Air travel creates opportunities for some interesting social interactions that you wouldn't find elsewhere in life. Part of that is people tend to be pretty stressed out, even long before they actually manage to get seated on the flight. What with waking up early to get to the airport with ample time with ample anxiety owing to the uncertainty of queue times that can range from mere minutes to hours depending on the day… Following, you have to get undressed for security, parting your belongings out into different bins while agents yell conflicting instructions at you. And this is before anything even goes wrong: long delays that cause you to miss connecting flights, which can add literal days to the length of your travel time; missing suitcases that turn up five days later looking like they've been through a warzone if they ever turn up at all.
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Yes, air travel is never an ideal situation for anyone. But if you haven't given it a shot, just try being tall with broad shoulders: knees crammed into the seat in front of you, not helped at all by the fact that the five-foot-nothing person in front of you reclined their seat fully before the plane had even reached cruising altitude; meanwhile, you silently battle the person next to you for shared control of the armrest, hoping to maintain enough real-estate that you don't have to spend the entire flight with your spine twisted into a pretzel.
Usually, if given the chance, you'd plan ahead, booking seats with extra legroom or at least making sure you have an aisle seat. But, as we previously addressed with air travel, forward planning often goes wrong. All it takes is one missed flight due to a delay to lose all those seat selections that you already paid extra for… and, no, airlines don't reimburse you for them—looking at you, United.
That being said, even if you're large and claustrophobic and in the worst seat in the world, you'd never be in the right for doing what this guy did when he insisted that a small woman seated in a better seat swap seats with him.
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