A few years ago I was on a transcontinental flight that was looking to cram me into a middle seat in Coach for roughly five hours. About 15 minutes into the flight, the gentleman in the aisle seat next to me fired up one of the free inflight movies on his tablet, cranked up the volume, and started to enjoy some version of Mission: Impossible - Tom Cruise Needs More Money. At full volume, and this is the important part: without headphones.
Around us, our fellow passengers prairie-dogged, craning their necks to see where the irritating noise was coming from. And well they should: if we had wanted to watch a bad movie, we would have downloaded it and watched it ourselves. And this is the important part: with headphones.
Several of my fellow sufferers did their best to shoot The Look to Aisle Seat (you know The Look; half-turn in your seat, giving dead-eyed glare daggers to the offender), but the narrow confines of the environment was obviously hindering them.
Now, you might think, “Mom, Interrupted, airplanes are noisy! You’re sitting behind the jets! Exactly how much bad dialogue can you hear in all that?”
The answer: All of it.
Oblivious, Aisle Seat kept nodding his head along to the pyrotechnics. (Spoiler Alert: multiple car crashes and exploding helicopters cross the Airplane Noise/Behind The Jet barrier, too)
I considered my options. I’m normally conflict-avoidant to the point of being accurately accused of being a doormat on occasion, but I also know myself, and I knew that I would absolutely lose what was left of my Coach-class sanity if I had to listen to this for the next 147 minutes.
So I summoned a personality I didn’t know I had in me, tapped Aisle Seat on the shoulder, and said, “Sir, please use your headphones. The rest of us don’t want to listen to this for hours.”
He said, “I don’t have headphones.”
I said, “Then see if the flight attendant can sell you some, or turn that off.”
He turned it off.
I kid you not: Rows 23, 24, and 25 erupted into applause. It was a heady moment for Mom, Interrupted, formerly known as Doormat.
But the scourge continues: just last week I was on a much shorter flight, and a woman seated across the aisle and behind me decided to watch a movie sans headphones, and there was no brave soul there to ask her to shut it down for the sake of all our sanity.
It went on long enough that I was able to realize that I would rather listen to a crying baby (she didn’t like that woman’s taste in movies, either) than listen to Peter Rabbit 2: The Runaway in absentia. I feel bad for crying babies on planes; they don’t have a choice in the matter. You, in 18D, watching PewDiePie videos for an hour? You absolutely could choose to pack headphones.
I know what you’re thinking: yo, pack some noise-canceling headphones for yourself if you’re going to be such a special snowflake. And I say unto you: they don’t cancel everything you think they do. My state of the art set dampens jet noise just fine, but don’t do a thing about bad action movies.
I have to ask: Why does anyone need to hear that it’s not acceptable to watch Keeping Up With the Kardashian reruns at top volume in a doctor’s waiting room or subway or restaurant (other social papercuts we’ve had to endure), but why does it even have to be pointed out?
Who does that? And if you’re the one who’s doing it, how can you not know this is a bad thing to do?
Back in 2019 the Irish news organization TheJournal.ie ran an online poll asking: Is it acceptable to watch videos on public transport without headphones?
Comfortingly, almost 15,000 respondents said “Thar mo chorp marbh,” (or ‘over my dead body’ in Gaelic).
Chillingly: almost 1800 respondents said ‘Who cares about your dead body?’ at least some of the time.
You know who they are; they’re in 18D, watching PewDiePie.
Elizabeth Evans is a local mother, wife, daughter, sister, former stay-at-home mom, former work-outside-the-home mom, former work-at-home mom and a human resources consultant.
