Social Seating! Somebody kill me already

Anyone who has had to travel with KLM repeatedly would agree with me on three counts. Firstly, their seats in the economy section are a little too close for comfort. Secondly, their crew wears a hideous blue uniform – your eyes actually hurt if you look at that colour for more than 1 minute and 34 seconds. Lastly, the crew is geriatric enough to make you feel guilty if you ask for a glass of water twice. 

At one point in time, I used to travel to Netherlands pretty frequently, after traveling with them a few times, I decided to change airlines. It’s not like I get a direct flight (Pakistan unfortunately is NOT te choice destination for most Western airline companies) and if I have to change a plane at Doha or Dubai, I might as well fly an airline with better seats and in-flight entertainment program. I am sure there must have been so many other passengers who decided not to travel with KLM for the very same reasons – unless they are masochist who like cramped leg space or midgets – or both.

According to rumors, in order to win those and some other new – read desperate – passengers; KLM is introducing a new service called “Social Seating.” The Dutch airline is developing a service that will allow the travelers to find the most compatible person in the flight to share their journey with, based on their social media profile. What the fuck! I will now have to share my facebook and LinkedIn profile on the counter before I get my boarding pass!!!

Forget catching up on the movies that you have missed in your local cinema and are too lazy to download, forget reading that trashy novel that you wanted to get hold of but did not do so at home because you were too afraid of being judged by your sibling, husband or cook. Forget catching up on the lost sleep on that 7 hour long flight, you will be sitting next to the most compatible person on the plane who probably would want to chat with you about the existentialist angst in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road that you have listed as your favourite book on facebook. Never mind the fact that you probably clicked ‘like’ on it 4 years ago to impress a chick in grad school; social seating would not care for your intellectual pretense, it will punish you for it.

Being an anti social being, I couldn’t care less about social seating. Any airline that wants to win my business needs to provide me with two services and I would be their most loyal customer; more leg space (yes, tall people are obsessed with more leg space) and an assurance that I will never get to sit with parents who travel with crying babies and nosey toddlers they can’t control.

PS: Before anyone goes on to judge me for keeping my distance from messy toddlers, they must read this horror story from hell.