Her Smelly Foot Took Over the Plane — I Made Sure She Paid for It (2 of 3)
One older gentleman tried to squeeze past, only to get barked at:
“Can’t you just go around?”
Around? Impossible. She had sprawled out so widely she may as well have been claiming squatter’s rights on the row. And then… the smell hit.
It was sharp, sour, impossible to ignore. Across the aisle, a woman pulled her scarf over her nose. Behind me, a boy whispered to his mom, “Why does it smell like someone never changes their socks?” She shushed him, but not before I caught the hint of truth in his words.
Enough was enough.
I pressed the call button and waited until the flight attendant appeared.
“Sorry,” I said, keeping my voice calm, “this passenger is blocking the aisle with her foot and refuses to move it. Since she’s using that seat for her… leg, maybe she should be paying for it?”
The attendant — all professional smiles but with a steel edge — turned to the woman and requested she move. The woman, unsurprisingly, bristled.
“I’m not sitting there, so I don’t have to pay. I’m entitled to certain comforts,” she declared, as if reading from a diva’s bill of rights.
Her seatmate, clearly fed up, chimed in: “You can’t just take another seat like that. If you don’t want to pay, I’ll record this and we can make it official.”
That wiped the smirk off her face. She froze, realizing the situation wasn’t going her way. The attendant seized the moment, radioed the purser, and within minutes returned with a decision: she’d have to pay the full extra-seat fee. And at today’s rates, it was almost the same as her original ticket.
Reluctantly, she reached for her card. The moment the payment went through, her foot vanished from the aisle. For the first time all flight, she sat like an ordinary passenger.
When the attendant left, the back of the cabin erupted in a soft round of applause — not mocking, but satisfied. People grinned at one another, exchanging that unspoken finally look.
Across from me, the scarf-wrapped woman mouthed, “Thank you.” And from the sparkle in her eyes, I could tell she’d been just as close to snapping as I was.
