rojo wrote:
It's amazing how amped up people are on flights, including yours truly. I almost cried when a flight attendant let me move to an open row a few months ago.
Here is the back story. I was pretty sure I was the last person on the flight and wanted to sit an empty row and asked the flight attendant. He seemed to have no sympathy and told me the flight had not stopped boarding officially. I told him it was done as they were closing the door when I got on but he kept telling me to go to my seat. I was PISSED as I knew I was the last person on almost certainly. A few minutes later, though, he sought me out and said, "Sir, the flight has stopped boarding. You canmove now."
I don't know why he hadn't been polite at first and just said, "I can't officially let you sit here now but if not one comes, you can come back. Or, 'yes you can sit here' but you need to move if anyone comes."
But in the end he treated me well.
As a a white male, I know he wasn't racist or sexist. ShaCarri doesn't know that. And that is what I think is a) white privilege and b) what's wrong with modern society. People are taught to assume stuff is racist/sexist when the reality is flight attendants are often just as annoyed as we are on flights.
The bolded parts are what caught my attention. Why couldn't you simply keep your mouth shut, at least during the designated boarding period, about wanting to move to a seat to which you were not assigned and to which you had no entitlement? Do you really not understand why the attendant was not being impolite by not telling you, "Yes, you can sit here, but you need to move if anyone comes"?
I doubt very much that your apparent sense of entitlement, or at least your sense of what a "polite" attendant might have told you, has much of anything to do with "white privilege." But it certainly does seem to arise from a sense of entitlement about what a rather low-level employee is both allowed and can reasonably be expected to say to yet another modestly disruptive customer who wants the rules to be bent a bit to accommodate him.