The Middle-Seat Curse
Sunday, July 13th, 2008I jinxed myself.
Last week, while still abroad, I blogged about my good seats on my various flights between Tampa and Warsaw. So of course, I had the opposite experience on my way back.
I had a coach ticket, so I can’t complain that I didn’t get to upgrade on the transatlantic leg; I’d paid on the way over to get a good night’s sleep and wouldn’t have paid on the way back anyway. But on the Atlanta-Tampa leg, I thought I was once again in luck. This time, I even had a bulkhead window seat, and there was again a nice young businessman in the aisle seat.
However, at the last minute the middle seat was filled (and I do mean filled) by a very sweet but VERY large gentleman who had to be at least 400 pounds. Let me put it this way: if he put on a little more weight he could have passed for a Samoan sumo wrestler.
He was a gentle giant who’d clearly been in this position before. He manually compressed his bottom to fit between the armrests, which couldn’t have been very comfortable. And he spent a lot of the flight with his arms wrapped around himself trying to contain himself into his seat. There was no way around, however, the fact that his shoulders were almost the width of two seats, extending halfway into mine and halfway into the aisle seat.
I spent the flight hugging the window- because if I tried to sit up straight, I was unavoidably “hugging” him. I joked with the flight attendants (in the kitchen, not in front of him!) about wanting a half-seat discount and they smiled empathetically and gave me a free drink.
It was a pretty short flight, only a little over an hour in the air. I hope that for his own sake the large man either upgrades or buys two coach seats for longer flights. But I had forgotten to knock wood when I wrote last week about having an empty middle seat, so I have no one but myself to blame.
- Mary Hunt, editor, eFlyer
