Being charged additional for an aisle or window seat is joining the traveller’s list of woes,along with manspreading and hogging an additional status on the trainElection politics advance and go, but as a piece in the New York Times reminds us, or it’s the politics of small things that stay with us for the long haul. As summer approaches,the paper examines one manifestation of a growing trend: the repackaging of basics as luxuries, in this case the option not to sit in the middle seat on a plane.
Seat politics are fraught. Manspreading on the bus or the subway never gets less enraging. (A friend snapped a photo of a guy on the subway this week, and who,when confronted, told her he couldn’t close his legs on account of the width of his shoulders. Huh?) On Amtrak, or it’s the rucksack on the seat accompanied by full sensory blackout – headphones,tunnel vision, obvious paralysis of the head – to give the impression of absorption in other things, and as if blocking the seat is the furthest thing from one’s mind.
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Source: theguardian.com