Airport Sleep Schadenfreude

There’s something enjoyable about browsing a repository of airports with reviews posted by people who have or plan to sleep in them. The Bastard isn’t above them, though most of his unconventional sleep location tales have more to do with heavy liquor consumption than frugality.

The Guide to Sleeping in Airports offers the traveler the opportunity to get a snoozers’ perspective on their regular destinations (and departures) and amuse oneself with vague “what if” scenarios – like “what if I wound up in Moscow Sheremetyevo overnight..?”

“This was the most disgusting airport I’ve ever been to after 10 years of traveling. I had an asthma attack due to all the cigarette smoke, the toilets overflowed and the floor was covered crap and there were piles of trash all over the place. The few staff that spoke English only knew how to insult visitors.”

Don’t miss the 2008 Best and Worst Airports and keep in mind that some of these unfortunate ragamuffins choose to sleep in the airports – how sad. Are they not aware that staying in hotels will accumulate them points toward plush status upgrades?

Lesson: It’s amusing to consider the poor souls who sleep in the airports, but it should only be through a bizarre and uncontrollable set of circumstances that you are forced to stay in the airport overnight. You are better, smarter, and more resourceful than that, fuckface.

USA’s Dirtiest Hotel: New York’s Hotel Carter

The Bastard can recall once staying in a room infested with mosquitoes and beds as thin as cardboard, but the Carter has that place beat hands down:

“The bathroom made me want to vomit,” one TripAdvisor commenter notes. “DON’T LOOK UNDER THE BED!” another cautions. (Apparently, used tissues aren’t the only risk. In 2007, a hotel housekeeper discovered a woman’s body stuffed into a trash bag under the mattress; she had been murdered by the previous night’s paying guest.)

Continue reading Carter wears smudged crown as USA’s ‘dirtiest hotel’ »

Lesson: It’s never wrong to complain, demand your money back and relocate to a new hotel immediately. If they try to charge you anyway, use your credit card’s chargeback – you didn’t book roaches with your reservation.

The world’s funniest passenger complaint letter sent to Sir Richard Branson

The Bastard is reposting this hilarious missive because he’s too fucking lazy to write his own post. And for those of you wondering why the fuck the Bastard hasn’t posted lately, get a life. The Bastard is busy, fer chrissakes.

“. . . It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.”

Continue reading The world’s funniest passenger complaint letter sent to Sir Richard Branson »

Lesson: Always document your misery for all the internets to see. And laugh at.

High-Five, You Impatient Bastard!

Guyanese authorities say a first-class airline passenger was so angry at seeing economy passengers leave a jetliner before him that he yanked open an emergency hatch and slid down the chute.

Continue reading Angry flier uses emergency slide to exit Delta jet »

The Bastard is always delighted to read about other enraged passengers, and particularly those who do deranged shit in fits of anger. It reminds the Bastard that it is only through the monumental societal pressure to conform that Airlines are able to continually degrade we passengers as a matter of course. Occasionally, one passenger will crack and pull a stunt like this and it’s a nice reminder that, despite the arrest and fine, man does indeed have free will – even in the airplane.

Plus, the Bastard has always fantasized about sliding down the emergency slide. Whee! Would probably be killer on the Bastard’s hemorrhoids, though.

Lesson: Chill out, motherfucker. Save it for the blog.

Please Save The Bastard a Fucking Seat!

The bastard loves nothing more than a vigorous screed against the state of travel, so when one of the Bastard’s minions forwarded along this blog post I was overjoyed to know I would have somewhere to sit:

After a week spent flying from Texas to Virginia to Chicago back to Texas, my verdict is official – air travel is simply wretched. Unless you have the money to decamp to first class, which I do not, it is a soul-sucking, annoying, tiring disaster.

Continue reading If you have nothing good to say about U.S. travel, come sit by me »

One suggestion to the author – let’s ditch the “hecks” and spice it up with some “fucks,” please.

Lesson: The Bastard’s misery is shared by even the sweetest of mom bloggers. And that there are no decent options for travel in the United States short of attaching your tightie-whities to a cruise missile and heading for EYE-RAK!

The Bastard Loves Your Travel Misery

Stores of the miserable wretchedness of travel make the Bastard smile. Please to enjoy…

India is a nightmare. I’m a fairly open-minded guy and I know making generalizations about an entire country based on a tiny bit of experience is probably an unfair judgement, but fuck it – I’m gonna run with it: India is a nightmare. The week I spent in Delhi and Varanassi gave me enough empirical evidence to confidently label it as a sun-scorched, scabbed asshole of a country which, unless forcibly sent, I will never visit again.

