inexperienced people into front line customer contact positions. When you add to this the levels of customer stress brought about by the poor environmental and information conditions that are prevalant, then there is inevitably going to be conflict. On top of all of this the reactionary legislation and security responses to the high profile terrorism and violence incidents of recent years has simply put the rancid icing on top of a very stale and rotten cake.
Obviously nobody condones violence or threats of violence against any individual, and it is entirely proper that legislation is enforced to deal swiftly with offenders. Likewise security has to be enforced and at this stage probably in dissproportionate measures, to prevent the global threat that has been demonstrated to exist.
The one thing that often seems to be a victim of all this "Brave new world" is simple old fashioned common sense. Flying as a passenger can often be a very unpleasant experience and it is not beyond the realms of reasonable expectation that sometimes people are going to be angry and frustrated. Sometimes people will have forgotten something, turned up late or made some other mistake. There will be times when there is nothing that can be done, and times when a bit of common sense will resolve and diffuse a situation. Don't misunderstand me, in that I know there are people who regularly apply all these attributes, however they are becoming few and far between, and certainly in so far as the general publics perception is concerned.
Yes there are regulations, conditions of carriage, statutes, the air navigation order and its various amendments. These are all there to fall back on if needed, but they are not a universal substitute for good manners and common sense when the application of the latter would negate the implementation and use of the former. If you are in a customer service position you should not for one minute tolerate abuse or threats, however take a reality check on what that actually means. It is not necessarily someone getting annoyed or agitated. It is not necessarily someone who might swear in frustration. It is not someone who might invade your arbitarily defined "space". Likewise someone who ignores the seatbelt sign in desperation of embarrasing themselves may be compromising their own safety, but there are occassions when that may be accomodated. On some airlines the signs are left on for almost the entire the flight. The arguement then is that the passenger has been warned and a legal defence is established. If you are going to do that, then do a P.A to establish the fact. In fact communication with the customers is the one thing that could be easily enhanced and rarely is. Most people are no less annoyed, but much less frustrated and certainly feel more involved, when they are being told and regularly updated on the reason for a delay, or the need for a course of action. With information, people can plan better and to some extent avoid the need for some of these unnecessary conflicts.
Certainly this needs far better management and organisation than currently exists in specific areas of the industry, as well as much better selection and training of candidates for customer orientated positions. Unfortunetaly I think it will be a long time coming !