What Happened in Rows 3, 4 and 5

1. Finding Our Seats

We were numbers 3 and 4 to board Flight 1577. Third and fourth in line with the jostling, anxious-to-get-onboard crowd standing behind us. What a different feeling that was, accustomed as we are to waiting at best at the end of the A–line, which means hoping we'll find two seats together without sitting all the way at the back of the plane.

This time we were nearly foremost, which would have given us the pick of the seats were it not for the people who flew in from the previous city and were already staking their claims. Still, when we started down the aisle, there were many seats to choose from. We chose row 5.

Just as Trudy began to sit down, a man from the back of the plane came moving against the flow and asked to get past her. He was one of the passengers from the incoming flight and had evidently made a dash to the lavatory in the rear, and now he was returning to his seat in row 4, where his briefcase was sitting in a seat by the window, and his laptop was sitting opened in the middle.

Trudy stepped aside, and he slipped back into his seat. Then, with the jostling crowd getting anxious behind us, we slid into ours.

2. Calamity

As Trudy sat down and I began to slide my backpack under the seats in front of us, there was a crashing sound and a loud gasping sort of yell. A large blue suitcase had almost fallen on top of me. Were it not for the fact that I was bent over dealing with my pack, it might have clobbered me, but instead it fell into the seat in front.

The suitcase had been hurled up towards the overhead bin by a woman with her hands otherwise occupied with her matching blue cosmetic bag and purse and the cell phone she had been yakking into the whole time we waited in line. But she had not hurled hard enough, and the suitcase hadn't made it into the bin. With a crash, it slammed into the light console under the bins and came tumbling down, missing my head and landing directly on the laptop computer that was sitting (opened) in the seat in front of me.

Oh! Trudy gasped as she watched it happen.

Oh, I'm sorry, the woman said to the man in row 4, as she grabbed her fallen suitcase from on top of his computer, jostling it around while she slung the matching blue cosmetic bag off her shoulder into the seat she had chosen in row 3.

I'm so sorry, she repeated, as she whipped the suitcase up toward the bin again, just barely making it this time with the help of a man who was standing in the aisle and put his hand up to keep the thing from falling down again.

In the meantime, the man in row 4 was trying to get his laptop to respond, clicking on the return key to no avail.

Click, click. Nothing.
Click, click, click, a bit harder and a bit faster. Nothing.
Click, click, click. He poked the return key very hard. Nothing.

Trudy was looking at me waiting for a report, as I watched the drama unfolding in row 4. I turned to her to whisper a report, and when I looked back, he had rebooted it and was waiting for the Windows screen to come up.

But the Windows screen didn't come up, just blackness. There was more clicking of the return key, but nothing changed.

I turned to whisper another report, and then I looked back again, by which time he had rebooted once more, only this time there was a horrible high-pitched scraping, squealing sound coming from his laptop.

Oh, that's not good, I said to myself, realizing too late that I had said it out loud. I'm sure he heard me, but then I'm sure he agreed.

3. Trying To Reboot

He looked over his shoulder to the back of the plane, as if he were looking for a colleague to make sure they had another copy of the marketing presentation they were supposed to make the next morning. From the white look of horror on his face, I'm sure his situation was something like that.

Evidently he couldn't see his friend, so he returned to the computer and tried rebooting several more times. All the while, the woman who had brought down a different kind of blue screen of death upon his computer was sitting oblivious to this man's world crashing in around him. I made up my mind that if he didn't say anything to her, I would stop her after the flight just to let her know what kind of furies she had let loose into this man's life.

But as those thoughts whistled thru my head, I looked back at this very determined man who was rebooting for the sixth or seventh time. And now he had his computer up and running. In fact, he was now reviewing his slides, the horror of a non-bootable computer evidently behind him.

By the way, the woman with the blue coordinated suitcases never checked back with that man. For all she knows, his computer never came up again. ... No. She doesn't even know that much. She probably never saw it pinned under her suitcase in the first place.

I wonder how his presentation went.

---
boarding a Southwest 737
homeward bound for Austin, TX

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