Priority Me
Sunday, July 06, 2008
Do you ever sit in the chairs that say "Priority Seating: please vacate this seat for elderly or disabled passengers"? Well, I rarely do. There's no good reason for it really, since I've never seen anyone get kicked out of the area... until this past Thursday.I was flying home to San Francisco after a visiting Sam in Burlington, Vermont. Burlington is the biggest city in VT, but don't be fooled... the place is barely bigger than Palo Alto, and its surroundings are totally bare. The airport they have in this place has, like, 3 gates, and all the planes flying through are TINY.
So I was making the first leg of my trip from Burlington to Philly in a teeny weeny 24-seat propeller plane last Thursday morning. It was delayed about 40 minutes due to rough weather, but the plane took off eventually, and all was well... until the weather radar broke.
Most of the passengers didn't seem daunted by this, but my stomach didn't cooperate, and decided that it was a dire emergency. Within a few minutes, I was locked in the airplane bathroom, watching my lunch go the wrong direction. Unlike a regular sickness, motion sickness doesn't get better after throwing up, so I stayed in that little room for over an hour, until the stewardess pulled me out for the landing.
Only barfing into a plastic baggy can possibly be grosser than the airplane bathroom, and the promised landing took a million years to happen.
Finally, when the airplane reached the ground, I adamantly refused to budge from the spectacular, non-moving seat. They were pretty nice about it for a few minutes, but eventually, they hauled me into a wheelchair and pushed me into the airport. Two stewardesses packed up my bags and followed me out until they could find someone in the airport to take over their nursing job, and finally, in the highlight of the day, some guy named Lamar cleared out a row of priority seating JUST FOR ME!
Apparently, having partially-digested spinach and potatoes in your hair earns you all the seats you ever dreamed of. I'm not sure if this will be useful knowledge t for the future, but hey, you learn something new every day.
Anyway, I sat in the wheelchair for about an hour before getting up to go pee. My next flight was horribly delayed, and for the first time in my life, I was blissfully happy about it.
