Midwest Chick's Place

I’m not sure why this article torqued me off, but here it is. A girl was bitching about not have a ‘buffer area’ around her on a plane because her various allergies are apparently so virulent that the mere thought of a peanut will send her into anaphylactic shock.

Here’s what she does to make sure that the crew absolutely knows who she is and what her demands are:

As soon as I got on a plane, I tell flight attendants exactly where I am sitting and where I keep my epinephrine auto-injectors in case of emergency.

I also usually ask staff to create what is known as a ‘buffer zone’ – meaning the rows immediately around me are asked by the flight attendants to avoid eating peanuts or nut products during the flight.

I wipe down every surface around me – tray table, television screen, seat pockets, arm rests and even the floor beneath the seat, where crumbs and food residue often collect.

And here’s the part that really got me:

Eventually, after take-off, crew members began asking nearby passengers not to eat nut products because someone on board had a severe allergy. By then, I said, the woman with the açai bowl had already been eating it for some time.

I turned around and explained that I was the passenger with the allergy, reassuring her that it was not her fault and asking only whether she could wash her hands afterwards.

Seriously, WTF. She felt the need to ‘reassure’ someone eating their dinner that they weren’t doing anything wrong (because they weren’t) and asked them to wash their hands. If someone asked me to wash my hands after eating my dinner, I’d tell them to let themselves out the emergency door and sit on the wing.

I’m trying to figure out if this is attention getting behavior, because demanding that total strangers not eat the foods of their choice because they had the bad luck to sit close to a person, just strikes me as the ultimate self-centered move.

If someone has a medical condition that is severe enough that it has to inconvenience six or ten or twelve people or entire flights, then they either need to drive or put themselves into a self contained suit, complete with oxygen.

This kind of self-centered bullshit is like the fat people who want to blob over into someone else’s seat because they don’t want to pay for another ticket.

At one point do they just keep these women off planes because their insane demands cannot be met?