I flew back on a redeye last Friday night from doing business in LA (working on another episode of “Young Justice”). I like redeyes. I can usually sleep on them, so the flight becomes effectively instantaneous and I don’t waste a whole day traveling.
On this particular flight, there was a mom with a a little boy, a little over a year old, seated directly behind me. He started crying from the moment they sat down.
And he didn’t…stop. Not through the opening announcements. Not through take off or travel. His voice penetrated my noise-killing earphones with ease.
He wasn’t in pain. He wasn’t hungry. He just didn’t want to sit still. At all. But the crew didn’t want him tearing up and down the aisle for obvious reasons.
And on the rare occasions when he did stop crying and I would start to drift asleep, he’d start kicking the back of my seat and wake me up. I didn’t say anything because I figured the mother had enough problems. And then at one point he stopped kicking my chair AND he was quiet, so I actually fell asleep. This lasted five minutes as I was violently awoken by the screaming match between the woman seated next to me and the boy’s mother because the kid had started kicking HER seatback and she chose not to take it in stride.
At the end of the flight, I gently suggested to the haggard mother the advantages of Children’s Dramamine before a lengthy night flight. She said wearily, “I tried it. It just made him MORE active.”
I shudder to think what THAT flight was like.
Feel free to use this space for your traveling horror stories.
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