My husband and I were on a flight from Atlanta to D.C. to visit his mother for Thanksgiving. Of course the flight was totally packed. My husband and I always get the aisle and the window seats. He sits at the aisle and I sit by the window. Don’t get me wrong; we like each other. We just don’t necessarily want to sit together. That’s one of the reasons we still like each other.
Anyway, we had boarded and were sitting and waiting for the plane to fill up, knowing that eventually we were going to be joined by someone else in our row. The last person that got on the plane was this large woman, who of course was going to be sitting in between us. I don’t have a problem with that. We chose that position. The problem I had was she brought on this giant bag of bagels. Being that Atlanta is not the bagel capitol of the world, I was puzzled by why she had such a large bag.
We all got settled and the flight took off. This woman starts pulling out these bagels with sesame seeds and starts eating them. After each one, she pulls a string of floss out and starts flossing her teeth. Sesame seeds were flying all over the place.
After two bagels, my husband asked her to please go to the bathroom if she was going to floss her teeth. She got really belligerent, and at that moment the flight attendant came over and asked what the issue was. My husband explained what was going on and the attendant turned to the woman and said, “If you feel the need to floss, you do it in the restroom. Not in public.”
The woman said, “I can do what I want. I paid for this seat.”
The attendant said, “All of these other people paid for their seats too. They certainly don’t need your spittle and old food coming out your mouth onto them.”
My husband and I were sitting there like we were watching a tennis match; it was back and forth between these two women. The woman sat back and didn’t say anything else the rest of the flight, so thank goodness this didn’t escalate. When we disembarked, I thanked the attendant profusely for taking care of the situation.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Never amazes me in todays world. Why is it "SOME" people just don't get it?
Some people lie to treat public transportation as their own personal bathroom. I see it on metro trains all the time. Grooming should be done in the home, not in a metal tube packed with people.
While I can understand not wanting the middle seat, if you book flights and leave the middle seat unoccupied then you are opening yourself up to anyone coming along to take that seat. And sometimes it's the oddballs.
I would always book seats next to my partner for travel (when we travel together) so he can protect me lol, or vice versa, from idiots like the pretzel woman. The worst flights here are those with huge FIFO workers on them, quite literally a middle seat doesnt exist, and if you get booked in one, suck everything in the whole way back, which is thankfully normally only 2-3 hours…
Excellent post.