Unwanted Seat Mate – The Weird Side of the Internet

Unwanted Seat Mate – The Weird Side of the Internet – by Liam Sweeny.

There are lots of horror stories about airplane rides. Some are about the omnipresent dangers of crashes, both in air and on the ground, although those are only horror stories for survivors. And there’s all that can happen inside the cabin, from bad actors with box cutters to contagious pathogens to just people being freaky and weird. But on a layover flight to Doha, Qatar, Mitchell Ring and Jennifer Colin had a story that would raise the dead… well, they could’ve hoped.

To start with, there were a number of free seats throughout the plane, or at least a few; that’s important. So it was a 14 hour flight from Melbourne, Australia to Doha, which, for the couple, was a layover flight to a vacation in Italy. Ten of those hours were uneventful, nigh pleasant. Ring, a nervous flyer, wasn’t even nervous. Then a woman collapsed.

She was a large woman; this is also important, and in no critical way, as I am a large man, and I must type in solidarity. But she was a large woman. And try as the attendants did, she did not make it. Point of clarification, if you have four hours to go at 40,000 feet and you need CPR, the odds are not in your favor.

They tried to move her to business class, which must have been empty, but they had to settle for propping her up in the seat next to Ring and Colin, with a blanket over her.

Riding with a corpse for four hours. I’m not sure exactly what phobia you end up with after that. And like I said, there were open seats. Why they didn’t let the couple move is beyond the scope of this commentary. Probably within the scope of a lawsuit against the airline. I don’t know about pain, but they could score some cash for suffering at least.

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