This NYT article struck a chord with me:
WHAT is it about flying in an airplane that seems to remind some passengers of a church confessional?
I remember flying overnight from New York to London next to a dour-looking middle-aged man who kept his peace until his second Scotch. Which is when he revealed that he was a civil engineer. A very, very unhappy civil engineer.
“My profession gets no respect,” he griped. “We design all your bridges and roads, but when do you hear anything about a civil engineer?”
He didn’t wait for an answer.
“That’s right,” he continued, “only when a bridge collapses! And why should I be blamed when the contractor probably chose the lowest bidder?”
…
Another seatmate, a young Navy enlisted man, spent the first several hours of a transcontinental flight studying a book whose pages contained all kinds of triangles, arrows and symbols. He closed the book as our plane began descending to land and spoke to me for the first time.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he confided in a low voice, “but I am actually flying the plane.”
It all had something to do with an arcane kind of witchcraft, the key to which was in the book he held closely, he said. I hoped his job in the Navy involved a desk, not weapons.
I don’t fly nearly as much as the author, but I must be a magnet for this kind of behavior. I’ve had a 13 year old girl brag to me about making out with restaurant valets, a Japanese emigrant to America tell me about her 50 year long marriage to an Army officer, a half-Japanese chemist talk of suing to protect his farmland near Narita Airport, and several others who for some reason thought I was just the right person to tell about their problems. It would be one thing if I actually made friends with someone on a flight, but in these cases I always end up feeling used like the proverbial hole in the ground. Sometimes it is marginally interesting to hear some random person’s whole life story, but it almost never cancels out what I lose in reading or sleep time. People should really just keep their mouths shut unless they actually know how to have a conversation.
I had an air force mechanic sitting next to me on a flight from Japan to the U.S. Just after take off from KIX one of the engines caught fire. For the next ten minutes or so – until we turned around, this guy just kept repeating “That wasn’t supposed to happen… That wasn’t supposed to happen.” Not particularly reassuring.
Adamu, I swear there’s no hijacking going on here. 😉
I thought I had it bad until I got the middle seat between a skinny guy, quintessential Man in the Grey Flannel Suit, in the window seat and an overly-gregarious guy on the aisle, who asked what his seatmates did. The poor sap in the window seat grimaced as soon as he answered that he worked for the CIA.
It turns out he translated and summarized French newspapers and other periodicals while sitting in an office in Virginia, but that didn’t stop Mr. Aisle-seat from spending what felt like hours leaning over me to pester this poor translator for secret dirt he didn’t have. (Hell, even if he had known something, why would he spill the beans to some slob on a Northwest flight?)