ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

This was kind of a landmark day for me. I’m in North Conway, NH on my first solo trip for work, and I also had my first ever experience where I was kinda pissed off at Southwest. That has never happened before, because they are my airline and I love them.

What happened is this. Southwest’s open-seating policy leaves them open to blatant abuse by pre-board passengers who can basically just say they are disabled or something and then they get to get on the plane first no matter what. There are legitimate pre-board passengers who really do need to get on first because they require extra time, but Southwest has a lot more preboards than the other airlines, because on other airlines it doesn’t give you any advantage to board sooner. You’d just be getting to your crappy assigned seat faster, so there isn’t any point in going to the trouble if you aren’t really disabled. But on Southwest, boarding first means having your pick of the whole plane, so lots of people claim pre-board status which is often questionable at best.

So all the regular people who fly Southwest are used to having these obnoxious quasi-pre-boards show up out of the woodwork at the last possible moment and demand to get on the plane first. This is a part of life at Southwest. But I don’t think it’s fair for people to get kicked out of their seats for preboards.

I was sitting in seat 2A, which is the aisle seat in the second row, and we had been told it was a full flight so I was settled in with the other people in my row. But what I did not realize was that a) there was still one passenger who would board just before they closed the door and b) seat 4E was still unoccupied and furthermore c) that final passenger would claim some mystery disability that would require them to sit in the aisle and the flight attendant would then ask me very sweetly to please please please move me to 4E so a disabled passenger could have my seat. 4E which happened to be between two large men, who both looked quite disappointed when I grabbed my crap to move in with them. Not as disappointed as me, though. The bitch who showed up last minute, by the way, did not have a limp, a cane, a wheel chair, or any visible deformity that should have entitled her to steal my seat, which was earned fair and square by waiting in the front of the A-line for over an hour, by using the You’re-Able-Bodied-And-Don’t-Need-It card. If she made it down here and was able to walk unassisted to the seat, she can walk unassisted for another two rows and sit in the middle.

It was a miserable situation. These two guys were just freaking tall and huge even though they weren’t particularly fat, and they could not really help taking up about a quarter of my seat for each of them. They had no place else to put their arms, so they had to put them in my seat space. I literally could not sit up because there was not room for me to do so, so I spent the entire flight to Baltimore leaned forward out of the way of their arms. We were all powerless to correct it. They both worked for the DOJ but could do nothing to correct the injustices right there on the aircraft. See how the system screws you?

When the flight attendant brought beverages she spilled water all over me and the book I was reading, which I borrowed from someone and now the pages are all wrinkly where it got wet. So I got to spend the rest of the flight in damp clothes, trying vainly to dry the book with an SWA napkin.

It’s one thing to have ludicrously laissez-faire standards by which people can claim disability, and another thing to kick a passenger who waited in line out of their chosen seat, just because some dumb bitch can’t be troubled to show up on time for the flight, and then must claim disability to take someone else’s seat.