No, I just speak pseudo-Chinese to absurd people like that (which I'm very good at doing, for I spent time in Hong Kong when I was very little; I only regret not being able to speak the language properly). It also works against telephone marketing, people begging on trains to fund their drug taking habits, and people trying to sell you things on the street.

Last October, I didn't pay for seat reservations for my partner and myself. So, we found ourselves split into different seats and rows, which struck me as odd as we were on a single PNR. But we had no problem sitting separately on a 4h flight. As it happened, we had to do quite a bit of shifting about at the request of similarly separated families, but we never asked if anyone else could shift for us. Didn't seem worth the hassle. The airline was DE (Condor) and the city pair was Lanzarote (ACE to Hannover (HAJ).