NITS

Happy New Year! Bonne Annee! Good day to you 2010!

Right. That’s the chit chat done with. The rest of this blog is just essentially moaning.

I have just had the most uncomfortable plane journey of my life. (And not in the social faux pas sense). I hadn’t said to the person next to me, ‘God there are way too many screaming kids on this plane. I’m with Scrooge at the beginning of the Christmas Carol on this one. People need to stop breeding or hurry up and die and decrease the surplus population,’ – only to find that they themselves were a mother of 7. That didn’t happen. Not this time. (You don’t make that mistake twice).

No my grievance was physical discomfort. The chairs we had to sit in were the most ill designed, ill-conceived of instruments for the conveying of humans on long haul flights that I have ever seen. In fact, I am not even going to dignify them with the title ‘chairs’. I am instead only going to refer to them as Nonsensical Instruments of Torture (NITS) from now on.

(Yes, I know, spot the spoilt brat – I am on a lovely holiday and I am complaining about the chairs (NITS) on the plane). This is a bit like saying I have a gold pyramid made entirely of gold in my back garden, but I am angry because the gold isn’t shiny enough. (There. That’s the self-aware disclaimer out of the way).

So let me tell you about these seats…

Actually I have tried to recreate them with my artists impression of the situation. Then I took a picture of my rubbish picture and put it on this blog. Yes I bothered to do that. Imagine if I applied myself to something sensible.

Right. So. The NITS.

Obviously they were all very closely packed together and there wasn’t much legroom. But that wasn’t the problem. I travel on public transport all the time and I am used to that.

On a normal chair you have a back that’s vertical, and the seat part that’s horizontal. But on the NITS the back of the chair wasn’t vertical. Instead it sloped forwards, slightly crushing the sitter, forcing them to lean forward and hurting their back (no matter how much they wriggled – much to the patient and quiet annoyance of their boyfriend).

The second problem with the NITS was that they had a ‘head cushion’ compounding this first problem. You couldn’t lean your head back or to the side in anything that might resemble a ‘sleep’ position. Your head was forced to slump forward, so you instead had to rely on the possibility of giving yourself loads of double chins to buoy you up somehow. Why couldn’t we lean our heads back? Why oh why? It’s such a simple pleasure. For the love of god, why? (Though I will never again take for granted the simple act of freely choosing which position I put my head in). (And I did try and pull my head cushion off my NIT at one point, but my boyfriend stopped me).

You might think you could overlook these two problems, because of course, once the flight takes off, you can put your seat back can’t you? Um, no actually. Not with the unusual modern technology choices of the NIT. When I pressed the button and pushed back, my NIT moved about half an inch, leaving it still not even vertical. Not even VERTICAL. My ‘reclined’ NIT was still forcing me to lean forward. On a 12 hour ‘sleep’ flight. Why didn’t we just stand up the whole time? Why even go through this charade of pretending to have seats?

My boyfriends chair actually reclined the full inch (the lucky bastard) and he did offer to swap seats with me, but I declined. (I felt I’d already ruined enough of his journey by that point, with my constant sighs, tutting, attempted vandalism and wriggling).

Interestingly there was an announcement notice at one point, advising everyone to try and get comfy and telling us not to lie on the floor, which my boyfriend found amusing, but which I found a necessary instruction, as that would have been my next move. And it proves I can’t be the first person to have this problem. By making that announcement this company is basically admitting it knows it’s NITS are shit.

The final insult of the NIT was a weird little sticking out ridge at the edge of the seat part, underneath where your knees bend. Which basically meant if you let the weight of your legs fall on it, it stuck into you and hurt; and you got pins and needles really quickly. (Which of course led to even more wriggling). Genius.

Still, I have been inspired to write a film called ‘NITS on a plane’ where the central character will be a murder witness heading for a trial against a gangster who wants him dead, and secretly follows him onto the plane, but finds the seats so uncomfortable he gets distracted and loses interest in killing him. Samuel L Jackson will shout at one point “I am I've had it with these motherfucking NITS on this motherfucking plane!"

It will be quite a hit, I can see it now.