weirdos
 

flying lax-dtw today. bunch of weird-o behavior on plane.

1- guy sitting next to me, with aa ex-plat tags on his bag, sits down and snags flight attendent to ask if she needed his boarding pass? eh? does aa ever require boarding passes after you're on?

2- lady from coach comes up front to talk to flight attendant, with baby in arms and two kids, lugging all their carry ons. tells the flight attendant that the people in the bulkhead row won't swith seats with them. flight attendant says there's nothing she can do, and that it's up to the passengers, as they have assigned seats. lady starts complaining about how she can't believe how adults can act that way and not switch seats with her.

3- as we're taxiing and taking off, the guy behind me is whistling the whole time? :confused:

4- and finally, just gross- after dinner, the lady across the aisle from me was picking her teeth with her fingers and wiping the resulting contents on the seat back in front of her. :eek:

so it was a mild day out of LAX today.....

All this on ONE flight...dang! I would have been looking for the hidden cameras!

A Book For You To Read
 

To the OP: Have you read Whoopi Goldberg's new book yet? I think you'll love it! :D

The Title: Is It Just Me?: Or is it nuts out there?

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Me-nuts-o...4211313&sr=8-1

-A

A-hem. "Stewardess, I speak 'Guy'!"

Was she cute? I'm willing to bet a battlefield upgrade this was merely the best thing he could come up with to initiate conversation with her that wasn't all "get me a drink" or "no, I'll have the fish".

she was lovely, but, *ahem*, one of the elder statesladies for delta...

that does remind me though, the guy in front of me in security was sliiiick and got the tsa girl's number right in line. nice.

it was certainly quite a flight to kick off the year with. :D

AF/CDG does. My last experience with AF, leaving CDG (2-3 weeks ago): I showed the BP at the podium while boarding. Then proceeded into the tunnel, down the stairs for a typical bus boarding:rolleyes:. There was nowhere else to go, into the tunnel then down the stairs or back towards the podium. A rude CDG (ADP) employee asks for the BP as I exit the stairways. She asked for the passport and yelled at me "ouvre le!" (open it!). I get on the bus for an interminable ride to the plane. By now it felt that we were in Belgium. Security guards made sure we walked from the bus straight up the stairs of the parked A320. As I walk in a FA asks for the BP. I had put it away in my backpack and I said that I didn't need to be shown where my seat is, but the FA rudely INSISTED that I show the BP. So there's an example where you have to show the BP a zillion times.

(I was very surprised I was not asked to show the BP as I deplaned.)

UA uses the boarding pass to identify your coat when they hang it up in the closet. Maybe AA does the same thing.

Often on AA the boarding pass is taken for coats and attached to the hanger for identification.

I loved the stories. :D As of late, it's not as much the crews and airlines that make travel miserable, it's the passengers.

Fish? FISH?

We KNOW what happened to Captain Over when he had the FISH!!!

Welcome to LA

Not overly weird, but... umm... yeah, well, the guy next to me on Sunday's flight was using the free wi-fi access to surf his Swinger Lifestyle site. Not exactly surfing pron, but some of those pics were pretty darn close. Made it awful tough to read my book. :D

OP - thank you for sharing. It makes me happy to be sitting in my home office right now. After four weeks with only one short r/t flight (in a single day) I have forgotten about boarding madness.

Extra kudos on the thread title.

AS this is not a DL specific subject I am moving this thread over to TravelBuzz. However if we had an "Outer Limits" forum on FT this thread would be right at home there. :)

RSSrsvp - Moderator

+1

I was expecting some lurid tale of Chester the Molester doing what he does best (or is that worst)?? :eek:

IMO most of what was describes falls more into the "eccentricity" category (except for the last, which falls under "disgusting slob").

When I was in college I worked in a department store, and we had some "regulars" who fit somewhere in the eccentric-weird scale. Some examples:

