Straight

So there I am on the plane, the ulti­mate petri dish of per­son­al­ity, bac­te­ria and weird­ness. I have taken the last avail­able seat, accord­ing to the agent at the counter, and I believe her. Mid­dle seat, bulk­head, stare at the wall sep­a­rat­ing the rats from the roy­alty in first class. I think I am the last per­son to get on this flight from Maui to Port­land, and I can‘t believe my luck. The win­dow seat is still open. The atten­dants do their final counts and say the door is closing…and then he arrives. Win­dow seat, row 6.

He hus­tles in, late for every­thing in his entire life, you can tell. Smil­ing, greet­ing every­one around him and still on the phone. The rest of us rats have dark­ened Kin­dles and are read­ing the in-flight 60 page advert mag for Spokane, Wash­ing­ton. He climbs in and pro­ceeds to tor­ture me all the way home.

1. Pulls out greasy, cold bro­ken chicken breast sand­wich, holds it under my nose and offers me a bite. I am not kid­ding. Laughs when I say, no thanks, takes a bite and offers again. Still not kidding.

2. Starts…starts a phone call as we are taxi­ing for take-off. I am not a rules guy and I do not believe that my cell phone call derails an air­plane any­more than I believe it can turn off an anes­the­sia machine in the oper­at­ing room. What bugs me is that even though this guy is seri­ously irri­tat­ing every­one around him, or maybe just me, the flight atten­dants walk by and smile and seem to find him invis­i­ble. He is tak­ing odds on the super­bowl with a guy in Denver. Whatever.

3. We get our lit­tle cups of passion-orange-guava juice (Hawaii flight, don‘t for­get) in our lit­tle plas­tic cups and we are all bal­anc­ing them in the lit­tle cir­cle in the tray table. I get through one sip and Win­dow seat, row 6 makes the move to get up. “Sorry mate, bathroom?”

4. Asks me to lend him money for a beer. Actu­ally wants me to put the beer on my credit card because he doesn‘t have one, I mean it doesn‘t work, I mean I don‘t like to use it, I mean, it is expired. Gave me all those answers when I sim­ply repeated, “Really, you don‘t have a credit card?” Atten­dant comes up to ask if we want our sec­ond cup of P-O-G and he pulls out a fiver and looks like a puppy at me. Beers are a sixer how­ever and I now get the grift. Nice. No dice dude.

5. Finally he falls asleep and pro­ceeds to have a con­ver­sa­tion with, what I assume was, the demon infect­ing his brain dur­ing wak­ing hours. I wake him up. “Sorry dude”. Repeat.

I did not take my shoe off and blow up the plane with my stand-by shoe bomb, but I was close. Mid­dle seat is bad enough, but this guy had my num­ber. Dialed in.

Being away from work was great. Needed the break. We went every­where and spent lots of time doing noth­ing. I did how­ever have time to look up a tree‘s dress which is prob­a­bly the sign of good rest.