Oversized Baggage

It shouldn’t take eight hours to fly from Fresno to Boise. The actual flying time is about 2 ½ hours but of course there are no direct flights to anyplace from Fresno. I once tried to book a flight to Reno from Fresno only to discover that my route would take me on a tour of California cities including San Francisco and Sacramento before landing in Reno. In all, it was going to take nine hours to make a trip by air that can be done in less than five by car.

This time the flight to Idaho went through Portland where the layover was supposed to be an hour. Ten minutes before boarding the announcement was made that the plane was still in Seattle and would be 90 minutes late. This was repeated with an additional 45 minute wait before we were finally able to board.

As I walked down the aisle to me seat I passed two incredibly fat people sitting side by side a few rows up from my seat. These two gastropods must have come in at a combined weight of 700 lbs. The male of the species was sitting on the aisle. I mean he was so fat that he spilled out into the aisle and clearly couldn’t be contained. I assumed the two were together, I mean what are the odds of two passengersauri ending up side by side as a result of bad luck?

I heard the guy grumbling about the tight fit and saying things like “ gee , they must be really trying to save money with these seats”. And I’m thinking, no, it’s more like the fact that you weigh more than most zoo animals and you’re trying to squeeze into a cookie cutter.

It became obvious that something was keeping the plane from taking off and I could see the crew holding a conference near the front. An announcement was made that the departure was being delayed because of a “cargo loading problem”. My first thought was that this meant my oversized, rolling cart loaded with about $10,000 of camera gear (someone elses camera gear, by the way) was about to be chucked from the plane and onto the tarmac. It became evident that the problem was more of human one when the crew came down the aisle and began ‘redistributing the cargo’, which in this case meant putting one lard ass on each side of the plane rather than having the aircraft lean to the right during the entire flight.

To me, this has to be one of those moments of clarity for the excess baggage. I mean, if you’re so fat that your presence on a plane puts the other passengers lives in danger, I think it’s time to cut back on the Cheeze Whiz-stuffed, deep fried Oreos for a while.

Shit, when my camera gear tops a certain weight, the airlines don’t hesitate to charge me an extra $50-75 so why not charge a passenger more for weighing over a certain amount.

I’ve been saying for a while that instead of checking everyone’s shoes and making people take off their belt before flying the airlines should just make everyone fly naked. Now, this could have some serious shortcomings because like a visit to any nude beach will prove, it’s not always the people you want to see naked who want to be seen naked. Still, something tells me it would cut down on the kind of cargo loading issues that popped up on the flight to Boise.