The Middle Seat

On the flight to Italy, I find myself sitting in the third row away from my section's video screen that I have begun to call Big Brother, and on which the party never stops rolling. Everything shown is "upbeat", meaning bright as hell with unceasingly, fast, choppy editing in the annoying MTV style.

The stewardess is offering people earplugs and eye shades. If they passed out the popped wine corks from first class, it'd look like an audition for "Tommy" back here in the cheap seats.

And, by the way...have you ever had this woman (below) as your "stew"? She certainly wasn't working my flight.

Now....granted....flight attendants take a LOT of shit from jerks all day long, and it is TRULY a wonder they can muster a smile at all in the face of how they often get treated.

Perhaps it's no wonder so many are from the south, where they train children from an early age to manifest a veneer of friendliness to coat their rotting inner core of southern passive-aggressiveness. In fairness, non-southerners also can act passive-aggressive, but only in reaction to stupid southerners. For example, the note below written by a Californian attending school in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and posted on Passive-Aggressive Notes



My favorite annoying southernism is the saying "Well, bless your heart!" (or some such variant). It is standardly delivered in such a withering saccharine way that I feel an urge to go brush my teeth every time I hear it. What does it actually mean? It means "Christ, what a fucking idiot you are!" For example:

Baptist #1: My momma was driving her Ford Focus this morning, praising God and speaking in tongues, and she was so distracted by the circus that the Lord placed on her tongue that she ran off the road."

Baptist #2: Well, bless her heart!

Anyway, maybe the flight attendants can smile because they know that in a lot of cases, the reason travelers act like assholes is that airline overbooking keeps getting worse, amenities have dried up more than a centenarian's skin, being late is par-for-course, and seats keep getting smaller. Thus, the environment created by the airlines themselves likely conditions much of the behavior.

My experience is best described by The Replacements' song "Waitress in the Sky", excerpted below:

Always on the ball, she's always on strike
Struttin' up the aisle, big deal, you get to fly
You ain't nothin' but a waitress in the sky...

Paid my fare, don't wanna complain
You get to me, you're always outta champagne
Treat me like a bum, don't wear no tie
'cause you ain't nothin' but a waitress in the sky...

Don't treat me special, don't kiss my ass
Treat me like the way they treat 'em up in first class

Sanitation expert and a maintenance engineer
Garbage man, a janitor and you my dear
A real union flight attendant, my oh my
You ain't nothin' but a waitress in the sky

Moving on...

Apparently, those puffy things people put around their necks for neck support have become standard issue. As a result, in-flight attire has been reduced to something suitable for the inhabitants of a WWII amphibious landing craft as these neck supporters, like everything else in US society, have become supersized and have more in common with lifejackets than pillows or headrests.

Five hours into the flight and Big Brother tells me we just made a right at Greenland. Jeez, only four hours to go. 525 miles an hour. I always thought these jets went faster than that. Note to airlines: It is NOT helpful to show a cabinful of persons trapped in the coach cattlecar a scale picture of an airplane flying across the Atlantic Ocean at 525mph. It's much like watching paint dry (I'd have used a more-original phrase like "watching Republicans get smarter", but paint actually DOES dry).

Somebody near me started smelling like popcorn once they went asleep.

I am among the perpetually awake few. We await instructions from Big Brother and attend to our thrombosis-related psychoses, sizing up hacking/sneezing sleepers for any clues whether they have "the flu", making ocassional shameful and quick eye contact with one another.

Fuck you Ambien. I am the proud inhabitant of a middle seat. It's like being a farmer and getting stuck with the topland. Ooooh Big Brother just started showing the Bill Engvall show. Nothing but the best reruns TBS has to offer for coach... Sigh. Oh yeah, fuck you Ambien. You know why? Because the high school chick to my left and the grumpy dude to my right BOTH dropped Ambien once we hit altitude, hermetically sealed themselves in blankets, and passed out. So much for taking a piss (and I don't mean that in the way the British do). The girl just wakes up every 45 minutes to have a sneezing fit on my shoulder. I had to take a wet nap and clean my head it was so bad.

After sneezing, she passes out again...