READY FOR BORING
If man were meant to fly, he'd have been born with wings. I'm far from growing wings when I board an airplane. Horns and tail, however ....
An airplane flight is not a fixed thing. Time may vary, the company may vary, stops on the way, the plane, the personnel … But we need to tell our story, so let’s settle for the fact that sometimes a flight takes ten hours. Which is considerably less travel time than what people had to endure before the airplanes conquered the skies. One should, of course, feel impressed and superbly content with these splendid circumstances. After all, whatever would our small-talks be about, if not about the lightning speed of technical progress? Everything is getting smaller, faster, better, more efficient. Yet, I hate to rain on your parade, but I want more. Next to watching grass grow or paint dry, flights are ... well, right up there.
A bored woman is the most dangerous thing on Earth, they say. I never cared to learn how or why. Now I have regrets, as I'm trying to imagine dangerous female behavior on an oversea flight. Would the woman in question turn murderous, nymphomaniac or eat all the small crackers from the self-service? The sign of the times points towards terrorism, I suppose. She will try hijacking the plane and terrorize everybody in it, for no other reason than being bored out of her skull. Someone should probably perform some scientific experiments on this particular thesis. I am just performing the preliminary work here.
A bored woman is the most dangerous thing on Earth, they say.
So how exactly would our heroine go about when unleashing her fatal boredom on, say, a Boeing plane? The machine in mention weighs 300 000 kg, give or take, and takes about 350 passengers, bored or not. Yes, I have checked these figures. When you are really bored, you start to read all the information tucked in the seat pocket in front of you. If the airlines took their job seriously, they would have tucked more entertaining content into that pocket.
Not even the complimentary bag of useful items for the passengers offers any true joys or aid for our woman on board. But where there’s a will, there’s a way. For a start, she would get up and swing the chord of the handout earphones over her head like the whip of Indiana Jones. If she can avoid hurting herself in the process, the crack of the whip will get everyone’s frightened attention, and she might even draw a tiny amount of blood from the chump in the next row who has been nudging her seat for seven hours. Then she will force the tanned and metro-chic purser to wear the fuzzy, striped freebie-socks up and down the aisle, driving him to humiliated tears. Furthermore, she would use some of the complimentary sleep masks to blind the stewardesses, watching them stumble around, bumping helplessly into each other.
When you are really bored, you start to read all the information tucked in the seat pocket in front of you. If the airlines took their job seriously, they would have tucked more entertaining content into that pocket.
All this will undoubtedly be fun for a while, but things get old and so she will move on to the cockpit. There she will pull out the little tube of toothpaste from the freebie kit and tell the pilot to head for the nearest tropical beach, or else he’ll be testing mint gel as a laxative. Or maybe that would be considered the nymph act? Hard to tell what turns people on these days. With a bit of creative thinking, the sleep masks, some toothpaste, and why not even throw in the fuzzy socks, one can probably bring the infamous Mile High Club to a new and kinky level.
Nourishing these entertaining daydreams, one has perhaps shaved off another fifteen minutes of the flight. And there's still approximately three hours, sixteen minutes and forty-nine seconds to go.
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