I’m an IT consultant. Before you ask me the jillion questions about what that means or what I do.. let me stop you because that is a whole other story that I don’t care to get into and what is really relevant is that I travel every week for my job. Every Monday morning I get up (not to mention, prior 5 a.m.), get in a taxi, go through security lines, get on a plane, have a layover, get on another plane, reach my destination, get on a bus to go to Hertz, get in my rental car and drive to work. Then, on Thursday afternoon I do the reverse (minus renting a car) and come home. And then I repeat the following week. This is a lifestyle unique to most which fosters unusual, sometimes wonderful, sometimes stressful, and sometimes downright awful situations. Although my blog post isn’t exactly pertinent if you take the name of this blog literally, because you sure as hell can’t request a stop on a plane and most people don’t consider flying public transportation, it is undeniable that you come across a surplus of interesting people - sometimes taxi drivers, fellow passengers, or flight attendants, just on the short (obvious sarcasm) “commute” to and from work.
As a business traveler, you become very accustomed to the lifestyle and sometimes even snobbish. I smirk when people say “This is the longest I’ve EVER seen the security lines at Austin Bergstrom”, snicker when people don’t know they are supposed to take water out of their bag or their shoes off before crossing through security, and raise my nose as I walk into the priority access security lane. There is also a lingo associated with it and a general competitiveness in chasing after every hotel and airfare point and status level. Think George Clooney’s character from “Up in the Air”. If you aren’t a business traveler, you may look at the lifestyle with intrigue and maybe even envy… In an ideal world it would be all about the free trips and the per diem and, surely, Mr. Right will sit down next to me on a flight and we will laugh and talk about our glamorous lives and live happily ever after. But, in REAL life, there is a crying kid behind me kicking my seat, a fat guy next to me taking up my shoulder space, and I look like shit because of weather changes and dry recycled cabin air. Let me give you a glimpse into the real life. Shall we call it something along the lines of Emergency Landing: The Captain Has Turned on The Fasten Seatbelt Sign or The Un-glamorous Life of a Traveling Consultant or Aches on a Plane (These are getting worse by the second)….?
Oh and I would like to again preface this with the fact that I am an IT consultant with a finance background which means I haven’t taken an English class or written anything beyond a design or requirements document in six years. Be forgiving!
My first (and maybe only ever??) entry is about an event that occurred around a month ago. Boarding my flight to New York in Chicago, I found an aisle seat with enough bin space to hold my suitcase near the front and asked to sit next to an older, seemingly benign, couple, probably in their early to mid-sixties. Everything was “normal” and everyone boarded the plane. The flight attendant went up and down the aisle closing overhead bins and when she got to the bin across from us, it wouldn’t close – my suitcase was part of the issue because someone else who boarded after tried to put their big suitcase up there too. I knew it wouldn’t fit, but resolved to let the flight attendant take care of the shuffling of items. The flight attendant, a younger woman in her early thirties, touched my suitcase and asked who it belonged to and I said it was mine. She looked around and saw that the bin above me and the couple only contained a couple of coats and items that could be shifted to fit my bag. She took a coat out and asked who it belonged to. The man next to me started to stand up and said it was his wife’s and this is where it started to veer from normalcy. He grabbed the coat from the flight attendant and asked her not to touch his coat and said he would get it himself. He basically told her she would mess it up and get it dirty and started to go off about how him and his wife just saw the luggage that they checked get terribly damaged while looking out the window of the plane. First off, to be clear, neither of their coats looked like anything fancy or special, but you would have thought they were family heirlooms. Second off, it is protocol on Southwest flights that small items go under your seat and jackets should be held in your lap in an effort to fit everyone’s larger carry ons and roller bags. It really is what makes the most sense. In a normal world with normal people, the situation would have been over and the couple could have held their coats in their laps and we all could have gone on our merry way. But that would have been too easy.
I mean, having to hold their coats really put a kink in this couple’s day. They couldn’t let it go and really needed to fixate on this and started to work each other up. They went back and forth about it for a few minutes.. how ridiculous it was since they had paid an extra $10 for the early bird fare so they could have that bin space and then lesser deserving minions (I’m paraphrasing) took what they had paid for.. he even inspected her jacket and asked her if it was okay or if they got anything on it. Although he had been somewhat difficult when dealing with the previous flight attendant, the man took it up a notch, and as another male flight attendant walked past, he grabbed his attention and said “Can I ask you something?” and started to go on about the same stuff him and his wife had just been discussing about how ridiculous all of this was. You could tell he expected the male flight attendant to take his side on the issue and apologize for the other flight attendant’s behavior, but he said the same thing she did about the flight’s protocol and said he was sorry for the inconvenience. Meanwhile I think the older man’s wife was turned on by it all…I mean she seemed to have provoked the incident by fueling his anger in the first place. This was clearly a match made in Hell.
THEN the female flight attendant from before came up and said “This is the couple who gave me attitude before” and the man next to me said “Oh no you don’t.. she’s the one who got all snappy with me” and then I can’t even remember what happened in between but he raised his voice and said “You guys are just HORRIBLE” and said a few expletives. The whole situation was very uncomfortable for me, as I look down at my book careful not to laugh (church giggles, some call them) or try to give a look of favor to either party. Unfortunately, and my main problem in most situations, is that on a plane you can’t remove yourself from the situation and I was literally in the middle of all of this. Moments pass and it feels like we should be taking off, then another man in a uniform gets on and walks back to our row and asks the man next to me if there is a problem. All of a sudden he is very obedient and cooperative, but then starts harping about the damn early bird fare and the mean flight attendants. The uniformed man says he needs to ask the pilot something and when he comes back asks the couple to come with him outside to discuss the situation further. At first they refuse.. the woman says “Oh no, we don’t have time for that,” and a few other things until the uniformed man said, “You both need to come with me or else I will get someone else who will make you come with me”. I got up and they left with their belongings. The situation didn’t really feel dramatic and most other people on the plane probably had no idea what was going on, but my heart was racing and I realized I was incredibly relieved I wasn’t next to that couple anymore. The woman behind me came in my row to get the window seat and we both got free drinks because of the occurrence, and we laughed about it together. They left their camera and we debating taking pictures of ourselves flicking them off, but decided just to turn it in to the flight attendant.. who knows if she actually turned it in? She probably threw it in the trash.
Although those people weren’t straight up looney tunes, it is surprising to see how much people can overreact. Can you imagine getting that angry over everything like that in your day? If that was the worst thing that had happened to them in a while then I envy their lives. Moral of the story: Don’t get sassy with a flight attendant or you will get your ass kicked off a plane. No emergency landing needed here.. Enough drama occurred before the plane even got off the ground.
