Adults Behaving Badly

I am an airline brat. My mother, years ago, worked for Frontier Airlines. My father spent 40 years in the industry, retiring from Delta a few years ago. Two of my uncles worked at Continental and American. And, my cousin works at United. So, to say that I've traveled via air a lot is an understatement.

Although I can get a discounted standby ticket from my father, the hassle involved in flying standby just isn't worth the few dollars I'd save by going that way. Even my cousin rarely flies anywhere on her employee passes because the flights are just too full...a far cry from years ago when we'd both hop on a flight to Hawaii on a whim, and never had to worry about if there was space available.

I got a great, great price on my round trip ticket to San Diego. The only drawback to it was that the times weren't all that great. I ended up flying on the "red eye" the other evening/morning on my return trip. Silly me was actually looking sort of forward to it because, in the past, most of these flights were fairly empty and relatively quiet so taking a nap wasn't a problem

Not this time.

Not only was this flight to Atlanta full (and they say you can't go anywhere in the South without going to Atlanta), but the people in my section of the plane were subjected to the antics of one drunken Tricia Lopez. Tricia and five of her co-workers (we gathered this as she kept referring to one of them as her boss) were scattered throughout our section of the aircraft. They apparently had hit an airport drinking establishment fairly heavily before boarding, although Tricia was, by far the most inebriated. Before the doors were even closed on the plane, she was yelling across the seats to her friends that she wanted to change seats (none of them wanted to sit with her, apparently, so she was stuck with another girl from her group who, thankfully, wasn't nearly as drunk). The flight attendants had to tell her, forcefully and multiple times, to sit down so we could leave. She would then yell to one of the guys in her party, "David, is Tricia Lopez beautiful?" and the guy David would yell back, "Yes, Tricia, you're beautiful." She repeated this stunt with every guy in her party. She'd then yell that she wanted to talk to one of them, and they'd have to remind her that the fasten seatbelt sign was on so they couldn't. All of their conversations were done at a yell, so everyone could hear everything. I was beginning to wonder just how drunk and annoying someone had to be before they were escorted off the flight.

It got better. A few minutes after we took off she mentions, loudly, to her seat partner that she thinks she's wearing a swimsuit under her clothing, and the proceeds to disrobe to show her friend her swimsuit.

A half hour after we leave she asks her friend, "Am I on an airplane?"

She and her friends did not shut up until the flight was over half over. Her screaming for shots of tequila during the beverage service was another highlight. Needless to say, a lot of us didn't get a lot of sleep due to these morons' antics. Tricia, thankfully, fell asleep towards the end of the flight. The last I saw of her, her mouth was wide open, her head was lolling to the side, and her friends were trying to get her up and moving.

I hope she felt like hell.