As For Those Flying Coach: “Nuts To You’
“Stand with me, fellow passengers! We storm First Class at dawn!”
Nobody actually shouted this, thank goodness. This was just a paranoid nightmare I had, spawned by my first-ever experience in an airline’s First Class section. For some reason, I spent the entire flight feeling as if I were in the Bastille and that Madame Defarge was in coach, knitting.
I’m not sure how I ended up in First Class. I remember the ticket agent saying something about how I had been “bumped up.”
“No, I haven’t,” I almost said. “Not really. Not for a while.” I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about.
But then I decided to just go along with it. Whatever “bumped up” was, I figured it was better than being bumped down, or bumped out, or bumped off. So I let it drop.
Then the flight attendant plunked me down in the front row, and it slowly dawned on me. I noticed that my seat was actually so wide that no portion of me whatsoever touched the businessman in the seat next to me. Why didn’t I get one of these seats that time I had to take the shuttle flight to Seattle? I’m talking about the time an enormous woman wedged herself in next to me, and her thigh was intimate with my thigh all 275 miles to SeaTac Airport.
Ah, but this sort of thing doesn’t happen in First Class. In First Class, that businessman and I didn’t even have to engage in elbowjousting for the armrest. We each had our own, with a thoughtful space between.
As soon as I was seated, my arm resting casually on the you-knowwhat, the flight attendant asked if I would like “a drink before takeoff.” I said no. I was that startled.
Thus began the bizarre experience of getting, for once in my life, First Class treatment.
As soon as we were in the air, the flight attendant approached me with a pair of tongs and a steaming tray of … what? … laundry? She told me it was just for “washing up” before lunch.
So I toweled myself off and waited to see what was next.
It turned out to be a linen tablecloth. I am not kidding. They actually draped a white linen tablecloth, the size of a scarf, over my little pulldown lunch tray.
“Ma’am, you seem to have forgotten my candelabra,” I thought about saying, but I thought better of it.
Then came the lunch, which didn’t seem so special. Sure, it was a nice chicken salad, a little bigger and more carefully presented than an average airline lunch. And the rolls, I couldn’t help but notice, arrived steaming hot from the warming oven and were accompanied with loads of butter. And the silverware came wrapped in a linen napkin.
But, I thought to myself, it’s probably not that much better than what the people in coach are getting. I craned my neck around to check.
My jaw dropped, exposing some unsightly lettuce mulch.
They were getting nothing. The people in coach were sullenly munching on five lousy peanuts. Maybe it was my imagination, but I thought I saw a few of them eyeing my chicken salad. That’s when I started feeling a little bit like Louis the 16th. A horde of angry French peasants spotted him eating airline chicken once, and you know what happened to him.
The flight attendant interrupted my nervous reverie to say, “Would you care for a nice chardonnay with that? Or perhaps a cabernet sauvignon?”
(Keep it down, for the love of Pete. They’ll hear you.)
I actually said: “No thank you.” I was that alarmed.
I guess I’m just not used to that kind of pampering. But by the end of the flight, I was starting to get into the spirit. I actually thought about saying, “Could I have another hot towel thingie? I have soiled my hands, I’m afraid,” but I thought better of it.
Not until the next day did I realize what a privilege this experience had been.
“You know,” I said to myself. “First Class is extremely civilized. There is absolutely no reason that one shouldn’t pamper oneself if one has the means, or if one is fortunate enough to become ‘bumped up’.”
Then the person next to me shoved my elbow off the armrest, causing me to spill my five peanuts all over myself. I was back in coach again.
, DataTimes