My Dear Fellow Passenger

Dave Balter
Balterer
4 min readDec 30, 2024

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My Dear Fellow Passenger,

The first thing to know is, no, you cannot use our bathroom. This is a special bathroom, it’s close to us. It is designated for us. We paid for this bathroom, and I don’t care if you might wet your pants. There’s a curtain, of course, clarifying that you are to trot to the bathroom that’s for your kind, the one 34 rows behind you, the one at the back of the plane. That’s your bathroom, this one is mine.

(so what if I rarely pee on planes anyway and there’s a line at the other one, its my bathroom you can’t have it)

Please avoid reclining your seat back. Yes, you paid for your seat like I paid for mine, but I also paid to have ‘extra legroom’ and I can tell from your seat, you didn’t. I think you have 6" less than me, and by no means should that give you the right to recline, even the slightest. And if you do, would you be so kind as to ask permission, something like, would you mind if I reclined my seat? To which I’d have to accept, but murmur to myself how selfish you really are.

Why does the stewardess — oh I’m sorry, ‘airline attendant’ — have to hit my elbow with their cart? Can’t they see I’m resting here, and so what if my elbows are a bit bigger than average. I do elbow workouts, do you? I didn’t think so. Anyway, if you are going to ram your cart through the aisle, you should apply flashing lights and offer beeping sounds, like you were a dump truck going in reverse.

Also, please set the tone of the 10,000 feet ding to just a tiny bit less of an annoying trill. I am sleeping by the time we lift off, or at least resting my eyes, and that darn ding wakes me up every single time. Also, please put the same ding on silent mode when you’re nearing landing. I get that it’s supposed to tell the help (what you call an ‘airline attendant’) that they are to prance about yelling at everyone about bags being tucked under seats and fastening seatbelts and sir, please close your laptop, which I have every right to keep open, I paid for this seat, didn’t I?

Could you please fix the wifi? It works only every time there is major turbulence, and even then it won’t let me download Spider Man 4. I figure with what I’ve paid for this seat, the least you can do is complete the training about IP configurations. Hell. if it were up to me, I’d put you out on the wing, holding up a string of antennae, ensuring that latency and bandwidth constraints and network handoffs are going flawlessly. Oh, really? To hell with your pack loss and network address translation. Your QoS (Quality of Service) isn’t worth the price of the hard crusted bread roll you serve with the salt block you call chipped beef.

Also make your silverware sharper. I can’t even cut the person next to me with this stuff.

This may be the one flight this year I have to pee, and you have that silly cart blocking the aisleway so the pilot can use the lavatory. He shouldn’t have eaten that bear claw from dunkins before the flight anyway — and orange juice, that’s just going to spike his pre-diabetic blood sugar. Also the way his voice sounds over the loudspeaker is too crackly, and sorta whispery and I don’t even like his accent anyway. He’s not from here, is he?

My dog would like to sit on your legs. You should be fine, stop whining like a little bitch. Also, my cat gets scared in its carrier so I’m just going to let it out for a little bit of a stroll. I have some gemstones in my bag so if you say you’re allergic, I can fix your chakras. I sense yours are really off, you probably weren’t a positive butterfly in your previous life, I can tell.

If you so much as lift a toe before we get to the gate, it’s well within my right to punch you right in the jaw. I’ll pretend like I’m going to get my bag, too, like, a super quick snap of the hand, so it seems like an accident, even if you lost a tooth, it’s your fault, you shouldn’t have tried to jump the line. We’re all gonna get off soon, for real, so why don’t you just keep it together, do some zen breathing, meditate, just think good thoughts and be nicer than how you look on the outside. You have resting frown face, did you know that? You’re going to get wrinkle lines around the edges of your mouth and then you’ll be sorry won’t you?

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