Traveling by air these days can be downright unpleasant.
The major setback is that one cannot select who will be seated next to you for the next fifteen hours and as more and more airlines cram more and more passengers into smaller spaces, being polite can become difficult.
If you’re really unlucky, you could find yourself sitting next to the passenger from hell. Whether or not your seat mate is fat or thin, there’s any number of other creature habits that could turn your journey into a really bad experience.
Seatmates could suffer from smelly feet, nervous tics, snoring or involuntary spasms, for example.
Many don’t know what dining etiquette is and enjoy talking with their mouth full, slurping and burping their way throughout the various meal services and drinking alcohol to excess.
And that’s not all. There’s the least frequent bather seatmate, the weak bladder seatmate who always selects the window seat, the armrest hogger and, my least favorite, the throat clearer.
According to various surveys on evaluating in-flight behavior, the rear seat kicker ranks as one of the most aggravating fellow passenger along with the reckless seat recliner.
The reckless seat recliner is the selfish passenger seated in front of you that reclines their seat as far back as possible the instant we reach cruising level and insists on leaving it there until the wheels go down.
My personal viewpoint on this is that airlines already force us into smaller spaces and yet they allow the passenger in front to invade it even more.
In fact, there have been several mid-air disputes between reckless seat recliners and the passengers seated behind them that several airlines have been forced to change course in order to eject the arguing passengers. Of course, you can always buy a pair of Knee Defenders — nifty little gadgets that lock onto your tray table preventing the seat in front from reclining but first make sure your airline isn’t one that has banned them.
I always go prepared on long flights. I try to avoid airline small talk whenever possible by engrossing myself in a book or whatever other newspapers or magazines are available. Yet, despite such obvious social cues, seatmates will still insist on striking up a conversation.
If you are sitting on the subway or at the theatre, the person next to you rarely feels compelled to engage you in conversation. So why is it that on an airplane, the person who sits next to you automatically feels he has to tell you, a total stranger, his life story?
You could pretend not to speak English but a polite hello and a brief smile to your neighbor is all that is needed.
Bon voyage!