MODERN AIRPLANE ETIQUETTE FROM YOUR PROTOCAL PAL
Some thoughts after flying across the country to move. You try to teach your kids good manners,but sadly, the rest of the world doesn't want to help...
The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control.
Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience.
Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of deportment have not yet been established for these situations.
It is no longer amusing to moo in either the security or the boarding line even if one does feel like cattle on the way to the abattoir. Bovines are not provided with individual boarding passes on their final journey and this is an important distinction.
While it may be individually agreeable to sing along with the music on your I-pod, it is not recommended in confined quarters. This is especially true when listening to Frank Zappa or Pavarotti’s recording of “Un ballo in maschera".
Comparing the flight to a roller coaster ride, raising one’s hand in the air while screaming “Wheee” and young ladies lifting their tube tops to expose their breasts to imagined cameras is acceptable only at take off and landing.
Making witty references to any of the “Airport” movies is completely unacceptable. They are not very well remembered and were never very entertaining to anyone except your grandmother who was never more than fifteen miles away from Watertown. You may compare a flight to the first (and only the first) “Airplane” movie, but you risk dating yourself terribly.
It is never acceptable to attempt to hook up a camp shower in the rest room unless one is on an international flight of ten or more hours. If this is the case, it is always wise to offer the flight crew a turn in lieu of gratuity.
Speaking of tips, most airlines frown upon them. But word to the wise: Personal financial remuneration will guarantee you one of the “good” breathing masks in case of cabin depressurization.
It is not necessary or even wise to replace the provided seat belt buckle with a designer buckle. You will survive a flight with a less than fashionable buckle. Trust me.
Please be aware that many flights no longer offer meals as part of the ticket price. This is a blessing to the palette but perversely and conversely a curse to the olfactory as many have taken to bringing not only sack lunches, but take out food on the flight. You Protocol Pal has been on flights where the ambiance closely resembled a McDonald’s occupied by Hezbollah guerillas who have vowed never to bathe until the state of Israel is removed from the face of the Earth. Their prospects for success are not good. Neither are your prospects for breathing.
No hard and fast rules have been codified for what kinds of take out are appropriate on passenger jets. Common sense dictates that a vindaloo spicy enough to water the eyes of the first three rows is probably not a wise choice. Watching a family of six share use chopsticks to share two orders of pad Thai noodles at thirty-eight thousand feet once amused protocol Pal. The ensuing floorshow would have been memorable even without the grocery gymnastics that resulted from a pocket of hot air over Butte, Montana. I suggest you stick with sandwiches. Perhaps a tasty cucumber on wheat? Airlines still serve a passable tea and this may add a much-needed feeling of elegance to an experience rightly compared to a Stalinist-era troop train.
If you choose to bring take out food on board, please remember that your bag of seasoned fries is subject to the same security regulations as anything else. Any fry more than two inches long will be seized. A fry cooked so long it has hardened is not only a sign of the deterioration of even our most base work ethic, is also classified as a type three projectile. Air Marshals have been known to draw their weapons if one of these is found aboard a passenger jet.
It comes as a surprise to many that even with the airlines no longer serving food, there is no place to plug in a hot plate on many airliners.
Applying make up in your seat is excusable. Applying hair dye is not.
It is not wise to share straws, eyeglasses or bodily fluids (even those in closed, federally approved medical transport containers) with the person in the next seat.
Smoking is banned on most flights. Campfires are banned on all flights.
Simply because you are in the air does not put you in international airspace. This means that gambling, ponzi schemes, human trafficking and unlicensed cosmetic surgery are strictly off limits.
Flight attendants, occasionally surly after a long flight on a 777 full of drunken Australians returning from a Cambodian sex tour, are a highly professional lot. Referring to them as “Babe”, “Sweetheart”, or “Your most gracious majesty, protector of the realm, guardian of the gates of Hades and future bride of Satan” is unwarranted. It is also no longer in good taste to eye their secondary sex characteristics and leer “My, you’re a meaty one, aren’t you?” especially since many are now male.
All airlines regulations revolving around use of cell phones, approved or unapproved electronic devices, and the tyranny of the seat belt sign are for your own good. You may feel king of the hill, belle of the ball, monkey who figured out the femur could be used as a weapon at the base of the monolith in “2001” by flaunting these regulations but your eventual death will only strengthen the gene pool. Please feel free to indulge yourself.
Your entire sense of self depends on how quickly you can get your mobile phone turned on and how many calls you can make on the tarmac. Do not let the other, less important passengers dissuade you from speaking as loud as you damn well please with their glances of disgust or outright stares of derision. You are the true master of the universe.
When deplaning, instead of thinking Emily Post, one should reference Charles Darwin. It is a primordial necessity to be the first off the aircraft. As demonstrated in Dr. Gilbert Favor’s 1975 paper “Trans World Airlines and the Stampede Principle of Survival” the person who deplanes the earliest secures favor with the most eligible, genetically superior members of the opposite sex and that the typical rites of procreation will often be disregarded, especially during spring break.
COPYRIGHT 2010 by Shaun McLaughlin
The behavior on commercial flights has changed since my father insisted on a coat and tie to fly coach. It is not well known that Lindbergh flew his legendary trans Atlantic flight togged up in white tie and tails. Memoirs of barnstorming pilots would include passages about flying biplanes in top hat with his platinum tipped walking stick doubling as an especially dashing aileron control.
