[Red State] A few weeks ago, my wife and I flew back from Houston on Southwest. Southwest is open seating, and if you’ve ever flown Southwest on a busy route you know that if you check in late, you’ll be in group "D."Note the flip-flops. He'll be kicking those off as soon as he is seated.
D stands for "Doomed."
You’ll get a middle seat. The "pre-check" included a wheelchair-bound obese woman. I don’t mean she was fat — she was the size of a fridge. The flight was announced full, which meant someone was going to be seated next to her. My wife and I were in A group. As we entered I saw her in the first row in the window seat. Well, most of her was in the window seat. The rest of her was draped over and into the B seat. Some unlucky passenger was about to spend four hours using about 40 percent of their seat.
Unless you fly first class, flying is a pain. I mean an actual, literal pain. The seats are uncomfortable and they’ve gotten narrower, and now because of our dear leader, the cost has gone up dramatically. It wasn’t long ago that we had mask Nazis roaming the aisles looking for any part of a nose peeking out from the top of a mask. Six months ago, a flight attendant hovered over me like an exterminator who just found a bug and demanded that I push my mask over my nose. It was already covering my nose but not sufficiently high for Herr Blucher. When I moved my mask further up (but not far enough for the stormtrooper) he loudly asked if "we are going to have a problem."
Then, there are the people who jump out of their seats the second the wheels stop and rush up the aisle. On a flight last year two people pushed up and stopped at my seat. I stood up and pushed in front of them, and I helped everyone in my row exit. "Take your time," I said.
My worst fear about flying isn’t crashing — it’s being stuck in a middle seat between two obese bodies. My nightmare happened to Sydney Watson. On an American Airlines flight from New York to Texas, Watson got stuck in the middle seat between two large bodies. She described it as being a human sardine. Instead of being encased in tin, Sydney was marinating in obesity.
Watson made the best of living my nightmare. She live-tweeted the experience. American Airlines was tagged by Sydney and it responded with a less-than-optimal answer.