Tuesday, June 05, 2007

Fly your way

While I am not the most frequent flyer out there.
There seems to be a recent trend that I am caught in whenever I am flying.

No, no air rage in my warpath, and nary been a hiccup due to incident of nature either technical or terrorism.

It just seems that I have to play usher to folks on my flight... or rather, those that decided that my seat was theirs.

The first incident happened on my trip back from France some time last year.

I had taken my seat and started to read.

A rather irate French men was looking down at me as if I had cooked and eaten his poodle in his presence.

He started in his thickly accented English,"Why are you in my seat!"

Of which, I just take out my boarding pass which doubled as my bookmark, showed him my seat number and pointed to the indicator on top of the seat.

That shut him up for the time being.
After 5 min, he began to mutter something about the fact that he normally get aisle seats. Bastard mode now in overtime, I just turned around and tell him that I know that I am right as I checked my seat.

He got the attention of a passing stewardess and got a seat somewhere else.

The other 2 incidents were during my Bali trip.

The first was when I board the flight in Singapore only to find that a Woman was seated squarely in my seat, with her husband in the seat across the aisle. I just look at her and she quickly took out here boarding pass and claims that the seat (52F ) was hers. Now, I hold the same ticket and realised that it is either a printing error or someone really f***ed it up in the ticket allocation.

I did a quick double take only to see that, she is supposed to be sitting in 62.....
And off she went. My only regret is that I should have quietly moved to 62 as the seat at 52 was faulty and will lean back everytime I rest my back on it.

.............

On my trip back, I have to doubled as another couple's English teacher and teach them the basics of ABCs and also tell them that FGH is on the other side of the aisle.

I just hope that this streak of correcting everyone's seating allocation will not continue or I will ask for a discount everytime I fly.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Lifting Experience

Living in a HDB flat is really an experience.
But nothing beats taking the lift.

You see, it used to be that the lift only opens up to 3 or 4 floors of a block. If you are the lucky bastard that stays on those floor where the lift lands, it means that you will have no woes of lugging heavy stuff and that your movers will thank you. If not, good luck.

However, the have the fortune of staying in a newer block of flats which lands at every floor, even the basements.

It was one of those morning that I got in on the lift, what wasn't common was that there was this woman that was standing right next to the door.

She didn't as much move a bit to allow me entry.

Whats worse, she started to stare at me. (Or Glaring was far more appropriate)

And not before long, she started to confront me and tell me that I should have waited till she get out of the lift before rushing in.

Now, even after a year at the new place, I have not met or talk to everyone on that same floor. But I am pretty sure that she isn't staying on the same floor as I am. Given the fact that the lift was on its way down. I can only guess that she thought that I was at the first floor.

Which then I had to just ask her, " Were you getting out at the third floor?"

Only then did she realised that the lift was at third floor on its way down to the first.

It is then it dawn on her that
1). She has been absolutely surly in her attitude
2). She would have been spared all these if she had just opened her eyes.

This is one of those cases of jumping to conclusion without fact or plain observation.