My flight to Las Vegas left at 6:30am on Friday morning. Who takes flights at 6:30am when they have no schedule or time line to keep, you might ask. And the answer is: Procrastinators. Procrastinators take 6:30am flights because all of the other ones are taken.
I met my mom here because she had a conference and essentially if someone asks me if I want to share a free hotel room in one of the entertainment capitals of America I'll be damned if I'm going to say no. That, and the hotel we're staying at, Mandalay Bay, has a lazy river. The most sacred of all water attractions.
Anyways, about my flight - Though I know that it is truly unfair I have very little sympathy for the plight of parents that fly with young children. Particularly when they are sitting behind me SCREAMING incoherent toddler profanities and kicking their tiny (but incredibly strong) feet into the back of my chair and into my spine.
Luckily it was a short flight and at about the hour mark I was confident that we would make it safely (well, most of us… I wasn't so confident that the kid behind me would make it - not if I had anything to say about it.) Just as I thought that, the kid let out the loudest scream yet.
Hey-hey Excuse me, Little boy! SHHH! SHHHHH! The woman next to me had finally had enough.
Now why the hell didn’t I think of that, here I was throwing desperate glances at the flight attendant, hoping that she would strap a muzzle onto this kid and reprimand these parents and all along all I had to do was turn to my new soul sister to my left and say “fuck dude, enough is enough.”
The parents were utterly bewildered. Oh I don’t know, maybe you woke your kid up at 5am so that you could get on a plane to LAS VEGAS. Maybe THAT’S why hes cranky. Hmmmm.
I did one time have a kid that was kicking the stuffing out of my seat and it was while I was still working at the preschool and I thought, well, I speak little kid - maybe I can talk some sense into this little shit. So very kindly I turned around my seat and said HI :) Can you please not put your feet on the back of my chair?
But you know what dude, that kid looked freaked out for about 2 minutes, stopped kicking my chair for about 5 and then continued like the soccer ball had only been half inflated before I turned around. Now it was fully inflated and I’ll be damned if the kid didn’t kick the chair all the way down the state of California. And all the dad could do was say “oh sweetie, remember that nice lady sitting in front of you? don’t kick her chair” but that didn’t do any good because 90% of the children in the world are, apparently, like wildlife. If you require zip ties to keep your kids’ feet in check, I promise I will look the other way as you apply them.
I do know that one day it will be me, with MY ill behaved child strapped into a flying machine, and that I will be at the mercy of HIS bad listening skills. But at that point I will be the only one to blame as I face the shame of public humiliation. I can only hope that it is a short flight.
Details on the trip to follow tomorrow once I'm home... Thank ya. Thank ya very much.
