About a month ago I wrote about crap parents who can’t (or won’t) control their kids, with the result that everyone else has to suffer. I mentioned how other crap parents rise up against anyone who objects, citing all manner of illnesses and disorders as possible causes of unruly behaviour, even though we all know that – in the vast majority of cases – it is just crap parenting.
Coincidentally, I was driving between lessons yesterday when movement out of the corner of my eye at lights drew my attention to a passing bus, A woman was lifting a baby/young child in the air – well, I say “child”; actually it was just a huge mouth with tears squirting out of one end and legs dangling out of a nappy the other. I could just imagine the mega-decibel buzzsaw bawling everyone else was having to endure, and I remember thinking “God help anyone who is on that bus”.
Then I saw this story on the BBC website. When you strip it down, it’s just another example of some dipshit who isn’t in contact with reality ranting on Facebook and having it go viral as a result of huge support from a load of other dipshits.
It all starts with a flight from Ibiza to Manchester.
Imagine the situation. You’ve had a nice holiday, but you’re going home in the morning. It was a package tour, so your departure flight officially takes off at something like 5.30am. Your hotel or chalet is at least an hour away from the airport, and you’ve been given strict instructions to be in the car park outside at 3am to board the bus to take you to there. You’re in Ibiza and you’re flying back to Manchester, so there’s a good chance you’ve had to put up with some teenaged yobs for the whole week. Naturally, they will have gone out last night and drunk more than they’d done on any other night. Consequently, at 3am you’ll be sitting on the bus going nowhere while the reps try to find them – at least one will be borderline comatose, and several will be puking up everywhere.
When they eventually do arrive their mouths will be turned up to 11 (the usual yob setting is 9 even when they’re being quiet). The reps will have faces like thunder – quite the opposite of their cheery bonhomie when you were freighted in last week, and you’re now going to have to put up with the loud yobs all the way to the airport (and at the airport, and all the way home). Once you get there, you will have to wait until check-in begins and the couple of dozen seats – totally inadequate for the 200 people milling around at the best of times – will be taken up by a handful of sleeping backpackers. The floor will be covered in sleeping, puking, and screaming humanity, so you’ll have to be careful not to tread on anyone.
Any cafes will be shut, even if your departure hub (i.e. shed) has any, and the vending machines will have been emptied by more yobs providing the traditional Coca Cola and crisps breakfast for their kids. When the check-in call finally comes, all the backpackers and yobs will somehow make it to the front of the queue. The check-in process will take over an hour instead of the usual 10 minutes because the Spanish authorities’ approach to an increased terrorism threat is to use half as many people to do six times as much work. Once through, none of the duty free shops will be open so you’ll have to kill the next 30 minutes watching the planes land.
An hour later, and some 30 minutes after the time you were scheduled to take off, you’ll suddenly realise your plane isn’t even here yet. Eventually, you will casually watch it come in, land, taxi over, disgorge the new intake of holidaymakers and their luggage, get loaded up with your luggage, and refuel. Somewhere around 8am you’ll flop into your seat, simultaneously smashing both buttocks on the arm rests as you do, and then spend a further 30 minutes being jostled by all the other passengers, who appear transfixed by the overhead storage compartments and that clunk-click noise they make, and block the gangway for everyone else instead of bloody sitting down.
You’ll finally take off, knowing that you have two and a half hours in the air plus any time for stop offs. Within five minutes you’ll start to get cramp as a result of the non-existent leg room, and develop breathing problems as you sit with folded arms to try and keep out of the personal space of the person next to you, who is twice as wide as the seat they’ve been given and who has no qualms at all about occupying both yours and their personal space all at the same time. If you’re lucky, the pissed yobs from your hotel will burn out, and the need for an emergency diversion to the Galapagos will be avoided.
The first $64,000 question is this. After all of the above, if someone has a screaming kid which just will not shut up sitting immediately behind you, are you going to smile and ignore it, or get angrier and angrier inside?
The second $64,000 question is: will you blow?
Well, it would appear that on the flight referred to in the story, someone did get angry and blow – if “blow” is the right word to use. When bombarded with the incessant and painful noise coming from a screaming child on a cramped and lengthy journey back to Manchester, a female passenger in the seat immediately in front (from what I can gather) shouted “shut that child up”.
I can absolutely sympathise with her.
But we are in the Facebook age, and nothing is ever that simple. The mother has taken to social media to effectively blame the irate passenger for the behaviour of her child, saying that the kid was having “a meltdown” and that the comment “didn’t help” the child’s anxiety levels. “Meltdown” and “anxiety levels” are the favoured phrases of parents who can’t control their offspring, even though it is they who usually created the environment for such behaviour in the first place. Another favoured ploy is to blame some sort of illness.
In this case, the child apparently suffered from a rare condition called Sturge-Weber syndrome, and naturally her behaviour on the plane was – according to the mother’s implied words – entirely and completely due to all the bad things that go along with that condition. The possibility that she was just acting up because of the early start and all the arseing around at 3am in Spain didn’t enter into it. On the other hand, Sturge-Weber can have some nasty symptoms, though if these were genuinely the cause of any such behaviour you’d have to ask why the child had been taken to Ibiza in the first place (she has a huge port-wine stain on her face, and my understanding is that you should avoid the sun if you have one), and why she’d gone economy (where even a full-grown adult might feel like having “a meltdown” and suffer “anxiety”).
Of course, barring any law which forbids it, the child’s parents had every right to take her to Ibiza in this manner. But then, other people – the majority, in fact – have rights too, one of which is to be able to sit quietly without someone else’s kids bawling in your ear and ruining something you probably paid a lot of money for.
So, it isn’t as one-sided as the mother with her Facebook rant would like to think.