That’s silly; of course the guy was joking. Bishops don’t have some kind of in with airlines, and they know full well they’re not important to an airline. And airlines don’t send planes up with known problems.
That does make for an awkward flight, doesn’t it?
I fly a lot and making conversation is last on my list of things to do. I put on my noise cancellation headphones and proceed to read or listen to music. Here is an example of how oblivious I am to fellow passengers, including the person seated next to me: In a flight this week I sat next to someone for 90 minutes, never once making eye contact. It wasn’t until I was standing next to him awaiting my gate-checked bag that I recognized him as an old colleague!
I am a very frequent flyer, making out of town trips 30 weeks out of the year. This is important, because I often see new, first-time flyers who are nervous about their trip. Sometimes I even get assigned a seat next to one of these greenhorns.
Because I was once a first-time flyer, too, I generally take some pity on the person, and let them know how I’ve flown hundreds of times, and never had any real problems other than the occasional delay or lost luggage, and even that is not overly-frequent. I’ll encourage them to look around, maybe even out the window on take-off, and tell them watching the ground fall away on take-off is one of the nicer experiences, and that it can help you get used to flying. I’ll even make a friendly note, looking out the window with them, about the way the wings start to bounce up and down as we gain speed on the runway…
…by grabbing the armrests on my seat and proclaiming, loudly, “Ohmygod! I’ve never seen the wings do THAT before…!!!”
That is pure evil. :eek:
I am a nervous flyer… if anyone ever did that to me…!!!
As an ex-airline employee who flew only on standby, I’ve flown quite a bit on some strange routings. Like PDX-ATL-LAX, just to be able to get a seat on a flight. I remember one trip many years ago from PDX-DFW on a redeye flight, and was seated in first class and the lovely lady next to me (after takeoff and we had our blankets and pillows at the ready), said “Hello, my name is ___, since we’re going to be sleeping together, I thought you should at least know my name.”
I thought it was really funny and didn’t realize until many days later that she was actually flirting with me. Oh to be 20 and stupid again.
Mark
I fly a lot too and rarely talk to my seatmate unless they seem particularly interesting or cute.
Once I had the misfortune to sit next to an awful woman who would not stop witnessing, even after I was fairly rude and told her to shut up. Cow. Luckily there were a few empty seats on the plane; I moved. Good thing too. I swear I would have stuffed the puke bag down her throat if I’d had to listen to that crap for 3 hours.
I’ve never flown alone, so usually I just sit with my family when I fly. If I’m ever seated next to someone I don’t know, I usually ignore them because I have family or travelmates on the other side of me.
In high school, I went on a trip to Greece with 2 awesome teachers and about twelve other students (all about-to-be seniors and recently graduated kids). The last night of the trip, most of us decided to stay up all night (we had to get up early for our flight). We sat and played spades and drank (secretly, of course) and smoked all night. We hoped this would help us all sleep through our 3 flights the next day.
Nope.
By the time we got on our last plane (Chitown to STL - only like a 40 min flight) we were all retarted with tiredness. Myself and another friend were seated next to a guy, my best guess is that he was 30 or so. I felt bad for him - we were slap happy to the max and probably annoyed the shit out of him. But he kept laughing at all the stupid crap we were saying. I don’t even remember what we were doing - I just know we were ridiculous. I slept for a very long time when I finally got home.
Oh my, how unsanitary. Did you alert the flight attendants?
A friend of mine encountered a “persistent Christian proselytizer” like this once on a train ride. He started with the usual polite ways to express disinterest in the topic, moved on to polite ways to indicate that no really, this was an Imposition, and finally, said point-blank, “That’s enough, please stop. You are bothering me.”
Mr. Crusader continued on, concerned yet cheerful: “But I am offering you eternal life. Don’t you want to live forever?”
Something snapped (or clicked) in my friend, and he replied with an evil sneer: “Of course. But my sweet Satan has already promised me I will live forever.” And licked his lips.
