It happens to the best of us

I’m flying again. To Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Two nights.  One meeting.

There is no typos in that sentence. I promises.

On the connecting flight from Durban to Johannesburg I met two people because I was sandwich in the middle of them. A motivational speaker and a vegetarian.  She has 11 cats. I’m not sure how many cats he has because I didn’t ask.  We were both too involved in trying to understand the need for eleven cats. She wasn’t covered in bird poop so she wasn’t the bird-lady from Mary Poppins. She wasn’t crazy.  She ran a pet-sanctuary.  Did I mention she also has three dogs, a parrot, two tarantulas and a eighteen year-old son. I listed them in order of importance.

I got on the plane and took my seat, buckled in an everything.  Moments later the hostess asked the guy at the window for his boarding ticket because he was in the wrong seat. Really?  I get annoyed with stupid people.  Passengers who don’t bother to check their seat number before they sit down. It’s preposterous. They’re holding up the whole boarding sequence, not to mention the space in the overhead compartments.   Amateurs.  It took him seventeen hours to find his boarding ticket stuck between the contents of his pocket that included: A receipt, a tissue, a credit card, last weeks supper, the umbilical cord of his grandson and the boarding ticket.

Turned out he was in the right seat.  I was not.

I moved to my assigned seat with the reddest face this side of the Sahara.

And that’s how I met the cat lady and the way-too-handsome-for-one-person motivational speaker.  It was a two hour flight that felt like fifteen minutes because most people turn out be awesome when you bother talking to them.

I also bought the latest edition of the continuation of the Lisbeth Salander saga aka “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”.  I was really looking forward to read “The girl in the Spider’s Web” but I didn’t get time to read the novel on the plane as humans are far more entertaining than any book published so far. I placed the book in the seat pocket in front of me, right next to the half eaten chicken-that-tasted-like-shit sandwich.  I laughed my way through another small bottle of wine and disembarked with a happy heart.  I made two new friends.  We even exchanged business cards.

I also forgot the book in the seat pocket on the plane.

So much for a person who has traveled to more than 35 countries in his life…