airlines

It’s Good to Be Home

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

Congratulations. This is your pilot.

I went out of town on business again and I have to say, I really missed you guys. And by you guys I mean the voices in my head that I’m talking to whenever I write. Well, except for the voice named Garth, he’s a real asshole sometimes.

I traveled to New York again and had the Best. Flight. Ever. It was made of awesome because there was this one lady who had managed to make it all the way to sixty years old without ever riding an airplane anywhere and she was making her first plane trip. Right next to me.

Yes, you’re thinking, “Lorca, you are such a pure soul with such a loving heart for people. I know you made this horrible experience just that much more tolerable for this poor woman.” And ordinarily you’d be right. But not in this case.

If the woman had been normal-level-of-scared I would have maybe talked her down off the ledge or kept her mind occupied for a while during the TWENTY MINUTE flight. Yes, twenty, as in less than half an hour.

But when I saw that she was wearing a life jacket in her seat even though the flight from Birmingham to Memphis doesn’t even fly over a good-sized puddle and when she started this obnoxious loud moaning even before the doors were shut, I decided she is someone who doesn’t need to fly ever again. So I helped her come to that decision by making the entire experience as scary as possible. For her.

How To Scare The Shit Out Of Weird People On An Airplane:

Step One: change your ring tone to a really awesome siren sound and play it over and over right up until the stewardess tells you that you have to shut the thing off so it doesn’t mess up the pilot’s controls and make the plane fall out of the sky.

Step Two: quickly download the movie Memphis Belle to your iPad so you can watch the WWII air battle scenes throughout the trip.

Step Three: repeatedly ask in a loud voice, “Did you feel that? Did anyone else feel that just now? THAT. That grindy-sounding bumpy feeling. You know, kind of like something fell off. Are we leaning to the left now? I think we’re leaning.”

I was ready to implement Steps Four through Eight, but then she got all Tourettesy-sounding and threw up in the seat pouch in front of her so I backed off for a while. Only a little while. Because how do you not mess with someone during landing? There are all kinds of awesome scary noises and bouncy things are happening.

I’m pleased to say that I have now done my part to further the railway travel industry or the Greyhound bus people because that woman won’t come anywhere near an airport ever again, and I mean not even if the donor heart her grandkid needs is arriving in a red cooler and she has to go pick it up. More importantly, innocent passengers like me can now fly without fear of being thrown up on or annoyed. Although Garth kind of deserves to be puked on once in a while.

Hollywood, You Lied to Me

ME Overly simple thoughts , , ,

There had better be a Starbucks there when I crash.

I am not ashamed to admit that every so often I get so wrapped up in a good TV show that it becomes nearly a medically diagnosed obsession. I have given up tickets to concerts, passed up camping trips, and even secretly skipped an obscure relative’s wedding (oh c’mon, we all know what a fruitcake she is, surely this won’t be her only wedding!), all because I was going to have to miss a new episode of my favorite show.

Netflix saved my sanity—and all future Christmas dinners with obscure relatives—by offering complete seasons of TV shows on disc. No wait, on streaming. No, back to discs. Nope, it’s streaming, I’m sure of it.

Even better, I’ve learned that I don’t have to actually watch shows on any given network time slot because I can just watch the entire series from start to finish without ever having to suffer a rerun or cliffhanger. So when I saw the show LOST being advertised on Netflix, I decided to never watch a single episode until they had pulled the entire series off the air, then I was going to watch all of the episodes at once while on vacation from work or the next time I’m laid up in bed recovering from hernia surgery. It made complete sense at the time.

Alas, it is not to be. I won’t be watching so much as the opening credits. Here’s why.

I’m currently typing this from somewhere over a stretch of land fairly close to Detroit. I’m in the smallest of passenger planes, wedged amongst a college guy who yells loudly while playing Angry Birds on his iPhone, an older woman who hasn’t stopped coughing since we left Atlanta, and a man who does not understand that the armrest marks the official border between the Land of His Seat and my own Seatopia.

I saw the commercials for LOST when it first came on the air and I am here to tell you with full authority that there are never that many beautiful people on one airplane. They lied to me.

Am I the only one who thought it was kind of strange that the survivors washed up on the island already haggard and stubbly, like they hadn’t shaved that morning before heading to the airport just in case they were going to be marooned on an island and wanted to look the part? And as the season wore on, why were all of the gorgeously stubbly-faced hottie men STILL stubbly faced? Unless someone had snuck a communal razor in his carry-on bag and the bag magically washed ashore, how were these men not sporting ZZ Top beards?

And is no one else worried that by the middle of season three the lone fat guy was still supremely overweight? Was he eating the extra cast members? Shouldn’t more people have been disappearing off the island as he struggled to maintain his Rubenesque figure?

Nope, the reality of airline travel struck and I’m done with pretty people masquerading as actual TSA passengers. It does kind of explain the government’s rush-job to develop, “I can see you naked through your clothes technology,” but that’s a whole other channel you’re not going to get me to watch.