Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Well, there you go

More proof that in a degraded society, bad manners will land you in prison:

I had never before been in a prison of any kind, for any reason, let alone such a filthy, decrepit, Victorian heap of stone and sadism as the Scrubs. That I found myself there at all may be put down to a collision of intractable forces -- first, my own loudmouth pigheadedness, which has landed me in trouble before; second, a humorless and probably exhausted flight attendant; and, third, the heightened tension now common to air travel, thanks to real and imagined threats to public safety resulting from the worldwide "war on terror."

...

My sins, in brief: When the cabin crew refused to radio JFK to see if I'd left my laptop at the gate and also declined to move me to another seat, "an altercation ensued" -- not physical, but verbal, with the flight attendants becoming snootier by the minute and me becoming, well, let's say, more American. I behaved badly in-flight, yelling at the crew, "I am an American citizen! You are our lapdog ally!" and other remarks of a vulgar and unhelpful nature. Very vulgar, I'm afraid: At one point I called that tired stewardess the worst thing you can call a woman -- you all know what it is -- but by then I was in full-blown air rage, something the airlines used to understand but, on the evidence, no longer do.
Pretty Lady finds it oddly poetic, if not exactly comforting, that calling a British stewardess the c-word will land a person in a Deep Dark Dungeon for an indefinite period of time.

5 comments:

Chris Rywalt said...

I rarely laugh out loud when reading Salon, but when I read "You are our lapdog ally!" I burst out in chuckles.

Anonymous said...

Still trying to get out of the "slow learner" line, are we?

Anonymous said...

I've flown with that man.

Ah, thank you for the schadenfreude, Pretty Lady.

Anonymous said...

I don't fly. My arms get too tired before I get off the ground.... (sigh)

BoysMom said...

I don't fly anymore, either. Last time I was eight months pregnant with my second and accompanied by my first, at 17 months. Morons at security made me take off my shoes (which, at eight months pregnant I couldn't see) AND my son's. No chairs available, of course.
I ask you, how much danger is a 17 month child's pair of shoes potentially able to carry?
No, thanks. Nowadays I travel in comfort by car. I can stop when I need to or my children need to, no one makes me take off my shoes, and we can see the scenery. There's a reason there are so many national parks out West, after all.