You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
Air Travel During the Holidays.
Oh My God!
It’s not just the cattle car mentally. It’s not just the homeless shelter garb. It’s not just the smell that some people think substitutes for soap.
It’s the attitude that people fly with now a days. And I was smothered in that attitude on a nauseatingly long flight home from the Golden State.
It didn’t help my travel plans any that I decided to burn the candle at both ends the night before.
Party like a rock star and you’re gonna pay the price, is what a young woman I know recently told me.
Well that young woman knows of what she speaks. I’m still paying the price.
It’s a new years weekender and the night doesn’t end till well after last call.
3 hours of sleep sees a 5:30 wake up call.
Somehow my buddy gets me to get me to the airport. What a stud.
He pushes me out of the car and I am among the throng of meandering sad sacks.
The line of travelers circles the concourse. Cars are three deep at the curb. It’s a bad way to work off a hangover in the foggy dark of a cool California morn.
The airport is unattractive like 1970’s shag carpet. It’s spartan and cement like, roomy like a shoe box with all the charm of wet lint.
People stand in line like automatons on their way to the Soylent Green factory.
It’s the usual array of security lines and TSA douches and machines x-raying me for nuclear espionage.
I get on the flight in boarding group 4. That means I am one of the last people to get on the aircraft.
As I enter the vessel, I immediately notice that the plane is a stinky smelly stuffed cabbage of tubular transportation.
I take my seat on the aisle. The window shades are pulled down adding to the claustrophobic feel.
The two boys in the seats next to me are large and have electronic equipment on their laps.
I quickly learn the boys are of Chinese descent and they are flying with their elderly mother and father seated behind us.
The boys talk to their parents in a sing song dialect very unfamiliar to me. The parents respond more loudly, their dialect piercing my ear canal from a foot away.
Behind the Chinese family is a large woman with a French accent. I don’t know anything about her, but she apparently has a real problem with the Chinese family.
Ready Set Fly.
The plane takes off and everything starts routinely.
I close my eyes trying to recapture some of my lost beauty sleep.
It lasts all of 30 minutes. Then the in flight movie comes on, and the Chinese mom and dad start laughing out loud. They are laughing so audibly I’m concerned the sky marshal is going to pull his service revolver.
The family is wearing head phones and reciting lines from the movie in broken Chinese – English.
They are litterally shouting. I wonder if they are mentally disabled. One of their sons turn to shoosh them.
It lasts all of a minute before China Mom begins screaming from her seat.
“Look. Monstah say he no powah up. That funny.”
I try and pretend it’s a bad dream, keeping my eyes firmly shut.
Meanwhile, my hangover is exploding like fireworks over the Sydney Opera House.
I have never sat this close to a Chinese woman with tourettes. I am hating this next 4.5 hours.
Not only are mom and dad loud in a strange dialect that makes me want to behead a live chicken, but their little daughter is kicking on the seat back adding to the cacophony of disruption and rudeness.
Pencil in any number of bathroom breaks by the brothers-irritant and you can see I am excited to land this big beast.
To make a long story short, the plane finally touches down. Just when I think it can’t get any stranger, the French lady behind the Chinese people begins swearing and yelling in her native tongue. I don’t speak Chinese or French and I don’t know what the hell is going on.
The French lady keeps saying she has to get off this plane and claiming she has whip lash from sitting behind the Chinese people.
How this could happen is physiologically escaping me at this moment.
I don’t know what this all means.
The plane is full of people standing in the center aisle waiting their turn to the get their over head items and begin moving to the exit.
But the French woman is animated telling the Chinese father she needs to get out.
“Go ahead. Go ahead. walk by me, go ahead get out,” the Chinese man says in angry broken English.
Everyone around us is staring. I am in the thick of it. I move my iphone to video mode, preparing to document the possible fist fight for Good Morning America should this escalate.
Suddenly the Chinese man is telling me I have to let her by .
“Why?” I ask, a plane load of people staring at me.
“She wants to leave,” he says repeatedly.
“Yes I want to leave,” the French woman says in a thick French accent. She begins moving past the Chinese man and is now right behind me.
I look at the woman and the Chinese father.
“Yeah I bet she wants to leave. I want to leave, that lady over there wants to leave too,” I say pointing to a young woman watching all this unfold.
“But you know what, she isn’t going anywhere. There’s a plane full of people waiting their turn to exit, and you’ll do the same.”
I’m pissed that I have been drawn into this lunacy. The French woman mumbles inaudibly. The Chinese family is talking amongst itself like a ping pong machine gone TILT.
The plane slowly empties and the group behind me is full of angst. It’s a little uncomfortable.
We exit the plane. I walk up the gate with the young woman I pointed to earlier. She says; “I speak French. She was angry having to sit behind the Chinese people. She said she just needed to get off the plane.”
I laughed. I know her pain.
People today are sadly misbehaved, misinformed, and aerial miscreants.
and that is crazy.