Ways to be not a good polite considerate air traveler.
Take advantage of your aisle seat to extend your leg all the way out into the aisle and then wave your enormous dirty bare foot with its smashed toenails up and down up and down up and down.
Take advantage of your aisle seat to cross your right leg over your left knee so that your enormous dirty bare foot with its smashed toenails is almost in the lap of the politely restrained atheist woman in the other aisle seat, and then keep inching it closer and closer.
Put your enormous dirty bare foot with its smashed toenails on your knee and clean it out between the toes, carefully dropping whatever you find onto the aisle floor.
Put your enormous dirty bare foot with its smashed toenails back into its sandal for awhile and stick it out into the aisle in order to stamp it heavily at irregular intervals.
Seize your enormous dirty bare foot with its smashed toenails and weave your fingers into the toes as if you were holding hands with your own foot.
Do all these things without ceasing for 5 hours on a completely full flight.
Just think that if you were traveling during the Good Ol’ Days Sir Fragrant Footsies might have had a lapfull of squawking chickens and a small pig.
Some people seem quite unaware of how they come across to others. I’m afraid to say that behaviour of this type does seem more prevalent among the males of the species. My grandma used to say that the electric razor was a terrible invention because in the old days, if you met a clean-shaven man, you knew he washed his face at least once a day.
He was so consistently piggy it was almost funny, or would have been if he hadn’t been in such close proximity to ME for 5 hours. He bought a box of food and hunched over it like a hyena with buzzards trying to take it away – his face was all but in the box. He shoveled all the food in in about 30 seconds. It was if he’d been snatched up out of some stone age village and dropped into the 21st century.
Put your enormous dirty bare foot with its smashed toenails on your knee and clean it out between the toes, carefully dropping whatever you find onto the aisle floor.
Thatte is fucken disgusting!
I know. My jaw dropped. “Really, piggy dude? Really?“
This cracked me up:
Unfortunately I can easily picture this behavior, though I’ve (thankfully!) never witnessed anything like it on a plane. Given your description, Ophelia, I’m surprised he wasn’t picking his nose and flicking that onto the floor, though what he was doing is just as disgusting and unhygienic.
That is the most disgusting thing I have read all day. Ugh. You deserve a medal for not physically assaulting this ape … Or at least slapping an air sickness bag over the foot.
Ugh!!
Dude, Ophelia, you gotta stop saying “awhile” when you mean “a while”! You’re driving me nuts!
Jeff – I know – I really wanted to. It’s funny now but it drove me nuts during the flight. I kept trying to catch his eye in order to convey “Stop doing that!!!” but he wouldn’t let it be caught. He knew perfectly well he was being a pig. I kept hoping the food cart would run over his foot.
Oh…”awhile” is wrong? Huh. I guess I never learned that. Oops.
What a disgusting piece of work.
Well, it’s not *always* wrong. Just 99% of the time.
And here I thought Bigfoot was a mythical creature!
[OT + meta]
It may be wrong, but it’s in the dictionary (the OED even!) and it means “for a short time”. And it’s been around for more than awhile.
John,
What you meant was “And it’s been around for more than a while.”
http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/a-while-awhile.aspx
“Awhile” is an adverb so your can say something like “rest awhile” which means the same as “rest for a while.” In the latter example “while” is a noun meaning “a short period of time.” Something like “rest a while” is grammatically correct but doesn’t make any sense.
And neither does “rest for awhile.”
Whether he does it for a while or awhile, picking at your disgusting toes while on a plane seated next to someone is disgusting forever.
People can’t help having big feet, people can’t always help having smashed up toe nails if they wear sandals, depending of the situation and travel delays if stuck in sandals you could make a point that the dirty feet couldn’t reasonable be avoided. The behaviour is just so strange though you wonder if it is a reaction to a massive fear of flying or if he just took “I don’t care what a bunch of random strangers think of me.” (quite reasonable) to the degree of “I don’t care how I make a bunch of random strangers feel in a stressful situation.”
It’s not the wearing of the sandals and it’s not the having of the hammertoes. It’s the rubbing and picking at the hammer toes virtually on top of another human being.
No amount of quasi-proud “I don’t care what people think of me!” rationalizing is going to make that OK. It doesn’t make you an independent rebel, it makes you an insensitive jerk.
Blech.
Of course people can’t help having big feet or smashed toenails. But they can certainly help shoving them into other people’s space. I kick my shoes off on the plane too – but I wear socks, and I keep my feet strictly in my floor space, invisible to anyone else. Mr Bozo stuck his as far from his own floor space as he could. That business of sticking his leg all the way out, knee locked, and then waving it up and down, for instance – that was not necessary!
Sorry I didn’t make it clear that I find an “I don’t care how I make a bunch of random strangers feel in a stressful situation.” very unreasonable. I fact not caring how you make other feel is probably a good place to start for a definition of unreasonable. I just wonder what made him step outside reasonable behaviour.