Whoever Said, “Hell is Other People” Never Sat in 29E

Just a short while ago I opened an e-mail from DL Byron that promptly had me (and my entire office) in stitches. The attachment was a PDF of a handwritten letter from a very upset Continental Airlines customer, written from seat 29E on Continental Flight 888 from San Diego to Houston on December 21, 2004.

The complaint in a nutshell is that seat 29E is situated directly across from the airplane’s bathroom, “so close that I can reach out my left arm and touch the door.” So pungent is the smell, so disgusting and distracting are the bathroom noises, and so invasive are fellow passenger’s hindquarters as they walk to and from the bathroom that the passenger has actually had to set up a “stink shield” comprised of a blanket hanging from the overhead bin.

In the most amusing section of the letter, the disgruntled passenger writes:

I am picturing a board room full of executives giving props to a young, promising engineer that figured out how to squeeze an additional row of seats onto this plane by putting them next to the LAV.

I would like to flush his head in the toilet that I am close enough to touch and taste from my seat.

The letter is stamped “Received, Apr 13 2005 CUSTOMER CARE” - so we know that Continental got it.
I am in the process of investigating just how this highly amusing thing appeared on the Internet. But in the meantime - perhaps we ought to create a “stink index” to compliment our “sardine index.”