now boarding, flight to revolting

Cheers for Thursdays in which the blagonets reverberate with the sound of TMI broadcast around the world and preserved for future generations to discover and wonder at the mistakes made by their ancestors.  Hip hip!

I don’t even remember which city I was flying back from, but the horror of this flight will stick with me forever.

I do remember that this was my connecting flight, and I had to run from one part of the airport to the other.  When I got to the right gate, I found that our flight had changed to a later flight, and that our largish jet was being downgraded to a smallish propeller plane.  Not that big of a deal, that kind of thing happens all the time.  I had to change my seat number, but also not that big of a deal because I don’t request certain seats when I fly alone.

Or so I thought.

So our plane finally shows up at the gate, and it’s one of those flights where some people don’t even get off because they’re just going on to the next destination.  By this time it’s night, and most of the people in the airport and plane are sleeping or napping or trying to.  As I’m getting on the plane, I’m pass a couple rows of folks with blankets and pillows and such.  As I’m walking by the row numbers, I groan because I realize that my seat is in the very last row.

I hate the last row.  You can’t recline at all, and it’s always right next to the bathroom, so every person on the flight gets to bang into your elbow as they use the facilities.  The big bonus is I also get the olfactory delight of being less than a foot away from the door to the bathroom, which as we know doesn’t have the best ventilation in the world.

The rows are three seats on one side of the aisle and two seats on the other.  I’m going to be on the three seat side, which means I get to sit next to two strangers.

And as I approach my seat, I see the people I will be sitting with.  And I’m playing it pretty fast and loose with the word “people.”

In the middle seat, there is the mom. The mom weighs about 300 or so pounds, all of which are brought into sharp relief by her lime green, spandex stretchy shirt and her neon pink, spandex stretchy pants.  Strapped to the mom’s chest is a baby in one of those harness carrier thingies, and before I even get close it’s obvious that the baby has made doody and has not been changed for some time.  The baby is bawling, with snot running down its face and onto the lime green spandex shirt.

You might be thinking, “well why isn’t the mom attending to the baby?”  The answer is in the window seat next to her in the form of a four year old jumping up and down in his seat and screaming some incomprehensible gibberish in between crying as well.  Snot and tears on his face have mixed with what appears to be chocolate and/or other food from a previous meal and never cleaned up.  The mom is trying to get him to stop jumping up and down in the seat, but not doing a very good job of it.

And right next to this display is my aisle seat.  I sit down with my book hoping to escape into a literary happy place.  Upon sitting, I realized that this woman was too large for me to put the armrest down.  A couple of her fat rolls were actually spilling over onto my thigh.  The poopybaby was screaming in my face and smelling better than ever.

I’m leaning as far as I possible can into the aisle, and just praying that we take off soon so I can get out of my godforsaken seat.  Every time the flight attendant comes down the aisle, she either bangs into me or has to ask me to move.  This is still a preferable alternative to moving my sensory organs towards the wreck on my right.

About an hour into the flight, the attendant sneaks up behind me and whispers in my ear, “There is an available seat in the front row if you want.”

If I want?! I couldn’t want that seat any more if it was a massage chair at Brookstone and came with free bacon.  I thank the flight attendant profusely and grab all of my things in a mad dash to the front of the plane.

I felt bad for the new people I was sitting next to, as I’m certain I had absorbed some of the wonderful smells from my old seat.  My right thigh was still hot and sweaty from her stomach’s intrusion into my personal space.  I had a wild look in my eyes that declared “back off” to all those around me.

I showered as soon as I possibly could upon getting home.  Twice.