A recent article in the Canadian Globe and Mail cites a case of a Vancouver, British Columbia woman who is prepared to file a human-rights complaint against WestJet after being asked to cover her breast while feeding her son during a flight.
According to the woman, Erin Tarbuck, a Vancouver mother and high school teacher, she “discreetly” lifted her shirt to allow her son to nurse just before takeoff. For its part, WestJet asserts the flight attendant “did not act improperly” when it asked Tarbuck to cover up with a blanket because “some of its guests may be uncomfortable with a woman’s bare breast even when it is her right to feed her child.” The other people seated in the same row with her were her children and husband, whom I suspect have seen this happen before.
The right to breastfeed is a sensitive subject, and before I get into my politically incorrect mental segue, or before I anger the “lactivists,” let me state for the record that I support a woman’s right to choose whether she wants do so — or not. Like any other natural bodily function, in my opinion, there are standards of decorum when in public.
Now that my disclaimer is out of the way, my mind can’t help but wander to a real-life situation I encountered during my customer relations days at my former airline employer. And that takes me further down the path to some other tales of the true but bizarre.
It’s really bad stream of consciousness thinking on my part — sort of like that uncontrollable case of the giggles I had at my Aunt Ruth’s funeral — but here goes:
1. Puppy chow. A woman traveling to Baltimore felt it was entirely acceptable to bare her breast to feed her chihuahua. Yes, you read that correctly. Her dog. And she was not at all discreet about it. She was indignant when law enforcement met the flight and charged her with indecent exposure.
2. Oops. A ramp agent accidentally hooked the engine air-start hose up to the lavatory dumping port. An “air-start” is sort of like jump-starting one’s car; the way I understand it, a large amount of air is forced through an engine causing it to start running. Except the large amount of air in this case was forced up and out of the toilet, blasting “blue juice” all over the back half of economy class. Yuck.
3. Pigs can fly. This is the stuff of airline folklore. Apparently, the customer had convinced the airline the animal was necessary for her emotional well-being and that it was small, like a Vietnamese Pot-Bellied Pig. It was so not small, and ended up riding on the floor in front of the first row of first class because that was the only place it would fit. Everything was OK for the length of the Philadelphia to Seattle flight until the plane landed, at which point the pig flipped out, started squealing and running through the cabin, and apparently tried to get into the cockpit. Customers, especially those in first class, were rightfully unamused. The story goes that this situation, in part, led the Transportation Department to clarify some of its rules regarding the acceptability of “out-of-the-ordinary” service animal situations.
4. Close the lid. In older aircraft, there’s that little placard that says “close lid before flushing.” In the more modern ones, it’s illustrated for us with a diagram so people of different languages can hopefully figure it out. A rather Rubenesque woman traveling on a B767 (which uses a suction-based system for flushing, rather than the traditional water-down-the-drain kind) should have looked more closely at that sign. She neglected to stand up first and was suctioned to the potty until the plane could land and paramedics could pry her loose.
5. In your dreams. We received a letter from a woman who wanted credit in her frequent flier account for a dream she had about flying my airline. She was completely serious. Except her flight wasn’t just from Atlanta to Houston. Her trip (pun intended) was a flight through the Macy’s toy department which was filled with life-sized dolls of Al Gore, followed by a low-altitude pass over a Connecticut corn field seated next to Woody Allen. Except that as she looked out of her window, the ears of corn weren’t actually ears of corn. They were, shall we say, parts of the male anatomy that from a distance might look like ears of corn if they were growing on a cornstalk.
I’m not making that up. I read — and answered — the letter myself.
In case you’re wondering, her request for mileage credit was declined.
