One of the most irritating trends is climbing the friendly sky.
There has been an alarming increase in passengers saving on speakerphone mode or watching movies and TV shows without headphones both on the plane and at the airport.
“At first it irritated me. Then it pissed me off. Then it pissed me off. Now I’m just confused,” Canadian rail chief Brennan Smith, 43, told the Wall Street Journal as he described the aggravating phenomenon. “I don’t know why they don’t have signs. There should be an announcement on the plane.”
Ady Beitler, 43, recalled an instance at Washington Dulles airport where a passenger argued with their partner over a bathroom towel over the phone. They weren’t using a speakerphone, so the conversation was impossible to ignore and even made Beitler “emotionally invested in the drama.”
Flyer Tracey Parsons said the phenomenon is worst in the airport gate area, claiming she has been subjected to it at almost every airport she has passed through in recent years.
“I don’t want to hear your phone call. I don’t want to hear both sides,” she said. “I don’t want to watch TikTok with you. It’s surprising to me — we had headphones on.”
This irritating trend – whose perpetrators span all age groups and socio-economic classes – doesn’t stop after takeoff.
“I’ll definitely see every flight,” said a flight attendant for a major US airline, noting that a withering glance is usually enough to shame watchers of the fun without headphones into silence.
In particular, not keeping fun to yourself seems to be prevalent in a variety of public spaces, from coffee shops to subway cars. But it’s probably worse in the air because, unlike on the subway, passengers can’t move to another car when an ordeal decides to watch “Beat Bobby Flay” on full blast.
To try to buck the trend, some airlines like American Airlines and Alaska Air are now making announcements asking flyers to use headphones.
Delta specifically added a tip about using headphones at the bottom of its in-flight entertainment page.
There are entire Reddit threads dedicated to inattentive travelers who have no problem broadcasting their fun, personal phone conversations to their coworkers.
“Obviously I fly a lot for work, but so far this year I’ve told about 6 people watching stuff in an airport that their headphones aren’t plugged in,” wrote one concerned passenger. “The device sitting there screaming while their headphones are on. No idea how they didn’t notice it wasn’t their headphones.
They added, “I’ve also noticed that almost no one will tell these people either. They just sit there looking at each other.”
Unfortunately, dealing with offenders can sometimes turn into a confrontation.
Shannon Black, of Vancouver, Washington, recalled calling a woman on video chat on the speakerphone in Delta’s Salt Lake City airport lounge. She asked if the offender would mind using headphones, but they considered Black’s suggestion “extremely rude”.
Some flyers have even claimed that some headphone abstainers do it on purpose to incite a fight. “These days it’s hard to know who’s a loose cannon or confrontational bait,” said one Reddit poster. “I don’t need to be hit or [have a] My gun is drawn to ask them, however politely, to turn the volume down.”
Interestingly, the phenomenon coincides with cheap wired headphones being less prevalent than before. In 2016, Apple removed the iPhone’s headphone jack to make room for other inputs, with Android following suit.
This forced users to buy wireless headphones for private listening, which meant spending more money and the hassle of having another device to charge.
Meanwhile, Neil Cybart, founder of Apple analysis site Above Avalon, attributed this device noise pollution to the fact that people are “simply watching a lot more video” than before.
Another possible culprit, according to the WSJ, is a general downward trend in decor, which permeates everything from fashion to the way people communicate with employers in the office.
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Image Source : nypost.com