People on planes do the weirdest things
Stick a sane man (or woman, but then you're really asking for trouble) in a padded room for long enough and he or she will eventually go a little mad.
The same appears to hold for air travel.
Put someone on a plane and the unnatural sensation of flying through the sky seems to make us behave strangely -- suddenly the normal rules of acceptable behavior are sucked down the pan, along with all that startlingly blue liquid.
Here are some things that many of us do in flight, but at ground level avoid like a Rush Limbaugh fund-raiser.
Got your own strange plane behaviors? Tell us about them in the comments.
It's a food, not a drink. The end. Drinking tomato juice
The singular most unfathomable antic of normally tasteful people on planes is their overpowering need to drink tomatoes.
You don't drink this stuff, ever, during normal life. What makes it irresistible now?
This is a salad product that tastes OK at best, even when secreted within more delicious peers such as avocado and beetroot.
I will concede I have also fallen victim to the "tomato juice conspiracy." However, mine has always come with vodka, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce and a stick of celery (see below).
Air travelers and Italians at the beach -- protagonists of public stretching. Doing squats and ankle flexes in public
Yeah, yeah, you don't want to get deep vein thrombosis, you need to exercise, you must stretch your legs.
I'm not saying you shouldn't do it, I'm just saying it looks weird.
And if you have to, can you do it without thrusting your smelly feet and sweaty behind into my face?
Well, it's 5 p.m. somewhere.Getting drunk at 10 a.m.
Some people claim the only way to get through a 12-hour flight in economy class without becoming a child murderer is to drink. Lots.
Damn right. And if breakfast's only just been cleared, so be it.
If some stranger's allowed to ignore his screaming kids while they try to hack a hole through the back of my seat so they can rip out my heart, then I'm allowed to defend myself (and them) from the rage rising within.
This is not a list of "please don'ts." This is a list of observations, and I have regularly observed myself getting drunker and drunker, earlier and earlier just so the fat guy sleep-dribbling onto my shoulder actually becomes kind of funny.
Oh, to be able to spend a few hours in an Emirates Airlines' first class washroom.Reading bad books
There are two points to make here. Plane travel has a bizarre effect of making non-readers suddenly want to look bookish.
A bit like those salad-dodgers who decide a small glass of tomato juice would go down nicely right about now (see above).
So that's good.
But it also makes real readers, who enjoy spending a few hours each weekend with Hemingway, Dickens or Joyce, suddenly reach for "My Mother was a Washing Machine" or "Me."
Look that last one up. It's real. Ricky Martin. 'Nuff said.
Going to the toilet for a change of scenery
Most of the time washroom protocol is get in, get rid, get out.
Yet there is something about a plane's claustrophobic WCs and their excess of toiletry goods and cubbyholes that makes them appealing as places to simply, hang out, occasionally.
Perhaps it's the privacy. Perhaps it's to escape those life-sapping kids and aisle-yoga practitioners.
Or perhaps it's just me.
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