Is This The Most Nefarious Thing a Person Can Do on a Flight?
This move might be the most villainous behavior on any flight.
Social media has really shown us a wide range of appalling plane and airport behavior. There's the seat stealing, the gate lice, the cooking of shrimp and grits in the bathroom on a full Delta flight. But even cooking shrimp in a dirty bathroom doesn't compare to the pure villainy of what I saw on X (formerly Twitter).
No caption accompanied the photo, but words were also unnecessary. The image said everything that needed to be said. In the photo, you can see that the passengers are seated on a flight with video screens (a rare treat in and of itself these days), and the passenger sitting in front of the person taking the picture is leaning back, hanging their arm over their seat back and dangling their hand in front of the screen behind them.
The person hanging their hand so casually is seemingly unaware that their appendage is blocking the screen of the person sitting behind them, even though the layout of the entire flight clearly includes screens on the back of every seat. Why is this innocuous behavior so villainous?
Well, for starters, it requires extreme audacity to stretch your limbs out in a space where people are given very little of it. Then, there's the total lack of spatial awareness in failing to recogonize that your hand might be interrupting the viewing experience of the person behind you. But the most egregious reason is that watching a movie on an airplane is one of the most incredible experiences a person can have while flying. People have been watching movies on airplanes for nearly 100 years, and for some bucko in an economy seat to stretch their hand out and clutch the screen behind them without a single thought about the person watching a movie is truly inconsiderate behavior.
The poster of the photo said they were just watching Key and Peele and weren't as peeved about the whole situation, but the person in front of him certainly didn't know that. What if the poster of the photo was actually watching Anatomy of a Fall or Crazy Rich Asians (two perfect plane movies)?
Clearly, behavior in public spaces is not improving as time goes on. Between this hand covering up the in-flight screen and people treating their Wicked screening like a sing-along, I think country-wide etiquette training might be in order.
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