After the incident Monday evening with the Cat Woman of BART I made it to the airport to board United Airlines flight 222 from San Francisco to Washington, DC.  All I can say is that my adventures in travel continued.

The equipment used on flight 222 was a Boeing 767.  For those of you unfamiliar with this aircraft it is a twin-aisle plane with 2 seats at each window and 3 seats in the center.  I had not flown on a 767 since my trip back from London Heathrow into Toronto. 

As I boarded the plane the stewardesses were NOT telling the passengers which aisle they needed to use in order to find their seats.  This is a bad move for a variety of reasons.  The top two I can think of right now are it will take much longer to board the plane with the passengers playing leap-frog with the center seats and climbing over their fellow passengers and it causes those unfamiliar with twin-aisle aircraft to sit in the wrong seats.

What happened with me is a prime example of this.

I made it to my assigned seat of 30F where I found a mother and her less than 6-month old baby camped out in my seat.  I politely told her that she was sitting in my assigned seat.  Her response?  “I am assigned seat 30D which is on the aisle.”  OK no problem, I simply pointed out to her that this is a twin-aisle aircraft and that her seat was in this row on the other aisle.  She insisted that she was sitting in 30D.  I pointed out to her that seats A&B were on the other side of the plane on the window, the aisle was 30C, and that 30D was the seat on the other aisle, 30E was the center seat, and 30F was where she was sitting, 30G was the aisle I was standing and and 30H and 30I were the window seats directly behind me.  She still persisted.  At this point I said, “Fine, I’m traveling alone and will sit in your seat.”

What is it with parents and a sense of entitlement to do whatever they want to regardless of what their paperwork says and in the face of obvious error?  This isn’t the first instance of this I’ve run into.

I settled into seat 30D (grrr…) and decided I would try to get some sleep on the flight as I was planning to go to work the following afternoon.  The plane departed SFO 20-minutes late which was to be expected considering the dumb stewardesses decided to gossip for 40 mintues while the plane was loading and not help the passengers figure out where their seats were resulting in my 30D/30F mixup.

Then it started.  That’s right the child of the woman that I was working out the seat problem with started screaming its head off.  Prior to this I had not noticed the other FIVE under 6-month old children seated around me.  When her kid went off it started a chain-reaction.  This went on for FIVE hours.

I’m telling you, by the third hour I was ready to take those damn kids and flush ‘em down the lavatory toilets. 

Since it is the season for constitutional amendments I have one to propose (are you listening Congress?) – Children that have not attained the age of at least 3 years are prohibited from flying on red-eye flights. This will be much more useful than the stupid marriage or flag burning amendments that were proposed in the past month.

On a side note I’m off to Washington, DC tonight for the 4th of July holiday.  I’ll be back on the 5th with more to write about.  Perhaps you’ll hear from me on Monday… We’ll see.