Rugby practice started this month and you know what that means! Soon my teammates and I will be taking bi-monthly flights on Southwest – the Greyhound of the sky!  The American equivalent of traveling in the back of a crowded truck with live chickens! – to glamorous destinations all around the country. Our sightseeing highlights will include grass fields miles from the city center and if we’re lucky, hotels boasting an hourly rate and Super Wal-Mart accessibility. We couldn’t take these fabulous vacations without you! Boy do we appreciate all you do! That said, our entire hypothetical retirement fund and mortgage does go directly into your pockets, so we’d be ever so grateful if you made a few minor changes to help make our travel experience as pleasurable as possible.

Regarding the “no standing in line for the restroom” rule: I shouldn’t have to be this anxious about peeing until well into the complications of old age.

Let me paint a picture of what the airplane bathroom experience is like for a typical traveler under the tyranny of this rule…Without fail, standing between you and bladder relief is an obese gentleman battling sleep apnea and a senior citizen who needed assistance boarding the plane, both sipping Merlot leisurely from overflowing plastic cups.

Giver that you are, you have deliberately dehydrated yourself prior to the flight to avoid creating a terrible inconvenience for your neighbors, but you are only human. You are also a person who tries to follow the rules. You understand that forming a line at the bathroom would really cramp the style of a flight attendant, who is using what little space she has to craft safety related puns for the announcements and awkwardly converse with the other valued Mary Kay customer occupying her hovel. You also understand that if the plane were to crash and by a miracle of God or LOST, the passengers don’t incinerate or become crushed to death upon impact, your presence in the aisle would surely inhibit an orderly exit of the aircraft. Good citizen that you are, you sit alert for several minutes, neck craned and eyes fixed on the nearest restroom, waiting for the refried beans-enthusiast currently occupying the stall to exit. Only then do you ask your neighbors to please gather their disorderly pile of loose-leafed work documents and pistachio shells and let you out.

These iron-bladdered individuals sigh heavily to demonstrate the great suffering you have caused with your thoughtless and burdensome request, then make a dramatic show of unbuckling their belts, relacing their knee-high boots and filing into the aisle.  Just then, some dickhole from first class with enough leg room for a quick escape darts into the stall in front of you. Unsure of your next move, you linger awkwardly in the aisle and try to become invisible, but a flight attendant whose helmet of hair suggests a brazen lack of concern about CFC emissions, calls you sweetheart (or something similarly condescending) and asks you to please wait at your seat for the restroom to become vacant.

Since you’ve already wet your pants and accepted that regrettably, for neither the first or last time in your life, you are powerless to the woman who doles out your snacks, you retreat toward your seat, only to become trapped behind helmet hair’s cart-toting colleague; now you must shuffle behind her like an enslaved cymbal monkey until she passes your row. The stack of papers has reappeared and become more disheveled, more Merlot has been ordered, and both your seatmates are astounded that you have the gall to return and inconvenience them in this manner a second time. Also, the drink cart has already passed your row, so there will be no snacks.

Please either replace my useless flotation device with a bed pan or allow me to queue up for the shitter. Really, I’m your best defense against a terrorist trying to get to the pilot because I will clog the walkway and tackle anyone threatening to cut me. Get it? Cut me? Zing! Feel free to use that in the announcements.

* The above refers to flights that are longer than an hour. If you have to get up to go to the bathroom when you are traveling from San Diego to Oakland, a flight so short that the plane never even levels out at its maximum altitude, you’ve probably just planned poorly.

Regarding some of your other passengers: It reflects poorly on you that you allow these individuals to fly.  Please pass this information along as needed.

…to the efficiency experts in the security line:

9/11 was in 2001. I realize that not everyone travels as frequently as my teammates and me, but I think the grace period for living in total ignorance of the new security procedures ended around 2004. For almost a decade, you have been asked to remove your shoes, coat and belt and take your laptop out of its case before passing through security. Even if your most recent airplane experience involved goggles and a leather helmet with earflaps, surely you must have noticed that EVERY OTHER PERSON has taken these steps prior to reaching the guard? Please don’t ruin our lives by waiting until the very front of the line to frantically disrobe and rearrange the contents of your padlocked luggage and then walking through the metal detector with a ring of keys that would make an elementary school janitor jealous. If this complete lack of preparedness and/or awareness leaves no time for my pre-flight Starbucks purchase, we’re gonna have words.

