I Walked With The Zombies Last Night

Hello. Yesterday night Rachel and I flew in to Cape Town, South Africa, on a Boeing 787 Dreamliner, owned and operated by United Airlines, a company that apparently follows the dictates of Elon Musk’s DOGE-ean model of promising improvement via reduction. The Dreamliner, a behemoth that holds as many as 300 passengers, was announced to the world in 2003 as a triumph of modern utilitarian but efficient design, maximizing passenger comfort and amenities while also cramming as many people into its fuselage as it possible without having to kill and gut them first.

I’m simply going to tell you how the trip went. First, it was 14 hours, which was ominous. I’d never before been on a nonstop flight so demanding and arduous, time-wise.

We were near the back of the plane in the cheap seats, which were mostly arranged nine across, in three rows of three. That is maximum efficiency but at the expense of two important things:

1. The seats were narrow and cramped together — their stingy width is infamous among transportation types — and, more important;

2. The aisles seemed dauntingly narrow, which I realized when I discovered how difficult it was to pilot a carry-on sized rolling suitcase back to your seat, which was approximately 200 feet from your starting point, past fifty rows of seats. You have to walk like an Olympic fencer, crablike, sideways to your target, to minimize your width and still retain some control over your extend-hand, while steering yourself and the suitcase through a space no more generous than the width of a man, or, y’know, of a suitcase.

Anyway, we arrived at our seats and unpacked our stuff. That is when people — including the flight attendants, began inadvertently jostling almost everyone in aisle seats as they passed by, sometimes stepping on their feet or jolting their shoulder. The aisle space seemed dysfunctionally small, leaving only millimeters for error.

I decided to measure this gap as best I could without proper instrumentation. I used my Apple laptop as a rough measurer. It is one foot wide. This meant that, calculating the space it did not cover, and estimating the left, the aisle was likely … 18 inches wide. I googled the this DOGE-ian dimension, and discovered I was spot on. Eighteen inches. Very narrow for commercial passenger planes.

This aisle, and the seats, and their combined effects of a 14-hour event are going to be the main focus of this report. The effect was incalculably bad.

They began to be most apparent when everyone discovered that you could not pass another person in an aisle — say one coming from the toilet and another approaching it — even if you did that excruciating belly-to-belly rub as you sidled.

The 14 hours, combined with the cramped, narrow seats with no leg-room began to have its greatest effect at about the 6-hour point, when people began doing odd things, in little desperate knots: Practicing mild butt-and-leg calisthenics and jealously seeking the tiny swaths of space equipped for it. I did the same, and interrogated some of the others about it. Like me, they were trying to save their knees from the effects of the intensely cramped situation. Some but not most of them were as old as I am. One woman seemed to be about 25. People began to just shuffling aimlessly in the skinny aisles, for the same stretching reason. “We look like zombies,” I said to one.

“We do,” she agreed, and continued shuffling forward.

(See footnote at bottom of column.)

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Important riddle: After ten hours, this happened: There was a small line to the three available lavs in our section, and after reaching the front of it, I saw a person emerge from one, and its vacancy sign light up. I went in, but stopped at the door, looked around, and did not enter. Went back to the head of the line, and waved another guy into it. He went in right away. The no-vacancy light went on.

Question: Why did I do that? Hint: It involves something the other guy had and I didn’t. I will tell you toward the end of this column.

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For a person even mildly unsteady of gait, navigating the aisle mean having to grab seat backs as you walk, for steadiness. This begat many mistakes. People were jostled. Sometimes hands slipped and grabbed not the seat back, but a head. The affected passengers were unresponsive to this indignity. No stinkeyes were delivered, as far as I could see, including for one I committed, on a baby.

People began ignoring the occasional “fasten seat belts” sign, and going to the bathroom whenever they wanted. At one point a young mother next to us arose from her seat with her two-year-old, Connor, in her arms; another passenger cried out to her that she should obey the pilots, who, apparently expecting severe turbulence, had just ordered even the flight attendants to sit. The mother glanced briefly at the other woman, and resumed her jouncy, side-bumpy voyage down 18-inch corridors to the loo, muttering loudly:

”He’s really desperate.”

“Well, be really careful,” the other passenger yelled back.

“Whatever,” mom answered under her breath.

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Essentially, in reaction to this DOGE-ian hellscape, society itself seemed to be breaking down. There are no rules in chaos. We are all prisoners. Every man, woman, and child is in it for his or her self.

It must have been like being a passenger, in steerage, on the Titanic.

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Riddle Answer: Because he, unlike me, was wearing shoes.

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When the flight landed, something else weird happened, something I have not seen since I was a kid and went on a few plane rides that had a lot of teenagers: The passengers lustily applauded.

Unlike in my yoot, this applause was not in appreciation of the pilot’s skill, or their gratitude for having stayed alive. It was a thank you for finally being able to get off this fucking thing.

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Okay, that’s it. Here is today’s Gene Pool Gene Poll:

We are good to go. See you tomorrow, I think.

Important note: The title of this column is stolen from a 1970s song by the Great Roky Erickson, “I Walked With a Zombie.” It was great, subtly reporting his experiences in a psych ward after being superdosed with Haldol, like everyone else there.

Listen to it here.

Send questions and observations here, especially if they are about your own negative airplane experiences.

And please support The Gene Pool here. It is only $50 a year, or roughly 19 cents per column.