This is not what they meant by “standing on business.”
A male passenger who paid a premium price for an exit row seat with extra legroom was appalled after an oblivious family invaded his space for the duration of his flight.
He detailed this bizarre flightmare in a viral post on the Dull Men’s Fun Club page on Facebook.
The passenger had reportedly been flying across Europe with his sister and niece. They had paid an extra €30 ($35) each for the more spacious seating accommodations — which seemed worth it given the four-hour flight time, according to his post.
However, the flyer’s dreams of a comfy flight soon crashed and burned.
“A dad and his two kids decided that the emergency door window right next to us was the most fascinating thing they’d ever seen,” wrote the poster. “They stood there almost the entire flight, leaning over us, pointing, chatting loudly, and completely blocking the space we paid extra for.”
Go figure: the passenger didn’t take too kindly to the interlopers treating his area like a standing room theater in the sky. But despite calling the flight attendant over three separate times to get them to move, the barb-air-rians “just kept coming back.”
“The third time the FA [flight attendant] came to tell them to sit down, she was already pissed off and warned them this would be the last time she tells them to move,” the traveler recalled. “Sometimes I wish Europe was as strict as the US with the no-fly lists.”
Commenters sympathized with the man’s in-flight plight with one writing, “this really annoys me on flights — yes, I get people need to stretch their legs — but that shouldn’t be at the cost of invading other passengers space.”
“I would have asked them to move or get the attendant to move them,” declared another. “Children should not be loitering by an emergency exit.”
“Just call the flight attendant over and tell them you saw the kid trying to open the door,” quipped a third.
Other flyers complained in the comments about similar stories of having their legroom hijacked by standing passengers.
“I paid £400 ($538) for extra legroom in two seats from Manchester to New York only to find the space was going to be the holding queue for the toilets,” recounted one.
This violation certainly seemed like a departure from the normal space invasions in the sky, which have entailed everything from seat squatting to not keeping one’s feet to themselves.
One mom sat in a row with her kids and said to her kids: “Don’t unpack yet,” relayed a witness who detailed this encounter in a viral Reddit post. “Mom is anxiously refreshing the seating chart in the app.”
They weren’t trying to upgrade — but more so attempting to game the seating system.
“They were watching the seating chart like hawks, hoping the seats don’t get booked, waiting for the door to close, because they wanted to take over an empty row!” the poster added.
And the scrappy succeeded with this seat-stealing tactic.