…to the geniuses still struggling with the new Southwest boarding procedure:

Once upon a time, Southwest customers created large, disorderly lines several hours before their departure to ensure ample overhead bin space for their coffin-sized luggage. This meant that unless you wanted to be stuck in the back row seat that doesn’t recline, you too would have to stand uncomfortably long before your aircraft had even left its prior destination. This was a dark time that I associate with misery and chaos.

There are now monitors and labeled columns in front of Southwest gates indicating where and when you should line up given the number on your boarding pass. This procedure has ushered in a period of change and hope for all flyers. “Yes we can” arrive at the airport at the last possible minute, possibly hammered, and still get a sweet aisle seat! There are some reactionaries out there who would like to return to the olden days of line cluster-fuckery.  These individuals manage to complicate what should be a very simple, efficient process,

1) by continuing to line up way earlier than necessary. This doesn’t technically affect me, but I find this level of stupidity totally irritating.  Your place in line is predetermined!  Why are you standing there?!

2) If #1 applies to you, you are probably also the person directly behind me in line having a conniption fit because you’ve noticed that I have boarding pass A57 and you have A56.  Thanks for conspicuously waiving your ticket in my line of vision and mentioning your number loudly several times to your wife.  Now I can offer to pick up my bags, maneuver awkwardly around the other people in line and switch places with you so you can get your rightful seat one row ahead of me on the plane.  Crisis averted.

3) On that note, if you are the person creeping in front of me with a C38 boarding pass, don’t think I don’t see you. I spent at least fifteen minutes of valuable facebooking time at work refreshing my browser until my online boarding pass became available to print. I EARNED this A-pass, buddy. Go sit down, it’s gonna be a while. 

Regarding your safety measures: No one feels safer, just more annoyed.

It seems to me that every airport security measure enacted in the last decade has been purely reactive, and frankly, it’s becoming embarrassing. Shoe bomber = shoe removal. Liquid explosives = no liquids. Nothing makes us look more inept than only creating rules that respond specifically to the most recent nearly successful or totally successful terrorist plot. When you roll out these changes, do you think the terrorists are totally thrown for a loop? “Damn, I thought we’d have at least a year of shampoo related debauchery before they banned liquids, back to square one.” That’s like getting your house broken into and only locking the window that the intruder used to enter as a future precaution.

Shortly after the liquids policy was enacted, I was flying to Boston to visit my friend Jenny and didn’t want to check a bag or use any of my precious AmeriCorps paycheck on travel sized contact solution. I decided to put an entire 12 oz. bottle of solution in my pocket and walk casually through the metal detector as if endowed with the same gifts as Tommy Lee. Mission accomplished. Apparently all you need to circumvent the new security precautions are extra baggy Nike sweats. I think this is a good example of your inability to think outside the box. Had I used my contact solution to hijack the plane, it surely would have resulted in the ban of all eyewear; we’d all be grabbing one-prescription-fits-all glasses out of the same bin that has the booties. Do you see how all of this fails to actually make us more secure in any meaningful way?

I do think it’s important to respond to specific attacks, but at least pretend that you are thinking a few steps ahead. Maybe enact some security measures that have no basis in an actual threat to keep the terrorists on their toes. You’re already inconveniencing us, why don’t you ask us to put our hands in our armpits and do a very slow chicken wing rotations while we pass through the metal detector? Then just act very mysterious about the threat this measure is targeting and take people who are particularly douchey (refer to previous section) off for extra screening. Just act like their chicken winging was sketchy; you can even use this as an opportunity to usher them into some back room and educate them about proper airport etiquette! The terrorists will be thrown off by this preemptive strike against armpit weaponry, and I will feel like I am being protected against potential threats in addition to plots that no idiot would be dumb enough to try twice.

Let me reiterate that we appreciate all you do! Southwest, the “bags fly free” policy? Bravo! The abundance of coffee suppliers in airports all across America? Liquid happiness! The fact that you are now accepting credit cards onboard for food purchases? Spreadable cheese is fun again! Still, I think we could all learn a little something from the JetBlue flight attendant (and my new personal hero) who quit his job in the most awesome way imaginable because he just couldn’t handle surly passengers such as myself any longer. Happy passengers = happy flight attendants = you continue to laugh all the way to the bank without having to clean up any messy publicity disasters when your customers and/or staff members freak the fuck out.

Looking forward to a flight experience this season that’s better than ever!

Hearts and Stars,

Marea Blue