Mr. Crusader’s eyes bugged out, then he stumbled backwards out of his seat and all but ran to the next train car.
Having endless, loud-enough-to-be-heard-over-the-engines, pointless conversations with your seatmates annoys the hell out of everyone around you. Please, please, please stop.
My new wife and I boarded a plane to Portland, OR last October for our honeymoon. There was a loud, aggressive, drunk asshole behind me who kept loudly trying to converse with the guy next to him with tales of how much pussy he got on his trip out East. He was really, REALLY fucking annoying.
At some point, he put his tray table down and pounded on it rhythmically, which made my whole seat vibrate. I sat there seething for an hour, and finally couldn’t take it anymore. I turned in my seat and yelled, “C’mon! Could you please stop that?!”
Not the most diplomatic thing to do, I know.
He stopped for a few minutes and something in his stupid, sloshy little head told him that he should start taunting me. “Hey, bitch!,” he would whisper. I ignored him. It continued for a while. I sat there thinking, “Calm. It’s your honeymoon. Start a fight, and you’ll spend the night in jail, at the least. Caaaaaaaaaaaalm.”
Finally, he went to pee, and we summoned the flight attendant. When he came back, she told him in no uncertain terms that if he didn’t sit there and behave, he was going to be arrested upon landing. He was mostly civil the rest of the flight.
When we finally landed, my wife commented on my restraint. “I’m really proud of you…especially after what he said about me.”
I saw red. “What did he say about you?”
“He referred to me as ‘your cunt.’”
I had no idea. I didn’t hear him say that. I’m actually glad, because I don’t think I could have stopped myself from hitting him.
My blood still boils when I think about it.
I used to fly every two weeks, but I’ve cut way back, to maybe once every month or so. Look around the plane - it’s unusual for anyone to make conversation with others. Maybe one out of every 5 rows has two people talking.
That’s not to say I’m not amenable if someone wants to. On a flight to Florida last month I spent some time telling a teenage girl about engineering since her father, who had been sitting next to me, said she was interested in it but didn’t know what engineers really did.
Awkward situations on planes are not just lack of conversation. They are security incidents, insane people sitting next to me, stinky people, slobs, the woman who slumped into me and started kissing and sucking on my neck in her sleep, and of course, “Children Gone Wild Part LXXVI”.
IIRC, the flight attendants were aware of the situation. The parents had no other options, as far as I could see. Floor? Nope, it needs to be kept clear. Bathroom? They couldn’t all fit in there.
GAK! I feel sorry for the next people that had to unwittingly sit in those seats–it’s not like they have time to desanitize the cabin between flights.
And just which model of airplane has 45 degrees of flaps, sir? Or does the pilot exaggerate just a wee bit?
Along the lines - most recent awkward moment in airplane for me:
“Wow, you used the entire runway”
"Um…er… not quite… "
“I was half expecting to hit those trees.”
“Ah, yes, I was getting somewhat concerned about that myself.”
But more in line with the OP - I will happily either talk to or ignore my seat mates on commercial flights. I usually cue off whatever they do. I will reassure the nervous and entertain the bored and leave the sleeping lie. Really, I am probably one of the better people you could get stuck next to. Not only am I flexible in the already stated manner, but I am small and do not take up much room so I will not crowd the person next to me either.
I tend to converse briefly with my seatmates, maybe for up to half an hour if they’re interesting, and then often again over food, but otherwise zone out with a book or music and ignore them. I’ve been fortunate to not encounter really seriously obnoxious people on flights. Usually.
The one exception was a trans-Pacific flight, in which not only was I stuck in a middle seat, but the family in the row behind us had an energetic 2-year-old who couldn’t sleep on a plane any more, alas, than I can. So for 14 hours across the Pacific, every time my seat mates and I would just start to drift off, KICK! in the back of one of our seats, hard enough to make all three seats shake. We’d take turns turning around and glaring at the parents, but since they had no language in common with either us or the flight attendants (and between us, I think we tried six different languages), we were pretty much hosed.
