Recently I happened to be at the airport to pick up a friend. When he arrived, I casually asked him “So, how was your flight?” “Oh it was pathetic” was his instant answer. “The food was bad, seats all crammed up, they showed some horrible movies, the airhostesses wouldn’t even smile and were rude; terrible service, I tell you” were details of his in-flight saga. I just smiled; with a sort of ‘Yup I know; they are all the same’ kind of an expression as we drove away. My friend’s complaints weren’t unheard of before. In fact, you ask any air traveler about his/her in-flight experience and you will hear a similar list of complaints. For some odd reason, when it comes to in-flight service, our expectations are always sky high. Not just that, when in a flight we transform into a totally different person. It’s as if, once inside an aircraft, we all experience split personality disorder.

We eat crappy meals day in day out, but at 10,000 ft above ground level we expect nothing but gourmet. We don’t care if our friends, family, or co-workers never smile at us (and it doesn’t bother us that they haven’t done so for years), but from the airhostess we still expect a kind of warm welcoming smile as if we were the only love of her life. And we expect her to be pretty as well (now this expectation is not just that of the male travelers, even the female travelers prefer pretty airhostesses). Most of us pride ourselves on having developed the knack of squeezing our way through crowded buses and packed trains, or being a group of 12 crammed up in an 8 seater vehicle (especially on long journeys), but in an aircraft we all need our space and leg room. We may not have read a book or a magazine or even glanced at a newspaper for ages, but not finding the in-flight magazine and a newspaper in the seat compartment ahead of us makes us restless (and it bothers us even more if the person at the end of the aisle gets one). We see crappy movies all the while, but we get really turned off if the airline shows us one. We don’t care to check if a life jacket actually exists under our seat, but we definitely ensure that our puke bag is intact. We keep a close eye on the flight staff and scrutinize their every move; the only time we ignore them is when they demonstrate flight safety procedures. In life, for meeting, for appointments, we are often late and never in a hurry to get anywhere. The only time we hurry up is when its time to get off the plane (as if the last one to leave would be asked to clean the aircraft). We rarely call friends or family to update them about our whereabouts, but the moment the flight lands we just can’t wait for it to come to a complete halt to switch on our phones and let everyone know that we ‘just landed’.

Fortunately, we all get back to normalcy once we get out of the aircraft. The only thing we do is complain about the pathetic in-flight service and that too just amongst friends. We don’t go about the expecting those same levels of service from others in our life. We get back to our day to day life (crappy food, unsmiling faces, rude gestures and so on) without paying heed to much of it – until we get into a flight again. That’s when again our expectation levels shoot up, our priorities change, and we exhibit a totally different demeanor. We once again crave for attention and we once again demand all that pampering. And we also love that tiny little spotlight in a dimly lit plane and the fan that we can control – because for most of us that’s probably the only time we get to be in ‘spotlight’ and have a dedicated ‘fan’ as well :)