Archives for February 2013

Flying to Dallas last week, I had one of those flights where you pay for all of those lucky breaks enjoyed throughout the travel year, like vacant middle seats, random upgrades, and arriving early. The flight was delayed 45-minutes after we boarded because they had to take all of the cargo off and then out it back on. Also: I was (un)lucky enough to be completely surrounded by 50 or 60 girls from a middle school travel soccer team. It’s the sort of thing that would happen in a headache medicine commercial. Except it was five and a half hours long.

It would be difficult to pretend that it didn’t transport me back into the horrors of being 13. The cool girls all had a row to themselves. Then there was the one who was just on the edge of being in the cool group sitting one the row behind. She kept trying to talk to the cool girl in seat C one row up, who answered only with monosyllabic dismissal. I’m sure that uncool girl was trying to work out in her head why they always seemed nice to her when hanging out alone, but were completely awful when the whole clan got together. I’m sure she’ll be the one driving the others to parties in a few years.

I was struck by the sheer amount of painfully bad decisions and long years that lay ahead of them.

But I was also struck by the fact that I was in a middle seat with a 70-pound little girl sitting in the window seat and another in the aisle seat. They didn’t even take up the whole seat pad. It was like flying with really loud Smurfs. At least half of the group could’ve shared one seat. Meanwhile, my adult sized frequent-flyer self was stretched from armrest to armrest. Hardly seemed fair.

So at the risk of being called a fascist, I’d like to propose a new seating regulation: we need to start seating the smallest people in middle seats. Everyone would be more comfortable. Small people don’t touch the sides of their seats anyways. It’s just good, common, fascist, sense. It’s only a matter if time before they start stacking us like chords of wood, anyways, so we might as well enjoy the time we have left.