An Odd Day (And Subpar Equipment) on United Airlines

I don’t want to sound like a broken record with stories of my United Airlines annoyances, but this one gave me a good chuckle in the end.

I had a flight earlier in the week where I missed an upgrade but still ended up in an exit row aisle.  This was a CRJ-700, a decent sized regional jet.  The exit row on these planes generally has plenty of legroom and this was a fairly short 2-hour flight.  So, even someone as spooled as me could survive in coach.

I was running a bit late but still managed to get to the gate right before boarding started.  I was the first one on the plane.  I stowed my bag under my seat and headed to the back of the plane to use the lavatory.  When I came back both my seat and the window seat next to mine were occupied.  With two United flight attendants in uniform.

The woman in my seat looked up at me but made no move to vacate it.  She asked me, “Would you like to sit in the window seat on the other side?”.  I didn’t, hence the reason I selected an aisle, and I told her so.  Her reply startled me a bit.  “Really?  Are you sure?  We wanted to talk to each other during the flight.”  She had pulled my water bottle out of the seat in front of me and was trying to hand it to me.

I again indicated I would prefer to sit in my assigned seat, getting a bit perturbed.  The actual flight attendant running the flight came up and asked me to take my seat.  Now, I don’t think she really knew that someone was sitting in my seat, the only reason I was still standing.  I decided to give up the silly battle over the seat, still a bit dumbfounded and take the window seat  on the other side.

No good deed goes unpunished.  I’d never sat in a window seat on this particular aircraft and will avoid doing so in the future.  I pulled out my laptop to do some work and saw a small fold-down shelf attached to the interior wall (the seat has no arm rest on that side).  The fold-down shelf is there to support your tray table.

Turns out I wasn’t getting quite as much support as I would have liked.

Sigh.  Just another day….