It’s hard to sympathize with Alec Baldwin, a short-fused celebrity living a rarified life ignoring the pleadings of a lowly flight attendant and yet….I kind of know where he’s coming from.
I too have a problem with many of the rules and regulations of air travel that can make anyone a bit bonkers. I consider the many announcements made before takeoff the equivalent of noise pollution and I just wish I could turn them all off. Let’s face it, if you do not know how to buckle your seat belt by now or that no one has smoked in an airplane for 25 years then, well, you’re just plane dumb (pun intended.)
Nothing gets me more irritated than the rule that states I cannot use my e-reader, whether it be a Kindle, a Nook or an iPad, while the plane is taking off. I find this ‘rule’ particularly abhorrent not because I cannot be without my e-reader for 20 minutes or so but because IT MAKES NO SENSE. When turned to the airplane mode, these e-readers are the equivalent of books. They do NOT emit any signal whatsoever. Read this article if you don’t believe me; it makes the case that announcing everyone should turn off their devices might actually be more dangerous!
If you ban the use of e-readers, you might as well ban the reading of all books. After all, there is always the possibility that a bat could fly out of one. Sound ridiculous? Of course but so is demanding that passengers turn off their e-readers.
In fact, e-readers are less offensive than many women’s magazines with perfume strips that offend my senses but there’s nothing I can do about that.
When rules make no sense and you know it, the pilot knows it and the flight attendants know it and yet, they demand you follow those idiotic rules for the sake of nameless bureaucrats in Washington DC, it leads to aggravation and, in the case of someone like Baldwin, an eruption. No one seems to know the details of his incident but if the plane was sitting at the gate, as he says, why did he or anyone else on the plane have to stop playing his silly word game? Makes no sense.
I don’t know about you but I do not follow rules just because someone tells me they’re rules. They also need to make sense or else, well, I just might ignore them. My one wish in life is to live long enough to see the FAA waive the rule requiring flight attendants to tell all of us how to buckle a seat belt. That will never happen of course so I believe I’ll live a very long life indeed.
Double what you said!
Alec Baldwin is just another obnoxious phony Hollywood liberal Obama lap dog who thinks he’s better than us and the rules don’t apply to him. Trust me, as soon as the airlines remove the no-smoking signs someone like Baldwin will light up, get into a confrontation and start crying “police brutality”, win a 100 million dollar lawsuit and force us non-smokers to wear gas masks whenever we fly anywhere. So you see, sometimes these rules do make sense.
Oh come on Frank…Alec B. is at least funny, no?
Funny? I think not. Despicable maybe. Isn’t he the one who ranted against his own daughter and called her a pig, which was broadcast on the radio? You know, I enjoy Mel Gibson’s movies but I think he’s an a**hole. The same goes for Woody Allen. On the flip side there was Benny Hill. He was funny and a nice guy in real life. I think we could use more Benny Hills.