Sad to say, these standards no longer apply even to first class cabins, let alone steerage. Please allow me to offer a few humble suggestions to make air travel a more pleasant experience.
Do not berate TSA employees for their lack of speed. Most of them are honest, caring, hardworking people dedicated to ensuring our safety. The rest are mildly retarded and may cry if confronted. Such behavior will result in a cavity search and proper standards of deportment have not yet been established for these situations.
It is no longer amusing to moo in either the security or the boarding line even if one does feel like cattle on the way to the abattoir. Bovines are not provided with individual boarding passes on their final journey and this is an important distinction.
While it may be individually agreeable to sing along with the music on your I-pod, it is not recommended in confined quarters. This is especially true when listening to Frank Zappa or Pavarotti’s recording of “Un ballo in maschera".
Comparing the flight to a roller coaster ride, raising one’s hand in the air while screaming “Wheee” and young ladies lifting their tube tops to expose their breasts to imagined cameras is acceptable only at take off and landing.
Making witty references to any of the “Airport” movies is completely unacceptable. They are not very well remembered and were never very entertaining to anyone except your grandmother who was never more than fifteen miles away from Watertown. You may compare a flight to the first (and only the first) “Airplane” movie, but you risk dating yourself terribly.
It is never acceptable to attempt to hook up a camp shower in the rest room unless one is on an international flight of ten or more hours. If this is the case, it is always wise to offer the flight crew a turn in lieu of gratuity.
Speaking of tips, most airlines frown upon them. But word to the wise: Personal financial remuneration will guarantee you one of the “good” breathing masks in case of cabin depressurization.
It is not necessary or even wise to replace the provided seat belt buckle with a designer buckle. You will survive a flight with a less than fashionable buckle. Trust me.
Please be aware that many flights no longer offer meals as part of the ticket price. This is a blessing to the palette but perversely and conversely a curse to the olfactory as many have taken to bringing not only sack lunches, but take out food on the flight. You Protocol Pal has been on flights where the ambiance closely resembled a McDonald’s occupied by Hezbollah guerillas who have vowed never to bathe until the state of Israel is removed from the face of the Earth. Their prospects for success are not good. Neither are your prospects for breathing.
No hard and fast rules have been codified for what kinds of take out are appropriate on passenger jets. Common sense dictates that a vindaloo spicy enough to water the eyes of the first three rows is probably not a wise choice. Watching a family of six share use chopsticks to share two orders of pad Thai noodles at thirty-eight thousand feet once amused protocol Pal. The ensuing floorshow would have been memorable even without the grocery gymnastics that resulted from a pocket of hot air over Butte, Montana. I suggest you stick with sandwiches. Perhaps a tasty cucumber on wheat? Airlines still serve a passable tea and this may add a much-needed feeling of elegance to an experience rightly compared to a Stalinist-era troop train.
If you choose to bring take out food on board, please remember that your bag of seasoned fries is subject to the same security regulations as anything else. Any fry more than two inches long will be seized. A fry cooked so long it has hardened is not only a sign of the deterioration of even our most base work ethic, is also classified as a type three projectile. Air Marshals have been known to draw their weapons if one of these is found aboard a passenger jet.
It comes as a surprise to many that even with the airlines no longer serving food, there is no place to plug in a hot plate on many airliners.
Applying make up in your seat is excusable. Applying hair dye is not.
It is not wise to share straws, eyeglasses or bodily fluids (even those in closed, federally approved medical transport containers) with the person in the next seat.
Smoking is banned on most flights. Campfires are banned on all flights.
Simply because you are in the air does not put you in international airspace. This means that gambling, ponzi schemes, human trafficking and unlicensed cosmetic surgery are strictly off limits.
Flight attendants, occasionally surly after a long flight on a 777 full of drunken Australians returning from a Cambodian sex tour, are a highly professional lot. Referring to them as “Babe”, “Sweetheart”, or “Your most gracious majesty, protector of the realm, guardian of the gates of Hades and future bride of Satan” is unwarranted. It is also no longer in good taste to eye their secondary sex characteristics and leer “My, you’re a meaty one, aren’t you?” especially since many are now male.
All airlines regulations revolving around use of cell phones, approved or unapproved electronic devices, and the tyranny of the seat belt sign are for your own good. You may feel king of the hill, belle of the ball, monkey who figured out the femur could be used as a weapon at the base of the monolith in “2001” by flaunting these regulations but your eventual death will only strengthen the gene pool. Please feel free to indulge yourself.
Your entire sense of self depends on how quickly you can get your mobile phone turned on and how many calls you can make on the tarmac. Do not let the other, less important passengers dissuade you from speaking as loud as you damn well please with their glances of disgust or outright stares of derision. You are the true master of the universe.
When deplaning, instead of thinking Emily Post, one should reference Charles Darwin. It is a primordial necessity to be the first off the aircraft. As demonstrated in Dr. Gilbert Favor’s 1975 paper “Trans World Airlines and the Stampede Principle of Survival” the person who deplanes the earliest secures favor with the most eligible, genetically superior members of the opposite sex and that the typical rites of procreation will often be disregarded, especially during spring break.
COPYRIGHT 2010 by Shaun McLaughlin
Comments
sex toys for women