Imagine if computers hadn't advanced in thirty years. To bring you this article I'd be typing out punch cards to be compiled in a computer the size of a hockey rink.
Or, if cars hadn't been updated in thirty years we'd all be driving behemoth gas guzzlers that sit high off the road and...oh, wait, never mind...
It's time to go. Repeated calls for someone named Mohammed come more and more frequently in the lounge as passengers filter slowly onto the plane. Most of them go to the rear, where the seats are squashed together so tightly you think that the row of heads between the headrests must be those of anorexic midgets standing straight up, as if at urinals.
Interesting fact about this 747: First class is separated from steerage by a row of machines that look as if they were designed by the military to survive a direct hit by atomic bomb. This is the galley, where your "food" is prepared. let me translate this for you: these are the machines that are designed to take every last bit of taste there ever was out of airplane food. Where else on the face of the earth can you not tell the chicken apart from the beef, both prone to tickling your optical nerves with the same pallid gray after resting dryly in an aluminum airline tray?
Despite the fact that it's November--off season for most--the plane seems like it is stuffed full of people and their small children. There certainly are many of the little tykes. Two in front of me and two behind. I have a gift for attracting them.
The little boy in front of me is a screamer. I surmise this even before he begins to warm up. I can spot one a mile away. Still, I can't imagine what evolutionary advantage it is to be able to scream your head off for four straight hours at 30,000 feet. God works in mysterious ways.
After take off, my little intuition becomes all too real; when he's not screaming, our little devil is dangling his body over the back of his seat like a newt climbing down a wall. I try to keep him from slithering into our row (and the two Germans beside me help as well) and much progress is not being made, but at least we seem to have stopped his advance. I find that there is something mucus-like on his hands. I hope it's snot what I think it is.
As a diversion I focus what's left of my attention on the man in front of me across the aisle. Over his thick flannel shirt he has on a wool sport coat, and an enormous overcoat over that. It is times like these I can't wait to grow old enough to need this much clothing to feel comfortable in a cabin whose temperature is designed to mimic Rome in August. I raise a toast to the man in the alpine cap missing its feather, or I would if there wasn't that embarrassing 6 inch sweat stain running from my armpits.
At least Lufthansa recognizes the civilized habit of a cocktail before dinner. Alcohol relaxes people. It certainly seems to have relaxed the woman in the seat in front of mine, because she immediately begins slamming her seat back to its fully raked position and beyond. Here's a hint: white wine goes better with whatever you're wearing at the time of headrest impact to your nether parts.
The problem is, people never seem to believe that the seat will only go back so far--usually until it smacks the next passenger in the chin or somewhere. They somehow feel the need to repeatedly slam into their seat back in an attempt to get it to go down even more. In this case, I'm thinking of mentioning to the nice lady in front of me that she'd need to have yet another rousing go at it if she desired to render me completely sterile by smashing my remaining good testicle, but I refrain--not out of a sense of propriety but rather from a sense that she might not speak English and in any case, I'm afraid my voice will come out in an unreasonably high pitch whine, so to speak.
There's even more of this, believe it or not, click next to go to page 2.
