Plane from Hell

It was a long and arduous journey back from New York City. (Yes arduous, I looked it up and it is the perfect adjective). I have rambled on before about being spoiled to business or first class seats on a plane. After accumulating two and three quarter million miles and permanent Platinum status on American Airlines alone (not counting the miles on United and Delta) I have earned the right to upgrade when I get the chance. If there is no chance to upgrade I get first choice of exit row seating which is a small advantage over the regular coach seat.

However, nothing is certain and when the carrier needs to change equipment, with different exit seating and fewer upgrade seats you can get stuck in regular coach seat 27B next to an over weight 6 foot 4 guy sitting in 27A and 27A and a half. His love handles and elbows totally obscured the arm rest, leaving me to make do with thee quarters of a seat. Not able to rest my own elbows on anything but his oozing flesh, I crossed my arms and attempted to make myself smaller. Through years of airplane training and meditation techniques, I learned in the 70's, I am able to go to sleep in this position. This could have been the end to this story but the fates were not in agreement.

The guy next to me was a talker. Not a conversationalist, that would imply an interaction or exchange of ideas, he simply talked. He talked about his trip to New York and how he was changing jobs and how he didn't really want to change jobs because he had small children and he was in the financial business and it was hit hard in the last year and the small company he worked for had been taken over by some guy that just wanted to use it as a cash cow and if I ever went to Palos Verdes where he lived I should stop at the resort that he and his wife loved that was build on the site of the old Marineland theme park and it was really wonderful ... At one point I was aware that I had fallen asleep while he was talking to me, but woke up to realize he was on a racist rant about the black lady that had not given him the service at Hertz rental cars that he deserved as a presidential level customer, it was reverse discrimination and he should have sued but he didn't he just never rented a car from them again....

I did actually fall asleep for a while. I woke up enough to notice that he had stopped talking. I didn't open my eyes but pretended to still be sleeping, and eventually fell asleep again. He nudged me awake, I assumed to get up and go to the toilet, but not so... he woke me up to tell me that the John Grisham book he was reading was not his best work and the one he wrote about the court in Mississippi was the best because you know he was a lawyer and he really knows how a court works, that makes him really good at telling those stories.



Years ago I thought about designing a "do not disturb" sign to hang on your ear so that the person next to you on a plane would know that you are not interested in conversation. I'm not sure that would have helped shut this guy up, if he would actually wake a person up to talk about John Grisham. I think I could have accepted the fact that he was encroaching on my physical space, or that he was totally interrupting my mental space but not both at the same time.

Einstein was right, time is absolutely relative and not a constant. The physical flying time from New York to Los Angeles is around 6 hours if you are in the captain's seat. However, in seat 27B the flying time is approximately the same as an average year of eternity in hell.

I am home now and there will be no need for me to get on a plane for a few weeks. The show in New York went very well, we got great interest from the APAP convention for future bookings. I took the talkative guy's card and I plan to send it to the TSA suggesting he be put on a "no fly" list. Not that he is a terrorist, but after ten minutes next to him on a plane... even a Southern Baptist would consider becoming a suicide bomber for Islam.
As you were,
Jay