Sunday, November 26, 2006

Is this okay?

I'm like everyone else. I've been stuck in a tight plane, with the person in front of me being a selfish twit and reclining the seat all the way back.

Yes. It's annoying. Yes. It's rude.

But does that give me the right to use these Knee Defenders? Little gadgets you put on your tray arms to stop the chair in front of you from reclining.


Oh, the designers have a little 'courtesy card' to give the person in front of you. Sort of a "hey, I'm infringing on your personal space before you infringe on mine" -- and vaguely political too:
I realize that this may be an inconvenience. If so, I hope you will complain to the airline. Maybe working together we can convince the airlines to provide enough space between rows so that people can recline their seats without banging into other passengers.
This is designed for the asshole who thinks the world revolves around him/her. The person who parks in the loading zone ("I'm just going to Starbucks." ). The person who thinks s/he is too clever to live by the rules.

Yes, the insensitive ass who fully reclines his/her airplane seat is an ass. But so are the people who think it's okay to change the rules to suit themselves.

They're all shmucks.

At least in my opinion.

Lori

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Disagree strongly. People are allowed to recline their seats back in airplanes; that is exactly why you can only recline them a few inches. The mistake is assuming they're your inches when they're common inches, belonging to the airline.

The best article I ever read on air rage said that the reason it occurs is that the passengers have expectations of a certain level of service which is at variance with the expectation of service delivery of the airlines. Particularly when you're talking about Air Canada, you're talking about a bus.

A bus. Not a taxi.

Lori said...

ah...'common inches' -- good point.

Metro said...

Don't care. I'm sick and tired of being treated like cattle by the airlines.

Expendable cattle yet, or else they'd make truthful safety announcements like this one.

Quote:
Please switch off all mobile phones, since they can interfere with the aircraft's navigation systems. At least, that's what you've always been told. The real reason to switch them off is because they interfere with mobile networks on the ground, but somehow that doesn't sound quite so good. On most flights a few mobile phones are left on by mistake, so if they were really dangerous we would not allow them on board at all, if you think about it. We will have to come clean about this next year, when we introduce in-flight calling across the Veritas fleet. At that point the prospect of taking a cut of the sky-high calling charges will miraculously cause our safety concerns about mobile phones to evaporate.

Anonymous said...

Well, then, there's the perfect market for a new gadget: The Defender Annihilator®. A heavy-duty little saw that cuts the Knee Defender in half. The only hard part is smuggling it aboard.

Anonymous said...

Oh god, I recognize the upholstery. There was a period of my life I spent far too much time in planes.