There are very specific reasons I was sent on this trip. First of all, my experience as a trainer, my leadership ability, and my communication skills would ensure that my counterparts in the building would receive proper teaching after my return. My can-do attitude and adventurous personality leaves me open for new experiences in new places. But the biggest reason of all is the fact that no one else wanted to go so I got suckered into it.
The trip as a whole was rather mundane, until the flight from Dallas to Phoenix. My flight out was one of the most enjoyable flights I have ever had. The flight was severely under booked, so seemingly every passenger had his or her own aisle. I would liken the passenger density to putting a family of five onto a school bus for a road trip.
The flight was very comfortable, experiencing fewer bumps than a weekend road trip to Vegas. I spent the time catching up on my reading and sleeping, arriving in Dallas refreshed and ready to work.
The trip home was the antithesis of my trip to. I don’t believe in Karma as a whole, but I do believe that for every pleasure there is a pain. For the pleasure of my outbound trip, I was about to experience the pain.
I arrived at the airport 3 hours before my scheduled depart time, this afforded me time to eat breakfast, buy a book, and get the most expensive haircut in the history of man. I took a seat at the gate about 45 minutes before I was due to leave, and started to do what I believe every person flying alone does.
Regardless of the mode of transportation, plane, train or bus, everyone does it. I call it a passenger triage, it’s my own personal manifest of the most and least desirable people to sit near. Normally, this list I compile in my head is purely for entertainment purposes, but I knew the plane that we were going to be packed into, and became concerned.
The Bombardier CRJ200 series planes are 50 passenger, dual engine regional aircraft meant for short hops. The seating arraignment is 2+2 and the overhead clearance is only 6 feet, which means that if I were much taller, I would have to duck to walk around the cabin. The interior is just over 8 feet wide, which seems like plenty of room, but considering 4 seats and an aisle must fit into 8 feet of space, real estate is at a premium.
The sardine can arrived at the gate 30 minutes late, which gave me plenty of time to complete my manifest. As I feigned playing spider on my Pocket PC, I took a few glances at the people around me steadily becoming impatient of the delay.
There was a gentleman sitting four seats to the right of me. He was a chatty fellow in his mid forties, who began talking to everyone and anyone who would listen to him about how well his son is doing in high school. If he sat next to me, I might smother him with my pillow. There was a woman about two rows of aisles away from me who looked like she might not fit into the aircraft without axle grease and a large shoehorn. This woman was wearing a purple t-shirt bearing a ubiquitous cartoon character and a set of pink leotards. I have never questioned a flight crew regarding the passenger weight restrictions before I saw her.
I kept my fingers crossed as I boarded the plane, hoping for a misanthropic, underweight, thirty-something business traveler with an mp3 player and a book to occupy his or her time. But, as is my luck, I got the orca. To top it all off, she got the aisle seat to my window seat.
Now, normally I really don’t give a damn about the size of a person, but imagine if you will, the following scenario. You are a twenty-something smashing man, of average weight and above average intellect, who also happens to be a claustrophobe. You have now been sitting on the tarmac for 45 minutes waiting for clearance to take off because high air traffic density that day. You have no idea when the plane is going wheels up, and you have a two and a half hour flight ahead of you. You are caught between a rock and a fat spot, and the fat spot wants to be your new friend. You have about 18 inches of overhead clearance and a two-foot by one-foot Plexiglas window and aluminum to the left of you.
I have always carried a morbid fascination with aircraft accidents. There is something that is very interesting about the seemingly trivial chain of events that cause catastrophic results. I have always wondered what it would be like to experience a explosive decompression, to be a witness to that kind of experience and survive. I have never wished for one until our plane took off.
‘…God, all I need is some air.’
As we began our egress from DFW, the jet took a rather sharp turn to the left as it was reaching altitude. This, of course, made the woman sitting next to me lean on me due to the force of gravity.
‘…God, don’t let her seatbelt snap.’
We reached altitude about 10 minutes later, and the Capitan turned off the ‘Fasten Seatbelt’ sign. There was no meal service on the flight, just the typical refreshments that are found on a short flight. Much to my grief, the woman planned ahead.
The first thing she does when the light goes out is reach into the overhead compartment and pulled out what appeared to be a whole roasted chicken and a pound of mashed potatoes. It looked as if she had experience with this maneuver, because it was completed in one motion with the eagerness of an Olympic sprinter waiting for the gun to go off.
It is my humble opinion that if you look like that, dear God, you shouldn’t eat like that. Try a salad once in a while, they are pretty tasty! The sounds that came from this woman while she was masticating are too horrific to describe with words. She tore through the chicken in a manner that stretches credulity, almost to the point where I expected her to start howling like Tyrannosaurus Rex from Jurassic Park after it eats the Velociraptor at the end.
‘…God, don’t let her eat me next.’
I sipped on my drink, stared at the snack that was brought to me and tried not to make eye contact with the demon. She reached into the stowage area beneath her and pulled out a laptop. This wouldn’t bother me so much, but rather than putting on a movie, she proceeded to start typing a letter. Of course, she had to put her left elbow directly in my face, slapping her underarm flab against my chest over, and over, and over again!
‘…God, why do you hate me? What did I ever do to you?’
The next sequence defies imagination. She looked at me, smiled and said something that I thought I would never hear in an airplane.
“Do you mind if I grab your nuts?”
I spat the orange juice that I was drinking all over the two passengers in front of me, and in a guttural reaction, stood up and tried to run away. My head made it all the way to the ceiling and made a dent in the overhead compartment. I was thrown back into my seat, and contemplated opening the emergency exit.
Slowly recovering from my concussion, she looks at me rather sheepishly, realizing how the statement was misconstrued. The flight attendant brings me a bag of ice for my head and the woman next to me explains herself.
“I meant your peanuts.”
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