OPINION: Flying is great, but seatmates are often a mixed bag

I like flying. I like looking down at the Earth, trying to identify what I see. I like having breakfast in one state and dinner in another. I like resetting my watch as if I am traveling in time, which I am.

And I enjoy imagining stories about people on the plane. It’s as if I am writing a novel, only no one can review and criticize my work.

The key point being I imagine. I don’t want to know their real stories, so I generally don’t talk to people on planes. Of course, it doesn’t always work.

I was flying back to Alaska from Houston and the guy in the seat next to me kept squirming and wiggling. Though I ignored him, he turned to me and asked: “You’re probably wondering why I am squirming so much?”

I lied and said no.

He ignored my answer and proceeded to tell me his story. He was a traveling salesman of Tibetan beer and had checked into his hotel the night before and taken a shower. He was tired, so he sat down on the narrow ledge in the shower, which was there for shampoo bottles, not 200-pound guys.

The tile shattered under his weight and left him with a cut bottom and a bruised ego. He wrapped his bleeding rear end in a towel and drove himself to the ER. The doc examined the cuts, announced that the man needed stitches and then called over younger doctors and nurses to observe the skill and style required to stitch up a flexible bottom while this guy was bent over the exam table.

At that point in his storytelling, the guy pulled out his phone. I panicked. I thought, no way do I want to see photos of his stitches. Thankfully, they were only photos of the shattered shower tile. He blamed the hotel for his stitched-up butt and planned to file a claim.

I should add that he was so happy with the doc’s stitches that he delivered a case of beer to the ER before he left town.

I had an uneventful couple of years of flying seatmates until last week on a flight to Seattle. The man next to me was checking the texts and emails on his phone as we were landing at Sea-Tac. He was clearly upset at what he was reading.

Turns out he and his partner in the next seat over had reserved a rental car through Turo for their visit. But Turo had sent him a cancellation notice. Apparently he did not pass Turo’s trust screening that the app conducts before putting people in the driver’s seat of somebody else’s car. Turns out Turo had sent him four emails with questions the day before, none of which he answered. Turns out maybe the non-responses led to the failing grade on trust.

His response to all this, which I overheard as we were separated by nothing more than a 3-inch-wide armrest, was to tell his partner what he intended to do about Turo: “We need to give them a really bad review.”

No sense of personal responsibility for ignoring the emails, just as the beer salesman did not accept that it was his fault for thinking a shampoo bottle shelf would support the weight of 20 12-packs.

No surprise that I’d rather look out the window and daydream about untold stories. There are no embarrassing stitches or bad reviews in my imagination.

Larry Persily is a longtime Alaska journalist, with breaks for federal, state and municipal public policy work in Alaska and Washington, D.C. He lives in Anchorage and is publisher of the Wrangell Sentinel weekly newspaper.

The views expressed here are the writer’s and are not necessarily endorsed by the Anchorage Daily News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)adn.com. Send submissions shorter than 200 words to letters@adn.com or click here to submit via any web browser. Read our full guidelines for letters and commentaries here.