We’re off to Switzerland to visit our son and then take a few days for a jaunt along the eastern shore of Lake Como. I’ll spare you the details of the usual miserable airport preliminaries and start with our arrival at our coach seats. Seats 40F and G were ours and with the crowd pushing to get to their seats, we had to get out of the aisle. The problem with that is each seat is stocked with a pillow, a blanket, and earbuds. How does the airline expect to load 100+ people in 10 minutes. We couldn’t sit on the stuff but where do you put it in a hurry? The only place is on the floor in front of the seats. And you have to do it rushed. Frequent fliers know that for takeoff and landing, that’s where stuff goes. So, I put my backpack in the rack above and pushed the rest of the stuff from the seat onto the floor. My wife did the same and put everything she had in her hands on the floor with the other stuff. We sat and waited while the captain said we will take off shortly. The stewardess checked to see that our seats were upright, our seatbelts on and our stuff was under the seat in front of us.
After takeoff, my wife said, “I forgot to put my phone in airplane mode” and reached down on the floor for her phone. “Where’s my phone?” she asked.
“Did you put it on the floor?
”“I think I did,” she answered. We spent the next 15 minutes looking everywhere for her phone.
“Could you have left it in the airport?” I asked.
“I don’t think so. I hope not. My life is on that phone,” she answered. Someone in the seat next to my wife said, when we took off, that he saw something go that way, pointing toward the back. I went back there and couldn’t find anything. We just had to wait. We couldn’t call it to see because there was no service in the air.
We anxiously waited for the plane to land in Zuerich. Seven hours later when we landed, a person four rows back found the phone and we breathed a huge sigh of relief. Apparently on takeoff, the phone slid back under the seats. We also didn’t realize that that mishap augured badly for our whole trip which I will not discuss here because it is too much to ask of me, and too much of you to read. Besides, my wife would never allow it.
