There’s a little game I like to play when I’m flying.
Because I’m a frequent flyer on Delta, I get to board early. Naturally, that perk means I get to toss my carry on bag in the overhead space and my computer bag below the seat in front of me. Then I sit down and watch everyone board and this is where the fun starts.
I like to people watch, playing the human lotto game of who is going to sit next to me, who’s going to head to the back of the plane and who’s going to have to start checking baggage at the gate. I wonder about them in that same way you do at people on the park. That person is on business, that person is on vacation. What was that person thinking when she put on the purple velour track suit? Is the person that sits next to me going to be that cute skinny woman or that overweight smelly man with a baby? Yeah, it’s the dude.
Anyway, on this particular flight, I was doing my typical watch and noticed a woman walking up to my row. My lucky day, I thought. (You know you’re starting to get old when you’re not as much 
interested in the sex of the passenger sitting next to you as you are in the size of the person sitting next to you.)
So this woman takes some cardboard roll and places it in the overhead. It looked delicate and was needlessly gobbled up the rest of the overhead space. I always hate when passenger think they have some sort of right to some thing fragile like that. Three carry on bags could have fit in that space. This is almost as bad as some dolt spreading his sports jacket across an overhead bin.
That’s annoying enough — as I do try to look out my fellow passengers in some sort of twisted way, but then this woman, with her rolled up whatever, committed the most egregious offensives known to airline travel.
She smartly placed her rolled up package of porn or whatever and then kept walking to the back of the plane. Not one row or two rows, but 15 or 20 rows. She had gobbled up a huge chunk of the overhead space that didn’t belong to her.
There are certain rules of etique that even the Countess of New York’s Housewives understand. And the first one is the overhead bin rightly belongs to the people sitting below it. By using up a chunk of space that doesn’t belong to you, you throw off the entire overhead bin continuum. Now some passengers have to push their bags into other overheads and that causes even more to push their bags into the wrong space. The domino effect of bags is overwhelming, leaving passengers checking bags that didn’t have to be checked and delaying the flight.
All because some inconsiderate worrisome passenger decided to put her bag in the wrong space. What a bitch!
But in a society where passengers aren’t supposed to speak to their outrage or get cut into someone else’s space, what can you do?
It’s easy. Even as she continued to walk to the back of the plane, where all of the overhead bins were open and free, I found an easy solution. I stood up, looked into my nearly empty bin that only contained my bag and her giant fruit roll up and started to pull my bag out and then smashed it down on her roll, listening with pleasure the crunching sound the tootsie roll made.
It wasn’t nice, I know. It was passive aggressive at best and I was being a bit of an ass. But the overhead airline continuum was reset and my fellow passengers, the ones sitting next to me gently placed their bags in our overhead.
We were long gone by the time the woman picked up her bed roll, or whatever it was, I didn’t stick around to see what it was.
