cathay pacific

Seats Turn Round Bottoms Square

January 26, 2010

in Seat Stories

This is about NOT RECLINABLE seats. Should you have masochistic streaks, you can find them on the Cathay Pacific 747B-400 flights from Europe to Far East. They are something of a kind: a plastic shell 40 cm. wide, with some 3 cm. thick Styrofoam filled sliding cushions… Yes, sliding… the seat won’t recline, only the thin cushions slide 10 cm. onward… after 45 minutes, your previously rounded bottom starts getting incredibly square edges…

Add to this that, should you happen to ask for aisle and find yourself in the middle seat of three, with a fat Chinese lady to your right and her fat nephew to your left (I feel nice here, I won’t swap with you…), the only position you can put your arms are: 1) straight forward along your body, or: 2) crossed on your chest. Alternate every 10 minutes, for the next 12 hours. And this, thanks to the blessed economic recession, that gave my company the justification for suppressing the business treatment for us for the flights longer than three hours. And be informed that we have no transfer allowance as well, so that when flying overseas on some red eye we get paid from 9 to five… but this is a job… something better should be a vacation…

To top it, once disembarking I was so tired that I didn’t answer to the chink steward’s good bye… so that he let me pass a couple of rows and then said loud: …”f**k you!” A good end to a hellish flight…

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Tagged as: cathay pacific, flight attendant, portly, seats

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Smell Like a Backed Up Toilet In Calcutta

November 3, 2009

in Odor Stories

Took Cathay Pacific back from Hong Kong recently. Was seated in 31B, a middle seat on the left side, between two men, both apparently Chinese (not that it matters). Anyway, during the flight, the guy on the window seat (to my left), starts smelling really bad. Not a pooh smell, but a really funky B.O. that would seem to radiate from his body every time he shifted to look out the window, which was about every 10 seconds. This was interrupted by continual opening/closing the window shade. He would then look at his nails which, best I could tell, were tiny shriveled up yellow stub-remnants of what were once human nails. Then he would scratch the back of his head, then look at his nails again, then clean his nails with his other hand.

Guy on right (aisle) took out dried fish mid-flight, which smelled like a backed up toilet in Calcutta, and proceeded to “dine” on this “delicacy” from parts unknown. The stench was so dramatically bad, I actually had to get up and go to the bathroom, where I locked myself in for about 30 minutes.

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Tagged as: cathay pacific, odor

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