The Airplane Talker

CK posted something to Twitter this morning about airplane tilt. It reminded me about the last leg of my flight home from Cebu -- the LAX to LAS leg.

First of all, I had a middle seat. Unless I'm traveling with friends, I normally go for a window because I want the ability to curl up in a ball and fall asleep without having people clambering over me. For the 11-hour flight from Taipei to LA I didn't get out of my seat once. That's the way I like it. Toss and turn a bit, sure, but sleep as much as I can. It makes the flight pass much more quickly.

I didn't bother to change my middle seat for the flight from LAX to LAS because it's a 45-minute flight. I can handle a middle seat for 45 minutes. But then this guy sat down on my right.

It's been my experience that "talkers" on airplanes are slightly-older-than-middle-aged, unmarried and usually men. My neighbor was all of those things. And it's not to say that he wasn't a pleasant individual. But my terse responses to his remarks and questions didn't serve as the indication that I wasn't interested in a conversation that I had hoped they would. Instead they encouraged him. (And for the record, when I noticed no wedding band, I couldn't resist sating my curiosity and asked if he was married. In fact, he was not.)

On the one hand, I don't want to be a dick to someone who's being friendly, right? These "talkers" are just lonely people who don't get to have much other interaction with new people in their daily lives. On the other hand, I had a book I wanted to read or a nap I wanted to take. It's not my job to entertain.

New Yorkers, maybe, feel differently about this than most people. New Yorkers spend so much time as a "captive audience" -- because of their daily use of mass transit -- that they observe an unwritten protocol of not forcing a lengthy conversation on another person just because that person is seated nearby. And that's not to say I've never struck up a conversation with a stranger on the subway or responded to one. They tend to be brief, limited to something particular like a book someone is reading. The conversation quickly hits a natural lull and that's the end.

For this flight, for 45 minutes, I suffered silently. But when it gets really bad, I take out my noise-canceling headphones, put them on and open a book. Maybe that makes me a jerk, but according to Dawn Summers I'm the original assface. I may as well live up to my rep.