Thanks as always to The Other McCain for the Rule Five links!
Just in case you needed reminding that people are assholes, read this. Excerpt (odd-ball Canuck spelling reproduced verbatim):
Shawn Kathleen became so annoyed by rude passengers while working as a flight attendant in the U.S. that she started writing about them in a blog.
Many people didn’t believe her stories — until she also started posting photographic evidence.
She was fired in 2013 — she believes because her employer discovered she was behind the blog.
But the job loss didn’t end the Ohio resident’s mission to expose bad behaviour on planes. Instead, the blog morphed into an Instagram site called PassengerShaming, which has more than 522,000 followers.
Based on photo contributions from air travellers and flight staff worldwide, the site shows it all: passengers making out in their seats, clipping nails and nose hairs, tossing garbage on the floor, flying shirtless and even watching porn on their electronic devices.
And yes, people are assholes.
I’ve seen the whole run of the kinds of losers lovingly depicted on the PassengerShaming blog; from people with barking dogs to kids that won’t stop kicking the back of your seat to one bonehead on a trans-Pacific flight who wanted to play his fucking bongo drums until I suggested (to applause from my fellow passengers) that his continued health and well-being hinged on his ceasing and desisting “…and I mean RIGHT GODDAMN NOW.”
Maybe I’m getting to be a cranky old man. But when I pay for an airline seat, I expect a little politeness from the people who are jammed in that sealed aluminum tube with me. If this blog can do just a little bit to shame the assholes who may recognize their own bad behavior, good for Shawn Kathleen.
But I doubt it will make any real difference. People who behave like this in the first place can’t be shamed. But venting has a purpose as well, and sometimes it might help to browse PassengerShaming after a long flight so we might tell ourselves, “at least I wasn’t sitting next to that guy.”
