Another strange seat poaching experience this week! Seated in the A window of the very last row, when I made it to the back seats A-E were occupied by people who I can only assume knew each other based on what happened next. There was a woman in my A seat, the man in C asked if I would take the F seat because it was "the same". I said no, he asked why, I said my credit card was attached to my seat (the real reason was because I object to seat swappers occupying my seat before requesting a swap, but I needed to go to the lavatory and wasn't interested in an extended morality conversation), that seemed to satisfy him and everyone got up to let me in. I put my bag on my A seat and took the opportunity to go to the aft lavatory. When I came out, they had totally reshuffled, the man and the person in the middle seat had disappeared forward to parts unknown, the woman was in the C seat, and the two girls who were in D and E were now in E and F. The B seat was empty (the woman had claimed it with her hand bags) as was the D. So clearly F with an occupied E was in no way "the same" as A with an empty B! I'm guessing the man reshuffled everyone to his preferred configuration but preferred his original seat to a seat next to his wife(?)! Anyway, just goes to show what has been said here before, when a poacher claims your seat and says it's just the same as their own, it's probably a lie, there was a reason they didn't sit in their own seat to begin with...

The final irony was my own lie about the credit card was exposed about 5 minutes later when an FA came back and said a window seat in E+ had opened up and did I want it, I said absolutely and got the hell out of there instantly No idea if they then all reshuffled back to the poached configuration...