I’ve been traveling on planes since before I can remember and now I’m already considered middle aged. Most of the flights I take are long distance international travel and the passengers are usually more well behaved but I’ve seen the typical long hair spilling over the back of the chair in front of me and have had my elbow nudged and scraped by someone’s barefoot poking between the seats but the really the grossest thing that I ever saw is hard to describe so get ready to read from a chapter from my autobiography. (just kidding, I about that)
I lived in Taiwan in the late 1990’s, but grew up in Michigan, and I loved playing ice hockey. The only problem was that in all of Taiwan, there was only one ice rink, and it was not in Taipei.
Fortunately, there were enough players that got together and created a National Ice Hockey League of Taiwan, and even though I was half the age of most of the players, I made it on the Taipei Team. With the help of some of their companies as sponsors, we found the means to fly to another city ever weekend on the opposite side of the island to compete.
I like the brag that I was playing on the second-best team in all of Taiwan at that time, but often left out that there were only two teams in Taiwan.
Very early on every Saturday morning, for most of the year my dad and I went to the airport, stowed the gear on a Dash 8, and flew with the Taipei team to the other city.
One time one of the other gentlemen on my team boarded the plane and it looked like his Friday night hadn’t wrapped up yet. He reeked of alcohol, couldn’t stand straight and slurred like you would expect an alcoholic ice hockey player would on a Saturday morning.
I know that you are all itching to hear the gross part, but I really wanted to paint the picture of us western guys, crammed into a tiny prop plane early in the morning flying to a small city in Taiwan.
What makes this even more gross is that on the team there were a few of us high schoolers and in front of all of us our whole team as well as the random Taiwanese that booked the flight with us he starts to grope and kiss the flight attendant, remember he is a big white guy and the flight attendant was a tiny Asian girl. Just being witness to that scene still makes me cringe.
it was over pretty quick as the rest of the team came to the rescue but it wasn’t too easy as he didn’t have it in himself to stop. I don’t recall if he got booted off the flight or not, but I don’t remember him after that.
When people ask me why Rocknroll_Jeph is sometimes also known as straightedge_Jeph, this is one story even I don’t share because of how gross that whole scene was.
Sounds like the kind of guy no one would have missed if he’d accidentally fallen out of the plane while it was over a large body of water.