An airline passenger who was a curse

I have no idea what his name is or where he comes from, but he is the most selfish expletive I have had the displeasure of meeting this week.

I will call him Mr 33C, because that’s the space he occupied on a flight from Cape Town to Lanseria. My wife and I were 33A and 33B. It’s common knowledge that the domestic economy flights are all part of a social experiment whereby total strangers are turned into Siamese twins for two hours.

Really, if the seats were any smaller, one would have to chew off a limb to fit – and not necessarily one’s own. Perhaps that’s the next phase of the experiment… The airline we chose charges people extra for luggage which is booked in.

Electric shock

I have no idea who came up with this idea, but I suspect it was an amoeba during an electric shock therapy session.

It really doesn’t require a genius to figure out that everybody now brings all their luggage into the cabin. Why pay for something that you can get for free, right?

Talk about a no-brainer. My wife and I decided to spare ourselves the pack donkey dilemma, and paid the extra fee.

READ MORE: Face it, SA Airways is beyond rescue

It really is so much easier to send 20kg of survival gear down a conveyor belt and then to miraculously retrieve it from a carousel 1 400km away.

Not Mr 33C. Oh no. In order to save nothing more than small change, he opted to drag a shipping container over the tarmac, up the steps, into the plane, and then panel-beated it into the overhead compartment – filling the entire space.

The result was that my wife and I had to contort ourselves and our laptop bags into our allocated torture chamber.

No, I’m not exaggerating. It’s actually a lot worse than I can try to describe it. My knees and my ears are not meant to be besties.

So, Mr 33C, who paid less than us, has the luxury of overhead storage space, while we are inconvenienced – and have to keep hand luggage by our feet. I think it sucks.

Don’t tell me that Mr 33C did nothing wrong. And don’t tell me “it’s allowed”. Just because the airline allows someone to be a douchebag, doesn’t mean they have to be.

NOW READ: A traveller’s guide to airline price discrimination