Continue reading India – Dirt, Diarrhea, and Death »

Lesson: India: country not for the faint of heart or weak of immune system.

Don’t Fly in the Airplane Ghetto

I’ve come to think of the last 10 or so rows of every aircraft as the Aircraft Ghetto. Why? Well, you’re often the last to board, always the last to deboard and the probability of a compulsory baggage check is highest there. The engines are very close to you in the last rows and YOU CAN HEAR THEM QUITE CLEARLY. Further, if you wind up in the very last row the seats are fixed in many planes and I swear there is less actual legroom. YOU DO NOT EVER WANT TO BE IN THE LAST ROW. Trust me. Once, before I had a clue and was a fuckface like most travelers, I got seated on a last-aisle window and I almost went insane with claustrophobia.

I take measures to ensure that I do not wind up “kickin’ it ghetto style” on my flights. When I’m booking and I find out what type of airplane I’m flying, I pull up SeatGuru and check out the seat map. SeatGuru is truly the bomb for helping you find the best seats but is also instrumental in avoiding the ghetto. See, seat 29E on some aircraft might be one of the best seats. On other airplanes it might be the horrific last row, right across from the shitter. There’s no way to know unless you have a comprehensive knowledge of every airline and airplane configuration or you use SeatGuru. When the Bastard books a flight and is offered a seat in the ghetto, he immediately tries to re-seat himself further forward to one of the SeatGuru “green” seats. If this isn’t possible, the bastard will just take the farthest forward seat available at the time.

Then, the bastard will patiently wait. Sipping his tepid decaf coffee and gently picking at the callouses on sides of his toes, he waits. And he sets an electronic reminder for himself in his calendar to go off 24 hours prior to his flight taking off.

When the reminder goes off, he goes to the airline site, which will often let him check in. If not, he waits, sips and picks some more, until it does, trying repeatedly in 5 minute increments. Once he can check in most airlines allow passengers to re-select a seat. Then the Bastard will again move as far forward as is available.

If the Bastard is still in the ghetto, he may take the unusual step of upgrading to a better seat, depending on just how deep in the ghetto he is seated. Or, he may go to the airline check-in desk &/or the terminal desk to beg the personnel to check for better seats. At all of these points it is still possible that a cancellation has opened something and a Bastard traveling alone is not hard to reseat. In virtually every case the Bastard is able to slowly ratchet his way out of the ghetto to a more respectable seat closer to the wing.

Lesson: The airplane ghetto is for the clueless and insane, not for you. Use SeatGuru and make the effort to get a better seat.

See Also: The Legendary and Hilarious Tale of a Passenger in a Ghetto Seat and his Complaint to Continental

Airport Chili’s – The Restaurant of Last Resort

Sometimes the Bastard winds up in some airport for a layover for a few hours and needs to blow some time. If there aren’t any titty bars near by, I wander the airport, gazing angrily at the shops and fast food joints. Sometimes, if the Bastard is particularly exhausted and the choices at that airport are particularly crappy, I’ll wander into a Chili’s.

I must be particularly exhausted to wander into a Chili’s because otherwise I’d remember that I fucking hate Chili’s. I’d remember that I despise their high tables sandwiched virtually on top of one another. I’d remember that I hate their shitty selection of crap bar-fare on their greasy menus. If I wasn’t half-dazed I’d remember that their beer selection is for shit and their heavily-advertised blender drinks apparently contain no alcohol. I’d remember that their decor is hackneyed 80’s Friday’s/Bennigan’s/Crapplebee’s with a layer of grease on top. I would remember that the food that arrives at the table is always crap.

White-trash gourmands say that you can make any food better by frying it. Chili’s has taken this mantra to heart with virtually their whole menu, yet they seem to be the only restaurant in existence that can make food shittier by frying it. Their soups – watery. Their salads, lacking in veggie variety (to say nothing of the dressings that all taste like ranch). At any price, Chili’s would be a ripoff. Chili’s fucking sucks.

Lesson: No matter how far you have to walk to find an alternative dining establishment, it’s close enough.

“That’s always a bummer.”

The Bastard Traveler was on his way home and all he could hear was trhe hacking and whooping and sneezing of the other passengers around him, and he didn’t like it. Not one bit. No one likes a sick Bastard. When the beverage cart came he asked for orange juice. The flight attendant must have felt the Bastard’s paranoid vibe becuase she brought not one, but TWO orange juices. How considerate of her. A ray of sunshine in the bleak, misearble world of coach airline travel.

