Return your seats to the upright position

So I saw this story about a fat guy on Air France today. Since just this week I made a whirlwind tour of airports - St. Louis, Houston, Anchorage, Seattle, back to Houston, and home again to St. Louis - all in the space of about thirty hours, I thought the story was particularly germaine. For those too lazy to take a break and read the story linked above, here's the gist:

Some big fat guy tried to get on a flight and the French ticket agent - normally such a caring and polite breed - told him that if you take up two seats, you have to pay for two seats. The fat guy got his feelings hurt, naturally, and is suing the airline. Probably the ticket agent didn't explain that if you buy two tickets, you get two meals. It's a win-win, really. But I digress.

This whole mess about charging fat guys extra because they take up too much space is a slippery slope, if you think about it. I can already see the next step - making skinny guys share their seat with someone else. I mean how can airlines justify giving some beanpole an entire seat when there's plenty of room left over for another skeleton or an unaccompanied minor (if the parents were there they'd probably object, the big whiners).

And I think this is what happened to me on my flight from Anchorage to Seattle, and continuing on Houston. Because I am of above average height, I usually try to get an exit row seat so I have a little extra room. but on this particular trip I was travelling with two kids - mine, it turns out - and they aren't allowed in the exit rows. So I wedged myself into the less-than-generous normal seat, and no sooner did we get up to cruising altitude, than the woman in front of me reclined her seat as far back as it would go. She was completely undeterred by the howls of pain which originated in my kneecaps, moved past my vocal chords, and escaped from my mouth. She was back far enough that while I was reading my book, I kept choking on her hair. She was very nearly lying in my lap. The side effect of this was that since I had to rearrange myself to accomodate her, every time the flight attendant came by with a cart of some sort, she either ran over my foot, banged me in the knee, or both.

What really annoyed me, though, was that when her meal came, she left the seat back in the reclined position! It just seems spiteful, really. She's doing extra work to sit up and eat, just so she can reserve her spot in my lap. I guess she was afraid someone else might come and sit there.

After the meal was over, she actually tried to get the seat down farther. Fortunately for my groin, the seat had its mechanical limits. She seemed disappointed, looking up at me from my lap. "Sorry, sweetheart," I told her. "I paid for the whole seat."

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After we got to Houston, having just missed our connection to St. Louis - literally by seconds (thanks a lot, Continental) - we got to sit at George Bush International Airport for about 4 hours. While we were waiting, I eventually needed to visit the restroom. When I entered, what I found there horrified me on many different levels. Seated in the first stall, trousers bunched at his ankles, was a man conducting business both on the toilet and on the cell phone, simultaneously. I have to wonder if the other party to the cell phone deal was aware that he didn't have his colleague's undivided attention. I mean honestly, there is such a thing as too much connectivity, isn't there? There's a reason pay phones never really caught on in the john. Just because you can make a call there, doesn't mean you should. And to actually conduct business like that? "Yeah, Phil, I'll get those contracts...right...over..." his voice morphing into a strained grunt. Classy.