Bad Breath

I happened to have a slightly more than eventful flight yesterday. Scheduled to leave at 4pm, finally off the ground at 545. That in itself is not spectacular, in fact nothing about this story is spectacular, but in itself, it is amusing.......odd, I just tried to spell that with a "z" as in "amuzing" thinking that it would be the US spelling. Apparently not. The septics unable to obey even their own loosely termed vernacular.
Anyway, flight, seat at the back of the plane, usual no legroom, at least not for me, emergency exit seats available, but you've got to pay, even if there is no one sitting in them during the flight - bonkers - why is there no class action against the airlines to sort this kind of debacle out. The three 5' nothing leprechauns naturally are all sitting in a row at the bulkhead while I tuck my knees behind my ears and pray to the gods of reclining seats that the chap in front feels my pain, or at least my patellas.
I take my seat and there it is, the greatest grievance known to human nostrils. I am next to the window, to my right is a gentleman, I am assuming him to be a lovely chap, probably works on solving world hunger or inducing complete nuclear disarmament during the day. However, during this day he had halitosis from hell. Not even, Hell does not smell that bad, he had breath that melted the tray on the back of the seat, he had breath that scolded children in Indonesia, he had breath, that even the most interesting man in the world would shirk from....and he had one of these foul stench ridden expulsions of vile cesspit vapours about once every 5 seconds.

To compound things, just as I'd found a way to press my nose up to the window and aim the air vent so it dragged less bacteria drenched filth air to my nostrils and more of the stuff that normal human beings vent, the captain of our craft echoes out across the fuselage that he didn't load enough fuel for the flight and we're going to have to make a splash and dash in Salt Lake city. Hey, everyone makes mistakes, let's just be glad he realised eh. However, I wish he hadn't made it on this stinky flight.

I did however try to turn this into a blessing in disguise by offering Mordor mouth some Wrigley's double mint gum, explaining that the chewing would ease any pressure differences in his ears. Fortunately he accepted, unfortunately now there was just an ever so slight minty hue to the dragon farts being emitted from his lungs.

You know, it's worse than a fart, far worse. Farts you can lay an element of expectation on the fartee to hold them in. Asking the same of bad breath seems a tad unrealistic. With a fart, you can claim common disgust by giving out an audible euhhh, reinforcing that it was not you while simultaneously shaming the buttburper and looking for either a smirk, or a look of guilt to identify the culprit. Asking someone to hold their breath from Boston to San Francisco will not merit the same solidarity.

In future I will be taking some extra extra extra strong mints to combat the possibility of it happening again. Failing that I could always ask them to lick the back of a spoon and then ram it in their face.