Sometimes during the course of flying to and from my job--which is teaching college English classes on board U.S. Navy ships--somebody at the Home Office makes a mistake and I get booked into First Class. However, normally, the powers-that-be catch such inexcusable errors before they go too far and I'm shunted instead into coach.
Coach on a modern, top-'o-the-line aircraft is much akin to a third-world country's puddle jumper flights--only without the chickens and other assorted livestock sharing an aisle seat with you; whether this is an advantage is still being disputed.
Seats in coach are designed for four-foot-tall, 80 lb. pygmy folk who, through a lifetime of communing with nature and their inner selves, have perfected breathing techniques that allow them to go into near-comatose states for the duration of their journey. For the rest of us, our knees are crammed up to our chins, our elbows are smacking into the faces of the people in the seats to either side (because, also unlike on a third-world country's puddle-jumper, you can only rarely get an aisle seat, which would at least allow you to stick one leg and one arm out into freedom), and our faces are stuffed into the back of the heavily hair-sprayed heads of the person sitting in front of us.
Then the flight attendant has the audacity to pop in all perky and such asking if we'd like the chicken or the beef option for our in-flight meal. If you dare to pick one (and not picking one really wasn't on the list, now was it?) then you and your neighbors are in for a real adventure: elbows and plastic utensils stabbing about in all directions, and food flying left, right, up and clockwise (the latter occurring if the plane happens to hit turbulence while you're trying to skewer a hacked off chunk of chicken breast--not an unusual happenstance).
And if half of your drink doesn't wind up in someone else's lap (or theirs in yours) then you should count yourself among the blessed and go buy a lottery ticket as soon after your plane touches down as you possibly can.
Of course, having done your business of eating as best you could, it won't be long before...erm...how to put this delicately? Well, it won't be long before you have to attend to some other business.
A few dozen “Excuse me's” and “Pardon me's” later (all spoken while attempting what will appear to be a tryout for a gymnastics routine at the next Summer Olympics), you'll make it into the aisle, stumble over all the feet and elbows of the people lucky enough to have aisle seats, and wait in line to use a bathroom that has just enough room for a toilet, a sink, a fox terrier, and not much else.
Done? Repeat in reverse.
The indignities of coach aren't quite over yet, though. At the gate, people in coach (especially those unfortunates who were sitting at the very back of the plane) are the very last to disembark. If it looks like one might actually make his or her connecting flight, then the flight attendants are forced to find some very large luggage and use it to block the exit until the threat is over.
Normally, I'm used to this. It doesn't bother me because it's expected. But every once in a while the powers-that-be don't catch the mistake, and I get booked into First Class.
Oh, what wonders there are in First Class.
There are seats that recline and which might even be made of a fake-leather-like material. There is ample leg space even if you have a window seat. The food comes with names like Philly cheesesteak and chicken cordon bleu. The bathrooms are luxuriously large and...oh, wait, never mind, no, the bathrooms are the same size as those in coach. But there are fewer people using them and not a fox terrier in sight to hog up the space.
In First Class, the flight attendant seems genuinely happy to be there. There may even be a pillow in it for you. In these days of troubled economic downturns, a free pillow on a trans-Atlantic flight is a big deal.
But an even bigger deal? Not having your nose pressed into the lacquered hair-sprayed pile of hair of the person in front of you.
Still, those First Class bookings happen so infrequently that I'd almost rather they didn't happen at all. It's bad for one's mental health to be teased with the lifestyle of the non-cramped, non-food-poisoned, non-waiting-in-line-for-the-bathroom expense-account wielding travelers at the rarefied front end of the plane when one knows that the next trip will be back there in coach, arms and legs wound up in pretzelfied knots of immobility.
Nah, that's not true. Gimmee my First Class. I'll take it whenever I can get it.
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If you would like to donate to the author's Always-Send-the-Author-First-Class fund, feel free to contact him. But he's traveling right now, so it might take a while for him to get enough feeling back in his limbs to get back to you.