I’ve also never forgotten a flight I took with my kids from Austin to DFW, in which we flew through a line of thunderstorms. For no known reason the flight attendants started doing drink service but I wouldn’t let the kids get anything, just in case, and sure enough, a few minutes later we hit a bump or two so hard the carts were flying up off the floor of the plane and the flight attendants were hanging onto the seats to keep from flying through the air. And, of course, the people who had been served drinks provided a fabulous object lesson in physics of what happens when the container for a liquid suddenly moves rapidly out from underneath it and there’s nothing to contain the liquid any longer. There were a lot of people who got soaked. My daughter, who was about 12 at the time, was sitting across the aisle from meand hanging onto my hand for dear life; she said, “Mom, I’m scared!” At which opint my dear darling 5-year-old son piped up, in his shrill little voice that everyone for several rows around us could hear, “I’m not – this is FUN! Whee!!” as the plane proceeded to bounce all over the sky. The looks of pure loathing the kid got were almost worth the awful flight.
Oh yeah, and that was also the only flight I’ve been on where everyone broke into spontaneous applause when the wheels touched the ground.
I don’t understand. Was he too physically disabled or too large for them to bring him into a restroom? Could he not stand in the restroom while they cleaned him up? And if that was the case, couldn’t one of them have draped a blanket for modesty? I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect not to be exposed to an adult’s genitalia regardless of their disability.
I fly several times a year for business. The first leg of my flight is the puddle jumper from here to Atlanta which takes all of about 25 minutes. Just about every time I end up seated next to either somebody who has never flown before and is scared to death he or she won’t be able to figure out his or her connecting flight in Atlanta or a little old lady who is worried she’ll never be able to get around that big old airport in Atlanta. With the newbies, I can at least walk with them to the trains and tell them when to get off the train and to take the escalator up to the concourse they need to be on. The LOLs are a different critter altogether. See, I just imagine my mother trying to get around that big old airport all by herself and I can’t stand it! So, I either make sure I get 'em seated on one of those little cart things that run around all over the place that will take the LOL to the trains, have somebody to be with her on the train, get her to her concourse and on another little cart to deliver her right to her gate, or I do it myself. Fortunately, I usually have a couple hours before I can get my flight out of Atlanta, because I have been known to escort a LOL all the way to her gate and then go to my gate which will always be at least three concourses away. Good thing those trains zip along like they do.
I’ll talk to my seatmate if he or she initiates a conversation, but I do not want to yakkity yak away all throughout a three, four, five hour flight. So, I usually have a book of puzzles to occupy myself or I nap. I can sleep on a plane easy. I’m even nice to children. Just week before last on a flight to Tucson, a woman was traveling with her daughter who looked to be three or four years old. The girl wanted to sleep, so she was lying down in her seat with her head on mommy’s lap. She stretched out her legs which of course landed on my leg. The poor thing was snoozed out and mom was leaning over to move her legs with a real I’m sorry look on her face but I whispered it was ok, and let’s not disturb her and wake her up. As we were leaving the plane the woman told me she could not believe how nice I was about it. It was no biggie to me. Hell, she was asleep and quiet. I’ll take little feet on my leg over screaming and crying and whining anyday.
He was a big boy, too large to fit him and another adult into a restroom and still get him cleaned up. I still don’t even see how or where moms can change their toddlers in a plane, and this kid was a big teenager. Yes, one of them could have draped a blanket for modesty, and I wish one of them had, but the parents seemed rather oblivious. They did nothing whatever to interfere with him banging the drink tray up and down, for instance. I hope they put something underneath him to protect the seats from poop, but I only looked long enough to get one good eyeful and then queasily averted my eyes, so I didn’t see what sanitary arrangements they made.