The plane truth: Please ignore your seatmate who has earbuds

"All passengers have boarded, " the flight attendant said as I finally relaxed in my window seat. "If you have an empty seat next to you, congratulations."

I breathed a sigh of relief. It was a five-hour flight and I paid Southwest a little extra to get a window seat. All the rows around me had empty middle seats, presumably because business travel (this was a Wednesday morning flight) is still down due to COVID-19.

This was my first business trip since the pandemic. I was hoping for a peaceful flight and thought it was likely after the flight attendant's announcement.

Then I saw the man in the aisle. A late arrival.

He was about my age and a little bigger than me. Like everyone on the plane, I looked down, thinking "keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking. Keep walking."

Of course he didn't.

He stopped, loaded an oversized carry-on bag above my row, then shimmied past the woman on the aisle seat and sat next to me, flopping his elbows on the armrests and sighing loudly. "I barely made it," he told me, ignoring the fact that I had earbuds in. "My wife dropped me off at the wrong terminal. Then I cut my arm going through TSA." He showed me a bandage that covered an obviously bloody forearm.

Yay!

Actually, my seatmate was nice – in the overly talkative, wanting to fully inform me about his life kind of way. Again ignoring my earbuds, he told me about a recent trip to see his newest grandchild, then proceeded to pull out his phone and show me photos. And more photos. And more. He showed me a photo of someone on a canoe trip in Florida and zoomed in to reveal a turtle.

Again, nice guy. Just more interested in chatting up a stranger than in letting me sleep.

I faded out, then woke up after a bit and he began chatting again, this time about his large knife and machete collection. I was sitting next to a guy who was telling me about his weapon collection!

He didn't ask me anything (I would have said I oppose photography on phones and believe knives and machetes should be taken away by the government, just to get him to stop.) Then, as we began our descent, he said, "The takeoff and landing are the only interesting parts of the flight." I didn't agree and he said, "Well, yeah. If you're going to crash, it will happen on the landing." HE SAID THAT AS WE WERE PREPARING TO LAND. I swallowed hard and looked out the window as the ground rushed toward us.

This isn't news: Flights are seldom comfortable and they're made worse when you have a bad seatmate.

Mine wasn't bad. He was friendly. He was talkative. He had a machete collection. He talked about plane crashes as we landed.

Maybe that's the reason the flights aren't generally full yet.

Reach Brad Stanhope at bradstanhope@outlook.com.