I beg your pardon, but you are sitting on me.

We have touched before on the ignominy of air travel these days.  But what on earth should the well mannered mother do when confronted with a person of largess in the airplane seat next to her infringing upon her space?  This happened recently to a friend of ours who was seated next to an individual who was so ample that our friend could not put the arm rest down between their seats.  Should the well mannered mother request a seat transfer?  Maybe if the flight is not full - but these days, what are the chances?  Should she send a letter of complaint to the airline?  Or as a polite person, should she just ignore the person smeared up against her as best she can?

Should airlines require height and weight info and require people over a certain tonnage to purchase two seats?   What about creating a corpulent zone?  Separate seating for ample persons?   Of course if the airlines were to try this, no doubt there would be cries of "Sizeism" and the ACLU would go after the airlines for their blatantly sizeist attitudes.  With 30% of Americans registering as obese and this trend growing by the day - how will the airlines ever keep up? Maybe we will someday find ourselves an a WALL-Esque world where we are transported around from spot to spot in individual barkaloungers?  Perhaps commercial planes will become like cargo planes and we will simply be driven up in our custom fit La- Z-Boy recliner and fastened to the floor of the plane.

In the meantime, when traveling with children it might be a good idea to remind them not to stare or point at the person in the work-out suit sitting on top of them.

Dear readers, what would you do in this situation?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

definitely not say anything. what can you do? how can you benefit from speaking up? unless there are seats to switch to, you only will upset the person next to you.

Anonymous said...

This recently happened to me, and I'm not sure the person next to me felt bad at all. I sat in silence on a red-eye back to Boston in constant, overlapping contact for 5 hours. It was disgusting, and a simple "pardon me" from the gentleman (or was he a gentleman?) would have been appreciated.

kayce hughes said...

I would have been seriously bummed out! My daughter did ask someone once why they were so fat. Wish I had prepped her not to before that unfortunate moment.

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