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Sitting next to a screaming baby on an airplane is starting to look better and better. First there was the 12-person brawl on a Barbados-bound flight, and now there's a guy who had to be kicked off a plane for cursing on his way home to New York City from a wedding in the Midwest. Raise your hand if you're surprised Robert Sayegh already says he might sue Delta Airlines.
Nobody? Dang, America, we are a jaded bunch, now aren't we? But there's something about Sayegh's whole story that just doesn't sit right with me. He contacted the media immediately in Detroit after being escorted off a flight, ostensibly for letting loose several F-bombs.
Naturally there's the he-said, she-said part of this. Sayegh says all the cursing was done to a fellow passenger, so he shouldn't have been kicked off. Delta says it's completing an internal investigation, but they put him on a later flight to Newark, and he got home alright. I'm not saying either one is lying, but who is the naughty one here?
We don't know. Nobody knows, save for maybe the passengers who were there, the flight attendants, and Sayegh himself. Still, this whole story has shaped up into the classic case of "lazy American can't ever take responsibility for his own screw-up in a bad situation." His cursing started the ball rolling, and now we have to listen to him whine on the news ad infinitum about how he's been wronged.
Let's lay this one out there, y'all. This guy got home to Brooklyn a whole four hours later than he planned on Sunday. Four hours! In terms of travel headaches, we're not talking migraines here. This is like the momentary pain you get when the baby in the seat next to you throws one of her rattles at your noggin. Has he ever heard of layovers? Weather? Accidents? I've sat in traffic longer than that. And I wasn't running up to find the driver of the tractor trailer at the front end of the 40-car pile-up to sue for ruining my afternoon.
When we talk about frivolous lawsuits in America, this is just the sort of thing we're talking about. One guy acts like a jerk. Someone overreacts. But the original guy, instead of saying, "Ooh, my bad, I started the whole thing," can't let go. He escalates the whole thing with the threat of attorneys. The flight attendants probably should have just told Mouthy Man to settle down and keep his cursing to himself. They didn't. They put him on another plane so someone else would have to deal with him. They passed the buck. Shame on them. But this guy was four hours late getting home. Four HOURS. Big deal.
Here's the thing. I'm not a prude. I curse on occasion. I probably wouldn't care if somebody on the plane dropped one f-bomb. But if it's the crying baby or the guy who thinks that everything is everyone else's fault, who's the type who sues because he's four hours late getting home on a cross country trip, I think I'll take the baby. At least she's got a good reason to be cranky.
Whose side are you on? The guy kicked off for cursing or the airline? Or neither one really?
Image via Vincent Desjardins/Flickr
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