After I boarded the plane, a woman approached the empty seat next to me and sat her daughter there. She explained they had booked their tickets last minute and couldn’t get seats together. Wanting to help, I gave up my seat so she could sit with her child and took hers instead.
Unfortunately, her seat turned out to be the dreaded middle seat in the last row of the plane.
Still, I didn’t mind too much. It felt like the decent thing to do.
About an hour into the flight, the woman suddenly appeared in the aisle next to me, clearly irritated. She pointed at the SkyMall catalog in my hands and demanded that I return it.
Apparently, it had been in the seat I originally gave up, and according to her, it “belonged” to that seat.
I blinked, a little confused. It was just an in-flight catalog that every seat had.
Trying to be polite, I handed her the SkyMall catalog from the seat I was now sitting in and said she could have that one instead.
But that didn’t satisfy her.
“No,” she snapped. “I want the one that was in my seat.”
At that point, I just stared at her for a moment, wondering how someone could turn a small act of kindness into an argument… over a catalog that literally exists in every row of the plane.
