Jesse Scott Owen

As I began to write this blog post last night, I was on my second flight of the day, from Charlotte to La Guardia, after a long weekend with family in Florida. I had spent my first flight listening to podcasts (which I will hereafter refer to as "my stories"), attempting the inflight magazine's crossword puzzle, and generally feeling like a king—the seat next to me was empty.

I hustled to make my connection in Charlotte and, hearing the gate agent's pleas, voluntarily checked my carry-on. I did this, probably, to feel like a good Christian, or more likely, because I knew my next seat assignment was in a middle seat, and so thought this last-minute gesture might buy me some good fortune, or at least ease my burden.

I came to my row to find a kind-seeming old white woman sitting against the window, and the seat on the aisle unoccupied. I sat and pulled out my book. Soon a young, short guy, I'm guessing from the Indian subcontinent, came and let the old lady know she was in his seat, and then we all got up and shuffled around, until he was in his coveted window seat and she was where she'd been assigned, on the aisle.

At this point the guy started acting strangely. He pulled out his laptop, opened it, closed it again, put it away, then repeated this cycle perhaps four times more before he settled with the computer open and on. I continued to read my book. The cabin lights dimmed. The old lady reached up and turned on my reading light and smiled at me like she were some saint come to inform the world about their personal reading lights on airplanes. I said thank you. I noticed the guy finally getting down to business on his laptop. He'd opened a screenshot of his mobile boarding pass in Microsoft Paint, and was frantically trying to photo-edit the pass to look like he was flying from Orlando instead of Charlotte.

I will admit here that yes, I was snooping. But if I learned anything from The Good Wife, it was the phrase, "no reasonable expectation of privacy." And besides, I composed all of this post so far while sitting next to the guy, and (quite easily) hid this from him.

Anyway, I suspected perhaps he was some sort of lame Frank Abagnale character who tried to edit boarding passes to dupe gate agents and fly for free. If that were the case though, I wondered, why hadn't he at least pirated some old version of Photoshop with which to perform his crime?

It was at this point near impossible to focus on my book. I turned off my reading light and turned on my stories and continued to snoop surreptitiously.

When he had to his satisfaction changed "Charlotte" to "Orlando" and "CLT" to "MCO" on the pass he started taking photos of the laptop screen and trying to filter the photos so that they appeared...real? At this point his behavior was almost completely inexplicable.

I eventually gathered that the ultimate intention for this doctored photo was to send via Snapchat to his girlfriend, who he was in some misunderstanding with—someone had made someone mad, I don't know—to inform her of his soon arrival to the city.

Here I can opine on his motives, perhaps he wanted her to think he had been in Orlando and not Charlotte. Perhaps he wanted her to believe he would be arriving far later than he actually was, craving a few free hours before he returned to her loving arms. But no matter the case, it is apparent that this man is an idiot, because he made no attempt to edit or obscure the flight number, which I imagine any loving girlfriend would Google at least for flight updates, letting alone the possibility she might want to meet him at the airport.

So anyway, if on some long shot you're dating a short, dumb guy named Manil, and you somehow haven't yet noticed that he is lying to you, here's a heads-up, and I recommend you dump his broke ass. But I would be so grateful if you would, for my sake, first explain to him this one thing he so painfully fails to understand:

Airplane etiquette clearly prescribes both armrests to the passenger in the middle seat, as they have neither the luxury of a window to look out from nor a wall to lay against, and they are not afforded the freedom of an aisle seat, to move at their leisure and also to, when appropriate, set one leg slightly out into the aisle. Because of this gross lack of even the possibility of comfort, it is only right that the middle-seated be given priority when it comes to armrests, not just for their convenience but also to admit them some semblance of agency, agency which was so violently stolen from them when their seat assignment was first given.

That's all.