By Jacqueline Zuniga
I left the Arcata-Eureka Airport, in Mckinleyville, at 6:30 p.m. — it was the easiest flight I had. Arriving at the San Francisco International Airport, I spent nearly $50 on food because I was not going to starve. That was the first sign of how poorly my trip was going to go. I sat near my gate laughing out loud at reels, not knowing it would be the last time I laughed until I reached my family days later.
Getting on my flight, the lady next to me decided it was annual Piss Off Jackyday. She took forever removing everything from her bag when boarding and woke me up five times going to use the restroom during our four-hour flight.
My connecting flight had a two-hour layover in Chicago O’Hare. It was 5 a.m. and the airport was packed, so I documented my experience on my close friend’s story about how many people there were during that time. As a college student, I care what I spend money on, so when I treated myself to a coffee that damn near drained my bank account I wasn’t expecting it to make my already awful morning worse with the worst coffee ever. On the bright side, it’s like United Airlines knew my experience with them was going bad – no one was assigned to sit next to me. I was able to finally read and relax. After more than 12 hours of traveling, I finally landed on the other side of the country, where an hour-and-a-half commute waited for me. After all that, I arrived at my aunt’s house at 1 p.m., saw my mom and ate real food.
After a chill family reunion, I woke up at 4 a.m. to relive the nightmare one last time. After briefly believing my flight was double booked, the flight attendants solved my issue. Sadly. The problem didn’t end there. I got seated next to a man who used his huge leather jacket as a blanket, which spilled into my seat taking over my armrest. I felt like a sardine in a can, making me uncomfortable the whole flight.
On my last United Airlines flight the app confused me, saying I had 54 minutes to get to my gate. Unfortunately, that was actually the time it was going to take me to arrive at my gate — my next flight was boarding in 14 minutes. I had to get from A23 to B58, so I took the airport train and walked what felt like miles to board my flight.
Everyone on that flight decided to talk to the person next to them. No shade to them, but the people in front of me were yelling and laughing, which pissed me off. Why are we being so loud on a flight? Have we forgotten airplane etiquette? Two hours of chatter and laughter at an absurd noise level was not fun. Their joy of making absurd plans at such a loud level made me miserable.
May we not forget: not everyone wants to hear your loud conversations. If you need to get up 15 times during a flight, buy an aisle seat. And United, as a broke college student, I don’t want to pay an extra $60 not to sit in the middle. What was supposed to be a relaxing journey through the clouds became a red-eye flight straight from hell.
Jacqueline is the super duper cool sports editor,social media manger for LJ and news manager for KRFH.