Little off topic(s) but....

While sitting knee to nostril in coach, waiting for our plane to go in reverse and pick up our forgotten luggage, I—for the first time in a long time—decided to follow along with the flight attendant and read the safety card.  I am not averse to airline safety precautions; it’s just that I’ve been on enough planes to know the safety procedures.  I don’t think that a United Airlines attendant is going to get on the intercom and say:

“Unlike other airlines, our evacuation procedures involve screaming like a baby and wetting yourself.”  Although, this would probably be a more realistic evacuation procedure.

Back to the safety card.  The next time you are on United Airlines, take a good look at this brochure.  In one set of panels, a mother gently puts a life vest on her baby.  My uneducated guess is that the child is one or under.  The baby looks happy (or gassy) as the mother inflates the vest.  The next panel left me disturbed and wanting for more.  In the moonlight, on open water, the baby floats in his mothered life vest ALONE.  The mom is gone, the plane is gone, no passengers to be found; just a lone baby, bathed in moonlight,drifting with the current, happy as pie.

The second set of panels instructs passengers on how to inflate and release the slide/life raft.  Now, I’ll assume this is a completely different water crash because the sun is out (which begs the question: How many freaking planes are crashing into the water UA?)  In one panel, a man sits on a life raft while others swim to him.  When closely inspected we see that the man has a SPLINT on his arm.  It’s a make shift splint so he either had a shitty doctor or HE HAD TIME TO SPLINT HIS ARM DURING A PLANE CRASH.  Like a missing reel in a movie or a ghost chapter in a book, this mysterious splint is never explained.

I’m now hooked by this safety card story.  Now, I will continually watch the back of my airplane chair, waiting for Chapter Two.