Beware the 737!

​​                     Books by Patti Liszkay available on Amazon:   
     "Equal And Opposite Reactions"      http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
     "Hail Mary"                                           https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
     "Tropical Depression"                        https://www.amzn.com/B0BTPN7NYY

​
​Beware the 737!

​         I used to love flying. I loved being on a plane, the feeling of being neither here nor there, in no real place or time, with no demands to be met or decisions to be made except whether to have a water or a diet Coke, pretzels or a cookie. It was liberating.     
       I could think better while flying, write better while flying, feel better while flying.
      I didn't need to converse with my flight mates, and I avoided all but the necessary social interactions. And though as a rule I'm a terrible sleeper in a clean, warm, comfortable bed in a dark, quiet bedroom, sit me in an airplane seat and I would immediately conk out.  I didn't even need to tilt back the seat and annoy the person behind me, I could  sleep with my seat back upright while the seat in front of me was tilted into my lap. Go figure.
       And so what if the seats were too small and too close together? I'd just get into my own zone and it was all good. Until the day it wasn't.
         That day, the day that flying turned bad for me, was Friday, October 19, on an American Airlines flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles with a stopover in Phoenix. 
          It was the seats. Yes, I stated above that I didn't mind seats that were too small. But on this particular flight the seats weren't too small; they were too, too, too, too small. The seats crossed over from the realm of snug but tolerable to borderline strangulating.
        This situation became apparent as soon as I arrived at my assigned seat and tried to settle in but could not. I was seated in the middle seat and the seat arms squeezed my elbows. My arms and hands were too cramped for me to type on my laptop,

​...which I couldn't open all the way, anyway, because there wasn't enough room.

    My legs and feet were none too comfortable, either.

       In no way could I get into my zone. And the thing is, I’m not even an especially big person.
      Not that I was overly mindful of how uncomfortable my more sizable fellow passengers must have been in these excruciatingly cramped quarters; I was too focused on how uncomfortable I was. And I let my dissatisfaction be known. I whined about the seat size to my mate Tom, who sat to the left of me, ​

​...and to the young lady who sat to the right of me and who was probably about twice my size and therefore probably about twice as uncomfortable as I was (though she had the aisle seat, which might have mitigated her misery). I whined and whined. Instead of the happy flyer that I usually am, I was a flying whiner.
        At one point in my whine-a-thon, Tom, probably for the sake of silencing me for ten seconds, pointed to the info card stuck in the seat which indicated that this was a 737 model plane that we were on.

​    “The 737’s must be smaller than the standard 747’s.” he said. Yes, I agreed, they must be. And this knowledge gave me a new subject to whine about.
       At last our plane landed at our stopover in Phoenix and we were released from our in-flight bondage, though I was more than dreading the next leg of our flight to L.A.     
​       However, to my great relief (and probably to the greater relief of my mate and fellow travelers), the next plane we boarded was not a flying torture chamber (one of the descriptives I’d been using during our previous flight) but a slightly roomier 321.

   The difference in the seat sizes between the two models, I would learn after some post-flight research, was only 1.9 inches, but, oh, what a difference 1.9 inches makes! For that last hour and a half journey I was back to my old up-in-the-air contentment.
       What I've learned is that, while the 321 seat is 18" wide, the 737 seat is a weency 16.1" wide. In what universe is it right to make human beings (or at least 21st century American human beings) sit for hours in a seat only 16.1" wide? 
          I may never learn the answer, but here’s one thing I know for sure: as God is my witness, I'll never sit in a 16.1” seat again!