Another airplane rant. I was coming home last night from one of my trips out to the edge of nowhere and ended up on one of those small cigars with wings: a Beechcraft of some sort; one of those that you have to bend over to get down the aisle to your seat, with one row of seats on each side of the plane.
Anyway, the woman one row back and to my right spent the entire hour and a half making the noises in the thread title. She had a dry, hacking cough and so was sucking on some sort of candies with a ‘shlurrrrp, shlurrrrp’ and then smacking her lips after each ‘shlurrrrp’. Periodically, she would snort up a load of snot ‘SNNNGGGGGGHHHH!’ and swallow it, then start hacking again.
I know that we are a largely rural state, but I’m relatively certain that Kleenex has made it into even the most remote recesses, and good manners are generally taught at a fairly young age, even among the fucking clueless. Man, I hate air travel, but for some stupid reason I keep taking jobs that require it.
I happen to be sick right now with what sounds like a similar problem. Not much you can do about it, trust me. Would you rather listten to SNNNNNNN!!! Wipe-Wipe-Wipe every 10 seconds? There ain’t no good way to deal with all that phlegm, let me tell ya!
My husband, who is 56 years old, has never learned to drink soda out of a can without a loud SLUUUUURP! with every sip. Drives me NUTS. I’ve suggested repeatedly that he might try to drink without swallowing more air than soda, to no avail.
I had an order of CDs come in the mail the other day that wouldn’t fit in my tiny mailbox, so I had to go to the post office to pick it up. There was a guy there, calmly waiting his turn and reading the newspaper. I wouldn’t have paid him any mind, except every 10 seconds or so he would let loose with this loud “SNNNNNNNNNKK!!!”
I suppose it’s possible that he didn’t know he was doing it, but I and the 20 other people waiting sure did.
I’ve got the story to end all stories on this one. The ward I’m on right now has the privilage of having a 96 year old guy on his last legs who has the distinction of being offensive to all 5 senses at once.
He’s smelly, rude, ugly, when he’s got enough in him to do it spits phlegm at staff and to top it off has a LOUD echoing cough/throat clear/spit/gargle/cough that can be heard all over the ward. For some reason he’s compelled to get his vocal chords involved so it sounds like a mixture of yelling, gurgling, snorting and spitting all at once. The poor woman in the room next to him has nicknamed him Captain Furball and as she’s had to put up with him 24/7 for the last week I’m honestly surprised she hasn’t asked to move to a different ward or something.
He’s seriously the first guy I’ve ever met that I literally hope dies before I have to see him again.
I used to work with someone years ago who had a nasty penchant for burping. Loudly, and often. Sometimes even with accompanying smell. :eek:
“Uuuuuurrrrp…” without even the grace and courtesy of an “Excuse me, I just had a huge tuna sandwich for lunch and it’s rebelling now.”
Blech. One of my co-workers confessed to me she’d gone to one of those websites where you can generate an anonymous etiquette message to someone’s e-mail notifying them of various - offensive behaviors, i.e., you stink so please bathe, please don’t pass gas right in front of us anymore, your breath stinks, etc. She said she’d sent one to him anonymously to ask him to please quit his burping rampage because it was grossing everyone out, but clearly it didn’t work. :rolleyes:
I’m not speaking metaphorically or anything though or exaggerating. I literally hope he dies before I see him next, and given that he’s 96 and in ill health it’s fairly likely.
I’m very reticent about flying on airplanes nowadays. My understanding is that the air-conditioning hydration reservoirs are breeding grounds for some of the yuckiest airborne transmittable bugs. If you think about all the folks who have bugs already in them before they get on a plane, and then how you’re in a climate controlled airspace for hours, well… it’s no wonder that airline stewards tell me they ended up hating the job. They’re always getting sick apparently.
Being that I work in a hospital, I think I can cover this. Have you ever been exposed to a smell so rank you could taste it? Work in a hospial for any length of time and eventualy you will be. You will be.
A mucus-draining head is no fun for its owner or a captive audience, I agree. I can’t recall ever being sequestered next to one on a plane, thank goodness. In general, though, the people who grate on me the worst aren’t the ones who loudly and unselfconsciously snort their phlegm back into their trachea, producing comically hideous science-fictiony noises. Hey, most of us get a head cold from time to time; it happens. And at least they’re honest about it.
No, the ones that really annoy the hell out of me are the ones who think they’re being discreet; the people who are too genteel and polite to even publically acknowledge the fact that they have sinuses, let alone any difficulties therein. So instead of using a hankerchief or sucking it down or whatever, they simply sit and allow their nasal passages to fill up silently until the point where their nose is just about to start dripping, and then:
snnckk
Oh-so-quickly, as quietly as possible, a tiny liquidy inhalation just barely enough to keep the drainage in check. Perhaps forty seconds of silence follows, and then:
slrpp
Dear God, it grates on my nerves. And it keeps going like this, like Chinese water torture, with no hope of improvement, because the person isn’t gauche enough to ever actually blow their nose. Oh merciful heavens, no; that would be rude and unsanitary and would call unwanted attention to the fact that they’re harboring germs. It’s so much less shameful to sit and pretend to be healthy, because surely no one notices the crafty way in which they ever so secretly and momentarily sniff it back:
shhlpp
Until at some point I just want to jump up and scream, *"BLOW IT OUT! BLOW IT! What the hell are you doing, playing with it?! * For God’s sake, either suck it down or blow it the hell out!"
But if I ever did that, people would probably look at me as if* I * were the strange one.
