There are a
few things that I like less than flying, for example shutting my head in a
heavy car door, sitting through a middle school choir concert, or finally
cleaning out the other refrigerator, you know, the one that sits in the garage
and accumulates a diverse array of leftovers in various stages decay. Of
course, if people ask how I feel about flying, I stoically tell them that I am
actually quite a fan, I just drop off to sleep and it's the easiest thing in
the world. I am lying when I say this.
Now that we
have some perspective, let me explain why I do not care for flying. While it is
often bone-numbingly boring to sit in a crowded tin box, hurtling through the
air for five to six hours while crossing the Continental U.S., there is also
the fact that so much about how the flight progresses is beyond your control.
You cannot
control., for instance, how full the flight is going to be. In fact, sometimes
the crew will tell you, "This is going to be a full flight, if you're one
of our pecuniarily challenged passengers and will be boarding last, we will
perform a courtesy bag-check for you now, so that we can proceed to packing you
all into this sardine tin as quickly as possible." While they say this, it
might not be entirely true, and you will enter the plane to find more than
enough overhead space. I usually don't mind this, in fact I secretly hope for a
full flight on the first leg of my journey so that I don't have to drag a huge
duffel around the airport with me. Unfortunately sometimes this is not the
situation that you find yourself in. The crew says nothing about how full the
flight is until you get onto the plane and realize there isn't enough room to
blow your nose let alone store a bag. I always conduct myself with the utmost
grace in these situations, relying on my sweet face to persuade people to let
me stick my bag over their seat. Not everyone is as naturally graceful as I,
and that is why you will sometimes find yourself watching the following drama
play out:
A very
sunburnt woman with about five children sidles down the narrow aisle until she
reaches her seat (right across the aisle from you, so you have the best seat
for viewing the approaching calamity). Her shoulders are so sunburnt that you
can see pieces of peeling skin fluttering in the unnatural breeze produced by
the plane's A.C. unit. Realizing there is no room immediately over her seat
(partly because your pink, black and white duffel is taking up the valuable
overhead real estate), she turns upon
the nearest flight attendant, not so much asking for help as snarling
why there isn't any room. The flight attendant, a 50-something Midwestern type
with a bronzy complexion, politely asks how many bags she needs space for.
"Four of these rolling suitcases" says Leprosy Shoulders. The flight
attendant, let's call her Bronzy, says in a weary way, "You should have
checked them at the gate, we really don't have a lot of room or time to play
Tetris. We need to get off the ground before it starts raining." Leprosy
Shoulders goes red in the face and nearly screams, "Like, we tried but
they said there would be room and wouldn't check them for us!" Bronzy
gives her a stern look and says, "Don't talk to me like that,
please." in the way that your grandmother might say it, that sort of
no-nonsense tone that brooks no dispute. Leprosy Shoulders clearly never talked
to your grandmother, because she then said, "Like, really? Ugh. What are
we supposed to do with these bags, there's no room!" She gestures wildly
at the clearly full compartment over her seats. Suddenly Leprosy Shoulders'
husband, a beleaguered man with a baby on one hip and two backpacks on the
other shoulder, cuts in, saying very mildly, "Danny" (I suppose
that's Leprosy Shoulders' real name), "Danny, just stop. Sit down."
Leprosy Shoulders continues to mutter, occasionally raising her voice loud
enough to make the rest of you passengers uncomfortable, but now Bronzy is
ignoring her in a practiced and professional manner, directing the put-upon
husband to a few empty spaces for his remaining bags. Unsurprisingly, their
children were horribly behaved the whole flight.
The above
story is an example of another thing you have no control over during a flight,
and that is the conduct of other passengers. Cranky fellow sardines is at the
very least a minor headache and at the worst infuriating. Then of course there
are the sardines whose bodies recognize that they were never meant to fly,
resulting in air sickness. I have the unusual luck of almost always sitting
beside or behind whoever gets airsick on any given flight. Call it a gift.
You cannot
control how long it will take the plane to get into the air or, once in the
air, that it will stay in the air. If you weren't already worried about that,
at the beginning of every flight, the flight attendants say "Please power
down and store all electronic devices, return your tray tables and seats to
their full upright positions. We will let you know when you can use your
electronic devices again." They never explain why you cannot use your
devices, but it is all very important and mysterious. I shan't pretend to
understand how an airplane even stays aloft, much less navigates through miles
of empty sky, however it has been drilled into my brain that any electronic
devices on during take off or landing will cause the plane to drop out of the
sky. This being said, I have a particularly unique situation and that is this:
my phone, unbidden by me, will often turn on and off of it's own accord. I
cannot control this when it happens and often do not even know it is happening. Because of my phone's rather
independent manner of conduct, I live in constant fear that my phone will turn
on during take of or touch down and doom
us all. I know for a fact that I have pulled it out of my pocket midflight to
find it on when I turned it off at the beginning of the flight. It is all very
stressful. I am actually writing this from somewhere above the Midwest, so if
you are reading it, that means that I am paranoid without cause and that my
defective phone did not cause a huge plane crash.
On a less
dramatic scale, you also cannot control the flight attendant. When are they
coming around with drinks? When will they return with a garbage bag or those
little bags of roasted peanuts? Who knows. They keep to a secret schedule that
they have sworn to share with no one. I was asleep during the first round of
drinks and I have no idea when another one will happen, so I sit here with my
dry mouth in the ridiculously dry air, wondering how long it will take me to
shrivel into a human raisin. To her credit, a kind brunette flight attendant
did stop by earlier and ask if I wanted anything since I was asleep during
their first round. I croaked that I would appreciate a water and she nodded,
smiling. That was thirty minutes ago. I have not had any water.
These are
the things I am talking about. Some of them are petty, some of them are pretty
big, but all together they accumulate into a long trip in which everything
depends on other people. I don't know why that wouldn't make me uncomfortable.
