It was a crowded red-eye flight from the West Coast to the East, and there had been a dispute about my seat, meaning that I would be required to wait until all the other passengers were seated before I could be allocated a new one. I spent much of this time standing propped against the lavatories two-thirds of the way down the plane, clutching my flight bag in front of me, and jostling and being jostled by the other passengers passing by, which wasn’t what you’d call special for any of us; when I spotted one of the wall-attached fold-down seats which the crew uses for take-off, I went over and perched myself temporarily on it, put my flight bag beneath my knees, opened my book, and from then on harmed nor man nor beast.
Photo by Tomasz Zielonka on Unsplash
Until suddenly, a particularly bossy attendant on the aisle across from me, who had until then been keeping herself occupied bossing around passengers other than me, spotted me from afar and took umbrage.
“You have to get out of that seat!” she shouted angrily. “Stand up now!”
“Why?” I said, because I was clearly not proposing to occupy it permanently and the plane was not yet within yodeling distance of departure.
“It’s a crew seat,” she snapped. “Only crew members are allowed to occupy it at any time.”
“Why?” I said, because it was only a seat, after all, and, despite what Mr. Los Angeles would have you believe, even I would find it a challenge to inflict a great deal of damage on a sturdy wall-attached fold-down seat, simply by folding it down and sitting on it.
Her eyes darted for a while as she considered this.
“It’s a question of safety,” she concluded, at last.
“But the plane isn’t moving,” I said, because it wasn’t, and wouldn’t be ready to do so for some time.
Her eyes darted further.
“A crew member needs it,” she said, then. And, gaining conviction as she pursued her thesis, “Now.”
“Which crew member?” I said, because she was the only one in view.
“Me,” she said, unblushing.
“But you obviously don’t,” I said. “You’re standing up, you’re over there on the other side of the plane, and you’re very busy there bossing ... uh, that is, doing something else.”
This did not endear me to her. She abandoned her previous occupation in mid-boss, and stormed across the plane to stand in front of me and unleash on me a storm of furious verbiage in which the word “regulations” appeared several times and in increasing volume of accusatory ire.
At last, I accepted that she wasn’t going to find herself a more uplifting hobby, closed my book, picked up my flight bag, and stood to obey her command. As I prepared to vacate this apparently holiest of seats at the twenty-first century’s Round Table, I growled – possibly the eensiest little bit less than adorably, but then she had been being particularly unpleasant to me – that “I hadn’t realized it was the Siege Perilous, Sir Galahad.”
And that, curiously, was the point at which it began to get actively ugly.
A man sitting a couple of rows down from the crew seat, comfortably settled with his bag neatly stored overhead, glared at me and shouted, “You’re making trouble!”
“No, I’m not,” I said, because trouble was precisely what I had just stopped making. “The attendant told me to stand up, and so I’m standing up.”
The man glowered. “You need to stop fooling around,” he said. “You’re going to delay take-off, and that will affect us all!”
“But I already have stopped,” I said. A couple of late arriving passengers attempted to struggle past me, and we engaged in a brief pas de trois until we had managed to disentangle ourselves. “The attendant wanted me not to sit in the crew seat, and so I’m not sitting in the crew seat. I’m standing in the aisle instead.”
Another man on the other side of the aisle laid down his smartphone to provide reinforcements.
“If you don’t cut it out,” he said, “you’re going to get yourself thrown off the plane!”
“Cut out what?” I said. A little anxiously, because you never know when the hallucinations will start to set in, I executed a surreptitious check: yes, I was, indeed, now standing vertically on my feet, as my new friend had requested, and yes, the crew seat was, indeed, now flipped up snug against the wall, and safe from the horror of occupation by non-airline-sanctioned buttocks. “I’m doing what I was told to do.”
But the attendant had been given an idea. She rounded on me, her eyes narrowed with inspiration.
“Come with me to the front of the plane!” she barked.
“But I’m doing what you told me to,” I said. “I’m not sitting in the crew seat anymore. The seat is free, just as you want it to be.”
“Come with me to the front of the plane!” she repeated.
“But ...”
But there were no buts. I was led, in full ignominy, and with some sinking of heart as no one yearns to be thrown off a plane, not even this one, in the middle of the night, to the upscale galley opposite the door, the one where the noblest attendants stand in splendor to greet the passengers and hand out antiseptic wipes and sort the souls of the righteous from those of the unjust.
As it turned out, the noblest attendants were very nice to me – as one might well wonder why they wouldn’t be, since for all the force of their colleague’s fury, I was now demonstrably a full half the plane away from the disputed crew seat and standing virtuously upright in my own spanking clean, if a trifle on the scuffed side, flight shoes. They even apologized for the seating confusion, and ushered me to a spiffy new passenger’s seat, which had lovely things like arms and a tray table, and was most delightfully situated in a whole other part of the plane from the bossy attendant, and all ended well.
I learned from this experience two lessons.
The first was that a woman who questions authority is, understandably enough, disliked by the person in authority.
The second was that a woman who cites the Arthurian legend while complying with authority is most cordially loathed by everyone around her.
Funny old world.