EPISODE 4
THE SAFETY BRIEF:
A short story about 30,000 feet, one safety demonstration, and the alarming realization that nobody was paying attention. Including me.
Let me set the scene.
It was a crisp Friday morning and I’m on a flight from Los Angeles to New York. A five and half hour flight. Long enough to watch two movies, pretend to read a book, and seriously reconsider the aisle seat as the person next to me has a bladder of a newborn baby.
I’m in the exit row. In the window seat is an older gentleman who brought a bag of mixed nuts with him (that won’t be noisy or messy). In the middle is a woman who has already removed her shoes and has about four “People” magazines on her lap.
The doors close. The engines hum, I never know if it’s a good hum or bad hum, we push back and then she appears.
The flight attendant.
She walks to the front cabin with the posture of someone who has done this approximately four thousand times and has made peace with the fact that nobody is going to listen. She picks up the intercom and begins.
"Good morning ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. Before we depart please direct your attention to the front of the cabin as we go over some important safety information."
I want you to take a mental picture of that cabin at that moment.
Row 1 — businessman. Laptop open. Completely locked in on a spreadsheet that apparently cannot wait five minutes.
Row 8 — a mother with two kids. One is crying, of course. One is eating something that was not provided by the airline. She is managing both while somehow also appearing completely unbothered.
Row 10 — a college student with noise cancelling headphones so large they could pick up satellite signals.
Row 14 — a man already asleep. Snoring. Loud. Snoring. Snoring. Snoring!!!
Row 18 — a couple having what appears to be a very quiet but very intense disagreement about something that happened before they got on the plane.
Row 20 — The masked couple. A man and woman who know COVID ended five years ago, but like to let everyone know they’re superior to the rest of us.
Row 12 — me. Watching all of this. Also not paying attention to the safety brief. Just staring at the flight map in front of me.
The flight attendant continues undeterred.
"In the event of a loss of cabin pressure, oxygen masks will drop from the compartment above your seat. Place the mask over your nose and mouth and breathe normally."
Breathe normally. I always loved that. As if at 30,000 feet with the cabin depressurizing my response will be to breathe normally. I can’t even breathe normally for take off and landing, but sure if there is loss in cabin pressure I will calmly place the mask over my face before helping others and breathe normally.
The flight attendant makes her final checks before takeoff. Seats need to be in the upright position, that critical one centimeter that apparently stands between a safe flight and a disaster. Tray tables up. And then of course, she stops at my row.
She looks at my backpack.
It is two inches out from under the seat in front of me. Two inches. I want to be clear about the scale of what we are talking about here. Not a foot. Not halfway into the aisle. Two inches.
“Sir, can you push that under the seat please?”
And I think about this for a moment. What is the theory here exactly? We are about to travel 500 miles per hour, 30,000 feet in the air, in a metal tube and the two inches of my backpack sticking out from under the seat will cause a catastrophic event.
For the record, two inches isn’t enough to impress anyone.
The flight begins taxing and I try my best to rest, but the baby in row 8 has other plans. Apparently, somewhere between the gate and takeoff, the parents made a collective decision to go screen free. No iPad. No headphones. Just the baby letting out its feelings inside the plane.
To add perfect harmony, the person behind me has a cough. Not a tickle. The kind of cough where you know they knew they were sick before they boarded. The kind where you spend the entire flight doing the math on when exactly you’ll start feeling it yourself. Spoiler, it’s always the day you fly back.
Everyone on the plane just accepts it. We board. We get sick. We become the coughing person on the flight home. It’s the circle of life at 30,000 feet.
Maybe that masked couple in row 20 is onto something?
The flight attendant finishes her checks. And somewhere between the safety brief ending and the wheels leaving the ground, I close my eyes.
Then things get complicated.
The plane starts to shake. Not the gentle kind. The kind where the overhead bins rattle and the flight attendant grabs the nearest seat and pretends not to be nervous. The seatbelt sign comes on. The cabin pressure drops.
The masks fall.
All of them. At once. Gravity's way of saying goodbye and good luck.
I reach for mine. I pull it over my face. I try to breathe normally as instructed.
I cannot breathe normally.
The captain comes on. "Ladies and gentlemen, we are going to attempt an emergency landing. We have hit a drone. Please assume the brace position and locate your nearest emergency exit."
An emergency landing. Suddenly the baby crying and the coughing seem like the good old days.
Religion became a big part of my life at this moment. Making promises I had no business making.
The plane tilts. The overhead bins fly open. A bag flies across my face and rips the oxygen mask.
I reach under the seat in front of me for my backpack to use for protection, because that seemed logical at that moment, but it won't budge. Two inches out from under the seat and somehow completely wedged in. The flight attendant is trying to get to me with a replacement oxygen mask but my backpack strap is now caught around her ankle. She can't move forward. I can't get the mask on. A series of events I wish on no one.
The plane tilts further. The woman next to me is chugging the cheap wine she ordered immediately after take off. The baby has officially stopped crying and I have started crying. The man in row 14 is still asleep. The couple in row 20 still hasn’t taken their COVID masks off.
The ground is getting closer. I close my eyes and think about every flight I have ever taken and every safety brief I have ever ignored and I make a promise to whoever is listening that if I survive this I will never again—
“Excuse me.”
I open my eyes.
The flight attendant is standing over me. She says,
“Please fasten your seat belt, we are about to take off.”
I fell asleep during taxiing and my brain decided to run the full disaster simulation in high definition.
The flight attendant smiles patiently.
"You're seated in the exit row. Are you comfortable assisting in an emergency if needed?"
I looked at her. I looked at the exit door next to me. I looked at my backpack which was still two inches out from under the seat in front of me.
Now, two inches seemed incredibly big. Sometimes you just need a second opinion.
I thought about the emergency landing. I thought about the oxygen mask. I thought about the chain of events I just experienced in my sub-conscious.
"No," I said. "I am not."
I got up. I grabbed my backpack. I moved to a middle seat three rows back, like that was suddenly going to fix everything.
Before I sat down I turned back toward my old row, pointed at the seat in front of them, and said
"Put your backpacks fully under the seat.”
They looked at me like I had been upgraded to a new category of unstable.
Maybe I had. But, trust me, I was a better flyer than that damn baby.
I sat down anyway, adjusted my seatbelt real tight.
The man in row 14 was still asleep. Completely unbothered by the scene I had caused.
The plane takes off. Smooth. No turbulence. No more drama. Just five and a half hours of recycled air and quiet disappointment.
About ten minutes in, the flight attendant picks up the intercom again.
“Ladies and gentlemen, now that we’re at cruising altitude, we’ll be coming through the cabin—”
I’m not listening.
I’ve got my headphones on patiently waiting for my overpriced cocktail to calm my nerves.
Behind me, someone coughs.
The baby starts crying again.
And somewhere up front, I hear the faint beginning of another safety-related announcement.
I don’t even look up.
Because now I get it.
There are only two types of people in this world:
People who turn small problems into full-scale disasters in their heads…
…and the man in row 14.
Still asleep, as if worry was a language he never learned.
Nobody Asked. Now you know anyway.
