We are safe. But not yet quite sound.
Yesterday morning the alarm didn’t go off, my fault, and we were then in a panicked rush to get to the airport. Finally made it through bag drop off, security and then customs. Made it to the plane just in time for boarding. Discovered a mistake on the ticket regarding seating. The attendant who assisted me worked really hard to find us a seat that we could use. She did and we made it onto the plane.
This was a plane we’d not been on before and it was cramped. Really cramped. I sat down in my seat and got ready to leave. A fellow, a good looking guy, came and sat in the seat in front of me. Maybe 10 minutes into a 5 minute flight he flopped his seat way back. Now, I’m in pain and he knew it because I yelped when the seat crushed my knee. He simply wouldn’t budge. It was a morning flight, no one else had their seat back except the guy in front of me.
Not only that he would throw his body back against the seat like he was telling me that I had to move my knee. I couldn’t. He seemed to intentionally want to physically hurt me. No, I didn’t speak to him about this. It’s his right to put the seat back, and, frankly, I was really tired from just trying to get to the airport and onto the plane.
I had to get up a couple times to use the toilet and did so by slithering up the back of my chair pulling my body away from his chair. A remarkable feat of engineering I’d say. When I got back I had to speak to him. I asked if he’d put his seat up so I could get into my seat. He looked up and stared at me, I could see he was deciding if he’d do it or not. For a tense 5 minutes I wondered why he was so angry at me, why wouldn’t he respond to a civil request. He turned from me raised the seat and I sat down. Then he slammed the seat back as hard as he could and, for a moment, the pain was unbearable.
5 hours I sat in pain.
When we landed I was jubilant, but this would turn out to not even being in the running on my list of things that went wrong that day.