• The Basket Lady - female customer who would come in weekly. She headed for the wicker department on the third floor, gather some baskets and other items, sit on the floor, and talk to the wicker items while gently stroking them. After about ten minutes, she'd pick two items and pay and leave.
• The Whistler - male customer who would come a couple times a week. He would ride escalators up to three, then walked through each department while whistling musical tunes. He would then ride to the second and floors and repeat his walk through those floors. He could actually whistle pretty well, and his whistling volume was moderate, so no one paid him any mind.
• The Dog Lady - fiftyish lady with a terrier dog. She would make repeated trips on the various escalators , sitting the dog on the steps and saying things like "whee!" and "there we go" to the dog as they completed each trip. Lady and dog would complete about 30 trips before they had their fill, and moved on.
• The Widow - A couple in their late 60s to early 70s would come into the store's restaurant (which served quite good food) every Monday for dinner. They always asked for a friend of mine, Doreen, to be their waitress. The couple suddenly stopped coming in; then a few months later, the woman returned by herself. Before Doreen could inquire about the husband, the woman began to speak to the empty chair next to her. She then ordered two dinners. Doreen asked the woman if she wanted the second one packaged to go, but the woman said to serve it as usual. The woman ate her dinner, occasionally asking her imaginary companion why he wasn't eating, then at the end, she asked Doreen to wrap the food to go, stating that "he's not hungry right now". She then departed with her food parcel in tow, leaving a generous tip. This pattern was repeated every Monday for about three months, then the woman disappeared and was never seen again.

I'm not sure how AA handles coats. a long time ago, Delta boarding passes had a little hold punched in the smaller part (the side you would keep). The FAs would then collect your BP stub along with your coat and thread the stud through the hanger. That way, they knew which coat was yours.

BA also uses the BP for identifying the coat owner. They do a good job of returning the BP, as the BPs are important for getting past lounge dragons, especially at LHR.

AA does not use this system (at least not on flights I've been on) - often, their hangers have a little white tag tied to the hook, on which the cabin staff member writes the seat number (although just as often the hangers are missing the tags).

I agree this was a very disappointing post. If you're going to post something about "weirdoes," I want to hear about a cat lady with her charge tied down in a pram (but I could settle for a Basket Lady), crazy ned the wino (not the drunk reject from Jersey Shore - god, don't they have greyhound anymore?), the asian (japanese) elderly immigrant who still thinks the war is going on, and all the other things that I hear goes on in coach - and I will now see now that my home airport no longer has 2-cabin service.

I can get all the stuff Ed mentioned in the Skyclub and First.

UA does the same thing, and still has the hole if the BP is cardstock. If the BP is on chickin toilet paper, you have to tear the hole yourself.

The really scary part here, if I read this post correctly, is that she wiped her fingers on the back of the seat in front of her, regardless of what was on them, and then put them in her mouth.

On BA, the cabin staff tears a small hole to attach the cardstock BP to the hanger (at least on my last two longhaul flights) . They do seem to be careful not to tear near the barcode, as that is what the dragons will scan at the lounge entrance.

I feel so lucky that I rarely find wierdos on board any more. I wonder why, but basically I am just happy to be free of all that.

Baring the normal antiaerosocial misbehavior, I have seen the trashbag carryon "suitcase" (dropped in a F-class locker while the traveler went to the back of the plane, naturally), and a first timer who really totally freaked and had to be talked down (to her seat) but no Times Square caliber stuff.

I think we've all seen annoying behavior. But thanks to the cost of air travel, preemptive FAs, and perhaps the understanding that the only way out gives you a 30,000 ft first step straight down, keeps the freaks out of the picture or otherwise keeps their inner weirdos in check. We so rarely see white coat and butterflynet material, just "Passenger 1A/DYKWIA", the grandma who's flying for the first time who tells you about all her operations, little Braeddyn's first trip to Disneyworld and in the old days, hijackers.

For for all the rest there is interstate bus service.

And we flyers are no doubt all the more poorer for it.

Nice! :D

"Weirdo" is in the eye of the beholder...

To some, anyone who flies SAN-PHX-PHL-PHX-SAN within 24 hours "just for the miles" is a weirdo. :p

What's weird about that? She's just trying to build up her immune system. :D

What was the pick-up line? "So... now that you've seen me naked and all, don't you think you owe me dinner?"

I think it was just the confidence- he just sidled right up reaaally close and opened with "how you doin' girl?", all before handing over his bp. He wasn't the best looking guy (to my straight eye) and super short, but was a bit of a hipster. She takes a step back, eye-scissors him up and down, makes small talk, and asks him to take her number and text her. :cool:

Mostly unventful so far today... still have atl-lax though. :D

A few years back I had a very respectable 60ish man sitting next to me headed to SFO. He struck up a conversation then mentioned very casually, "All these ***'s in San Francisco are going to burn in ***. It's in the bible, you know". I thought, how do I always get stuck next to the whack job...

On Amtrak, I had a seatmate that mentioned he liked to pray a lot, and that he might speak in tongues. Fortunately this was just a 90 minute run, not cross-country. I was a little disappointed; he didn't actually speak in tongues while I was there -- maybe I should have asked him to. :p

I also wonder if it was just a gambit to get an open seat next to himself.