I'm going to post this here, though its relevance might be questionable. I don't have children so I can't speak to all of these issues with authority. But I recently saw something on a flight that made me more mad than a seat kicker, a crying baby or a drunken passenger.

I was on a commuter NWA flight from Minneapolis to Lincoln a few days before Christmas. In the seat in front of me was a couple and their three year old (a guess on age). The child was very interested in the lights and vents and was playing with them above both their seats and the seats in front of them. The parents attempted to control the child, but he was obviously pent up and full of energy. The father grabbed the child and tried to hold him down physically. As you can imagine, this made the child squirm more. The father kept telling the child that he couldn't disrupt the other passengers; this sounded good to me as the flight was at midnight due to delays. The child did not want to be restrained, the father did not want to release him. The result: The father began spanking the child. When this produced crying that would not stop, the spanking turned to slaps across the face that hurt ME just from watching. I wanted to grab this guy and ..... slap him a little bit. I went from being ticked at the kid to fuming at the father.

The reason for this story? Perhaps the things that annoy us to some degree annoy and embarass the parents to a greater degree. And, just perhaps, there is a tradeoff whereby the other alternative is far worse than the action taken. Would you rather have a child kicking your seat or crying? Both bad, but perhaps that is the choice a parent is faced with. We'll never know. Compassion and an attempt at understanding would be key.

As business travelers, we often think that the skies are all ours and everyone should cater to us as business travelers. If you doubt that, you've not read more than a dozen posts in this BB. Reality is that we share the skies with leisure travelers, people traveling for the first time and people traveling under dire circumstances. My philosophy is make the best of it, suck it up and get on with your life.

The soap box is now available for rebuttal.