A Year in Pictures of Working

Flying to Boston for the weekend. I'm tall, so it's uncomfortable to fly.

I'm not sure exactly how they decide who gets to sit in the exit row. I'd always thought it was usually tall people, but I noticed that this isn't necessarily the case. In fact, most of the people in the exit rows during this flight were short men, and old men. Basically just people who know to ask for it.

"The exit row," I heard one of them say to another. "A lot of people would kill for these seats."

The tiny businessman sitting next to me had a kind of I-fly-a-lot-and-I've-got-it-down-to-my-own-asshole-science vibe about him. He was pretending to already be asleep while I was still boarding, and only half moved his little legs to let me through to my seat, making sure to keeps his arms planted on both armrests as if to say, "I'm so groggy, it wouldn't even occur to me to relinquish any of this space, but it's not my fault because I'm pretty much asleep, right?" Despite having plenty of leg room in front of him, he splayed his legs out, so one of his knees was halfway into my limited leg space.

I stared at the emergency door latch, and contemplated pulling it open, sucking us out into the sky over Indiana. They probably shouldn't let me sit in the exit row.

# posted by Arnie : 11:59 PM