March 6, 2023
This poor, cursed airline passenger has been mired in a life-or-death emergency situation for at least two decades. As long as I’ve been riding in airplanes, this person has been on the brink of disaster. At the very least, he is stuck in a depressurized airline cabin, possibly a grim prelude to an all-out crash. To add insult to injury, this person seems to have the most insane bodily proportions of any of God’s creatures ever to walk the Earth.
Why do I keep referring to this passenger vaguely as a “person?” The size of the boy suggests he is an infant. In a seated position, his legs do not even extend beyond the end of the seat. If he is indeed an infant, he should not be sitting like that—he should be in an infant seat. But he’s not. And he has a full head of thick dark hair, with a haircut from the 1970s.
Is he a toddler? An older child? Then why don’t his legs extend beyond the end of the seat? And why is his posture so terrible? This is clearly a serious situation. Why is he slumped helplessly in his seat? He has the body size and body control of an infant, but the body proportions of an adult. Is he just a tiny man? Is he so unlucky in life that even when he is being transported to another location far away, that the plane is about to crash? And that situation repeats itself in a continuous loop ad infinitum for over twenty years?
I don’t remember precisely the first time I encountered this cursed soul. It was at least as early as the late 1990s. I do remember that in the year 2000 I was on a flight to Las Vegas with several work colleagues and for some reason we were reading the safety card and laughing at the disproportioned torso and limbs of this person. We even commented how he looked similar to a really short stocky guy in our office, Jerry. It was such a good bit, that at least once a year when I’m on a plane, I check the safety card to see if it’s still the same. It always is and he’s always there. So I send along the photo. “Good news, Jerry’s back in the skies!”
And another thing, what is this kid wearing? He has a collared shirt tucked into his slacks (just like Jerry), but he’s not wearing any shoes. Who dressed him? And this kid’s mom, if that’s who she is (guardian? handler?), why is her seat belt so far down her lap?
The icing on the cake here is that the man-boy is also on the losing end of the notorious airline policy that says “in the event of an emergency, take care of yourself first even if the helpless person sitting next to you is dying,” or words to that effect. That’s actually the whole point of the picture. The great Norm MacDonald once said that the airlines shouldn’t even go over that policy because “yeah, that was my fucking plan, you didn’t have to tell everybody, blabbermouth.” In any event, this is surely a trifecta of misfortune for this poor bastard (possibly literally, as the father is nowhere to be seen). When, I dare ask, was the last time this kid took a solid breath of oxygenated air? Does he ever receive any of the precious life-sustaining oxygen being pumped out of those masks?
Normally, I would also raise the question of whether safety measures devised and drawn decades ago, measures that remain unchanged to this day, can possibly be effective. Was Tyler Durden correct on Fight Club that this was all about the "illusion of safety." I used to think so, until some pilot with ice water in his veins landed a plane on the Hudson River and all the safety measures were apparently followed and everyone survived. Seems as if the joke was on Tyler Durden.
Speaking of Fight Club, the backstory as to why my friends and I were even reviewing airline safety cards is murky, but, if memory serves, it had something to do with the fact that the anarchists in that movie replaced the regular safety cards with ones featuring panicking passengers on a plane about to crash. Sure, it was funny for a brief moment, but little did we know that the actual safety card would provide more enduring laughs, for decades in fact. It seems as if the joke was on us.
So the next time you’re in an airplane, check the safety card and say a prayer that our little man – literally – lands safe and sound. Hasn’t he already been through enough?