So the Bastard took his sweet time drinking his orange juice, flipping through some music and trying to drown out the death rattles of those around him. When the beverage cart came back, it lightly clipped his knee in just such a way that the reflex was activated and WHAM! the knee came up to the tray, sending the OJ onto the Bastard Traveler.

It was the nearly full 2nd cup and now it was running down my shirt and was literally making its way down all the nooks and crannies of my clothes to my crotch and my ass. I was taking an assbath in orange juice and was utterly powerless. I then activated the call button, something I rarely do.

The nice lady came and when she saw me, she responded “Ohh, that’s always a bummer. I’ll get you some towels.” She brought me a big bundle of towels and I fruitlessly tried to blot up the OJ that hadn’t yet pooled around my scrotum. How fucking humiliating and miserable. The Bastard Traveler was really motherfucking pissed.

When I got home a few hours later and finally stripped down, my underwear and shirt-tails were still wet.

Lesson: Don’t get the second beverage.

Recline and Die!

Listen, fuckface, just because your seat can recline doesn’t mean that it should. When you recline you steal a good 20% of the precious airspace of the passenger in back of you and a good amount of the legroom. You make it almost impossible to use a laptop and you make eating uncomfortable. Don’t fucking do it, dipshit!

If you do recline, the Bastard Traveler will make sure that you are so uncomfortable that you will resume the upright position immediately. I will drive my knees into your seat, then I will pulse my legs at random repetitive intervals until you resume the upright. I don’t fucking care if the flight is 4 hours long, I will do this to assert my territorial right. I will not stop. I will not give up. If you are tenuous and stubborn enough to persevere, I will then remove my shoes, exposing my extremely odorous feet, and thrust them under your seat and as far forward as possible to ensure that the overpowering stench will waft upward and envelop you in all of your reclined comfort. Since no man nor woman has ever survived this onslaught, I do not know what I might do if you persevered even the stinkfoot, but I think you should not doubt my imagination. After all, I am The Bastard Traveler.

The only time it is OK to recline is if you are on a very long flight that takes you overnight where 50%+ of the cabin is sleeping and reclined. In this case, it’s OK and you get a pass. But you shits that recline for a 2-hour commuter are the lowest of the low and I’m gunning for you!

I saw something truly spectacular on a flight recently. When the flight was deboarding, a woman 2 rows behind me tapped the shoulder of the woman in front of her and asked “WERE YOU COMFORTABLE FOR YOUR FLIGHT?” The recliner was a skinny Asian woman who may or may not have understood the question because her response was barely audible, and she was 3 feet away from me. The victim, a chunky middle-aged woman, repeated, more loudly “WERE YOU COMFORTABLE? … BECAUSE I WASN’T! YOUR RECLINED SEAT MADE ME VERY UNCOMFORTABLE!”

The Asian woman looked very uncomfortable and meekly said something. Chunky wasn’t going to be put down so easily. “WHEN YOU RECLINE YOUR SEAT IT MAKES THE PERSON BEHIND YOU VERY UNCOMFORTABLE! THOSE OF US BACK HERE IN STEERAGE NEED TO RESPECT ONE ANOTHER’S SPACE!“
Oh, you can bet your sweet ass that the Bastard Traveler was loving this. Then, to the Bastard’s surprise, a hippie chick piped in a few rows back “It’s her seat, she paid for it, she can recline if she wants! Leave her alone!” That was my cue.

“SHE’S RIGHT!” I declared. “IT’S TASTELESS AND INCONSIDERATE TO RECLINE ON A 2-HOUR FLIGHT LIKE THIS!” Then the Indian guy who was seated next to me piped up – “it is her seat…” I shot him a hot glance and he trailed off with “the airlines ought to do something about it…”

I addressed Chunky, loud enough to be well heard – “JUST DO WHAT I DO AND DRIVE YOUR KNEES IN UNTIL THEY STOP” and she said “I won’t do that.”

I surveyed the crowd waiting to deboard and what I saw was telling – those that looked like seasoned travelers – businessmen and women, and those that were over 5 feet tall were nodding slightly and looking askance as the Asian woman. They agreed. They were too timid to say so, but I know. I have that power.

The Asian woman probably wasn’t aware of her transgression, which is one of the reasons why this post exists – to inform the uninformed. I felt a little bad for her but Chunky was right – those in steerage need to be particularly aware of the comfort of those around them in order for the whole stinkin’ thing to work. otherwise we’d all melt down and start throwing SkyMall catalogs at each other, poking eyes, pulling hair, giving atomic wedgies the whole thing. It would be pandemonium.

Lesson: Don’t Recline.