Fun with perception

I just got off the weirdest plane flight. It started in line to get my ticket. The guy two people in front of me was checking his bag and casually leaned down, picked up a wastebasket and began to hurl into it. Odd, but it happens to all of us, sometimes.

After I got into the plane, I noticed Mr. Hurl was two rows in front of me and soon after we started off, his sickness continued. But before the vomit vapors could reach me, I couldn't help but notice the plane filled with the most pungent of other bodily vapors. It didn't take a Sherlock Holmes to figure out the nervous sweaty guy looking all around across the aisle was probably to blame. After just a few more minutes passed, the beverage carts began rolling and the woman in front of me, trapped from the bathrooms at both ends by carts, decided to change her baby's diaper on the seat immediately in front of me. No lie.

These seemingly random, everyday things combined into a sort of "perfect storm" that resulted in the worst case of stink plane I've experienced. I wondered if I could survive the next two hours.

But something amazing happened soon after. A flight attendant manning a cart pulled out a big bag of Foldgers brew, poured half a water bottle through the unused coffee grains and into a stack of paper towels. She then took these coffee-grain soaked towels and walked the length of the plane several times, wiping the sides and undersides of the luggage compartments. Suddenly I was whisked away from the bowels of the stinkiest plane on earth to the tasty hills of columbia. I could swear I saw Juan Valdez picking coffee beans out the window below.

The flight wasn't that bad from there on out. My hat's off to flight attendant's MacGuyver-esque skills in saving us from hours of smell torture.