Musings From My Flight: The Roach Coach

Every time I fly it’s a different experience.  Mostly because people are FREAKS.  I hate it and I love it at the same time.  While traveling this week, I had the following thoughts I thought were worth sharing:

Dear woman with an obviously teething baby.  They make these things called pacifiers now.  They’re really cool.  You can put them in your baby’s mouth and it will shut them up.  I’m no Dr. Spock, but I have to think that it works better than the ten cookies you’ve crammed in her face hoping for the same result and instead getting more of the blood-curdling Mariah Carey screams that echo through my body like a lightning bolt.  Make it stop.  Please. 

 I was sitting next to an Asian couple.  The woman didn’t speak English.  Or, if she did, she was incredibly rude screaming out her one-word demands to the flight attendant well after she had passed for sugar and cream for her coffee.  And, while I’m glad that she is nimble for her age, I didn’t really appreciate that she would just throw her leg over my face to get into her seat.  Or, that she - in the middle of me typing this - put me in prime motor-boating position for no reason at all, other than to throw her coat into her seat.  Actually, she probably would have leapt over me had I not tapped her with an annoyed, “HI.” The kicker was when she and a friend across the aisle pulled out a Farmer John’s half-pound brick of ham STEAK.  Unsliced.  She opened the package with her teeth and started going at it like a dog on a bone.  She pulled off a quarter of it, handed it to her friend and then proceeded to eat it as though it were a Snickers bar.  In the wrapper.  After downing the ham, she crumpled up the wrapper FULL OF HAM JUICE...OVER MY COMPUTER and then handed it to her husband, who disposed of it in the barf bag.

 While waiting for the flight in the gate area, there was a woman next to me.  She was older, probably early fifties.  As I’m sitting there eating my $10 sandwich before getting on the flight, I can’t help but hear music in my peripheral.  At first, I thought that the lady was wearing headphones and her music was just really loud.  I was thinking, “Get it girl, you rock on with your bad self.”  But, then it got louder and I realized that she was holding her flip phone next to her head, and was listening to some soothing Persian pop music.  It was annoying, but I was trying not to get myself worked up before the flight (I’m kind of a nervous flyer).  Then, she turned it up.   Not one to keep my feelings to myself, I looked at her and said, “REALLY?”  And, she said, “Oh, you can hear that?”  Um, YES.  I think she was mad, but at least she turned it down and moved the phone away from me.  I mean, COME ON!  I wouldn’t pop on some Pantera (or Pavement, for that matter) and expect for the entire flight to want to be entertained by my choice in music.  What is wrong with people?!