Men On Planes Part 2: The Re-Angering (Plus a Salon.com link and a giveaway update)

I’m back from Atlanta, everyone! [pause for wild cheering, young girls fainting]

Before I launch into my stories from the plane and airport, as the title suggests I very well may, I want to show you something. Rachel Kramer Bussel wrote a piece for Salon.com about books featuring realistic and positive depictions of abortion, wherein no one winds up with their lives ruined because of the procedure. And she included my book The Girlfriend as one of the three books profiled! You can check out the article here, and if you haven’t read the Boss series yet (The Girlfriend is the second novel and not a stand-alone, but the first installment, The Boss is free to read on all platforms), you can find buy links here.

The rafflecopter giveaway has ENDED! I’ll be selecting the lucky winners from the over 2,000(!) entries. If you’re one of them, you’ll be notified tomorrow, and winners will be displayed on the widget on the giveaway page.

I’ve written about men and how they behave on planes before. I’m certain that women behave horribly on planes, too, but I can remember one incident in all the times I’ve flown where I’ve seen that happen. I must be lucky, and all the outrageously terrible women are on different flights.

My flight home yesterday was pretty much this:

(If you can’t view the video, it’s the classic SNL sketch with drunk business men in an airport bar, sharing loud stories about a guy named Bill Brasky.)

Imagine a group of six or so drunken businessmen, who all know each other, stumbling directly from the airport TGIFridays bar to the plane. And of course, because we were sitting in first class, the drinks kept coming. They were loud and making obnoxious jokes about ordering the filet mignon. They repeatedly referred to the female flight attendant as “honey” during boarding (she ended up working the coach section while a male flight attendant covered first class after take off). By the end of the two hour flight, they were all sweating buckets down their swollen red faces, shouting to each other over the seats (because they were scattered through the cabin), and laughing so loudly I could hear them over the hovercraft episode of Top Gear I was listening to through my noise-canceling headphones. The hovercraft episode, for god’s sake. By the time we landed, the plane smelled like a still and the guys could barely stand up.

At the least the headphones blocked out the annoying phone chime of the guy who wasn’t with the group, but obnoxious in his own right. He had an iPhone and was using the “twinkle” ringtone.  If you want to get a real feel for how obnoxious this was, you can listen to it here. It not only went off nonstop for the entire flight–leading me to suspect it was set as an alarm, not an actual call, since you can’t use your cell service in-flight–but for the hour or so the guy was waiting at the gate.  He blithely ignored it. Now, it did cross my mind that he could have been hard of hearing and unaware that it was going off, but he seemed to be able to hear everything else around him just fine, including the flight attendant’s offers of, you guessed it, alcohol. And if it was simply the higher tone not catching his attention, he should have been able to hear the grumbling of the people around him in the seating area, as everyone kept commenting on how obnoxious it was.

Speaking of obnoxious, our flight was delayed, because the previous flight was late. When the attendant at the gate announced that the plane had arrived, she added, “In order to board your flight faster, please step back and let the passengers deplane and head to their connecting flights.” She made several announcements this effect, but right away, the path of the deplaning passengers was clogged by men with rolling bags already lining up to board the plane that they couldn’t even get on because people were still coming off it.

Like I said, I know that women can be jerks in public, too. But when it comes to taking up space or acting without thought to courtesy to the people around them, men seem to be the still reigning champions, at least where air travel is concerned.