tl;dr – Absolute cinema.
People continue to crash out on airplanes (and at the airport), and in today’s camera-in-pocket world, many incidents inevitably are recorded and make their way to the internet.
In today’s entry, we have a situation where two passengers argued (in my opinion, lightly and somewhat comically) about sharing the armrest between them.
The video, recorded by one of the passengers, features a larger-bodied man filming an interaction with a somewhat less large-bodied man.
As taken from the video’s captions – evidently the man in blue elbowed his way onto the armrest and claimed that his seat neighbor’s arms were also in fact on the armrest, so they were in essence sharing. This in turn prompted the larger passenger, seated in what appears to be the middle seat, to (sarcastically) claim, “Uh, yes, my fat rolls are on the armrest, I’m so sorry, sir.”
What would ensue was a quick back and forth about weight loss, where we learned that the initial alleged arm-pusher is himself, a graduate of Weight Watchers.
As such, we have an old-fashioned ‘who’s entitled to the armrests debate?’, which at this point permanently lives under holy wars.
Some believe (including AI search results, lol) that “while there are no official rules, etiquette generally dictates that the person in the middle seat is entitled to both armrests as a consolation for the lack of space and convenience. Passengers in the window and aisle seats have their own benefits (leaning against the window or having aisle access) and should be generous to the middle passenger by allowing them to use the armrests.”
Others (myself) choose to believe that a reasonably mature compromise can be reached between two mature passengers, each with a sense of their own body, personal space needs, and… here’s the kicker…the needs of others.
As one of the passengers is a large individual, I’m sure folks will have oodles to say about that as well.
I know plane travel isn’t always the most comfortable, but…
