accusations flying

(I don't know these guys)

I was assigned 14C, an aisle seat. I saw row 12, counted two more, and sat down. In the wrong seat. (There is no row 13; some forms of bad luck are just that easy to avert.) I changed seats and settled in… until another passenger came along and asked me to surrender my seat on the aisle to her and all her zillion carry-on and Duty Free bags.

It seemed a good enough idea. I moved over to the center seat, steering clear. The woman directly in front was not so lucky, for it was upon her head that my fellow passenger’s heavy plastic-sided suitcase came gracelessly thudding down, supposedly on its way to safe storage under her seat. The shocked and injured woman groaned loudly, bowing down and, quite pathetically, holding her head. “A thousand sorries!” the perpetrator cried out, “but it’s not my fault there’s no room for my stuff in the overhead bins!” An armada of air hostesses sailed blithely over; there was nothing to be done but smooth things out. The woman had made a scene, and then she made the scene worse, by attracting all the attention she had hoped to deflect with her indignant accusations.

Meanwhile, the woman on the other side of me was admirably keeping to herself, or rather, to her cell phone. This was also taken to extremes. She ignored repeated announcements to turn it off, obsessively checking her call histories, but otherwise not using the phone for any perceptible purpose. At some point, she turned it off and even zipped it inside her bag, only to take it out again a moment later, while taxiing, to make a call. She had to speak really loudly to be heard over the safety announcements, one of which, of course, was to keep all phones deactivated.

I really admire Greek women for their immodesty about these things, their shamelessness at times. I usually resent them for it, but I see how it serves them.