Strange things happen on long-haul flights. Photo: Rudi Suardi.
I had the strangest thing happen to me on a recent long-haul flight. I dropped my eye mask on the ground during meal service and when I went to retrieve it, it was gone. I looked everywhere, on my hands and knees.
It was a bit of a sentimental object for me – a novelty mask with big eyes embroidered on it, which my mother gave me before my first solo overseas trip a decade ago. It wasn’t a big deal, but I mentioned it to the stewards when they passed and asked them to watch for it. One of them paused and frowned.
“The eye mask with the eyes on it?” he said. “I just saw that on the ground a moment ago…”
I turned to the passengers behind me and asked them if they had noticed it, and both noted that they had also seen it. We were all puzzled. Where could it have gone?
Then, a few moments later, the girl behind me tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to the passenger across the aisle from her. There, tucked in among all of her things in the seat pocket, was my eye mask. I looked at the lady seated there, who was now fast asleep, her own eye mask in place. I silently retrieved my mask, put it on, and went to sleep. But I kept thinking, how strange. Did she pick it up by accident? Had she meant to hand it in? Or, more oddly … was she stealing my eye mask despite me visibly searching up and down the aisle for the past 20 minutes?
It was one bizarre moment in what became a flight of weird passenger behaviour. In the first leg, a man sat beside me, his family across the aisle. He put his blanket over his head, and when I asked him to let me out for the bathroom, he peeked his head out and laughed. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m hiding from my children.” I was bemused, especially given I was hearing his wife spend the entire flight trying to wrangle the kids – while their father was apparently hiding next to them, refusing to help.
Later, on the next leg, when we were disembarking, the woman beside me got changed in full view of the whole cabin – standing in her underwear, changing as though she were in her own home. Odd, I thought.
When I was chatting about this with some fellow travellers later, one friend told me that on her flight, she was seated next to two primary school-aged children … whose parents had seated themselves way up the cabin. Who does that? Leaves their children to a stranger instead of splitting up and sitting with one child each? It’s like people just lose some sense of social contract in the suspension of the plane.
I get it – long flights suck. You enter into a sort of zombie state, shovelling plane food into your mouth whenever it’s presented to you, whether you’re hungry or not, your body in the limbo between time zones. Personal hygiene becomes a challenge to retain, and if you’re like me, you actively avoid any conversation with seat mates aside from a polite hello and goodbye at either end of the flight. It’s fine – get through it however you need to, put earplugs in and ignore the people around you to the best of your ability. We’re all just trying to get to our next destination.
But basic rules of good conduct should apply, right? Like, don’t steal other people’s items, get changed in the restroom or at the airport, and stay responsible for your children, to name a few.
Perhaps the in-flight safety demonstration needs to include a few key reminders for people as they enter international airspace – just because we’re not on land doesn’t mean rules of common courtesy shouldn’t apply.
