Elbow Guy

I would guess I don’t fly very much compared to a lot of the LGM community. I’ve probably averaged something like five flights a year in recent years. So I was taken aback last week when flying back from the holidays in Michigan to Colorado by the following experience.

I had the middle seat in a three-seat row. This is because I was too cheap to pay to “upgrade” to an aisle or window seat on the United Airlines flight. (I suppose this kind of thing is economically efficient, but I bet the constant nickel and diming on everything in this world of hypercapitalism is a big reason why everybody is in such a bad mood).

I had just sat down in awkward proximity to the two total strangers on each side of me, when the 30ish woman in the window seat said something to me about my elbow being on the armrest. I don’t remember her exact words, but I was, absurdly in retrospect, embarrassed and slightly flustered, and apologized for not knowing the relevant etiquette. I mean I don’t fly much, relatively speaking, but I’ve still taken hundreds of flights over the last 45 years or so, so I probably shouldn’t have immediately assumed I was in the wrong, but hey that’s how we ended up with January 6th I suppose.

Then this person did something so odd that I still can’t quite believe she did it. She showed me the screen of her phone, which featured a text to someone that read “I”m sitting next to Elbow Guy,” under a photo of my elbow on the armrest! This made me feel even more disconcerted by my apparent faux pas, although a little light went off somewhere in my mind, or in the back of my mind, that maybe this person was a little off her rocker, or “quirky” as we say in Boulder if the person’s net worth is at least eight figures.

Anyway, I later Did My Own Research ™ and discovered that I had a largely if not universally recognized right to BOTH armrests, which if I had done the math at the moment should have been deducible, since if I didn’t then the other two people in the row would each get two armrests, and, along with the privilege of not sitting in the middle, enjoy perfect armrest hegemony.

But the part of this story that still feels disconcerting was the texting of the photo of my elbow, along with my transformation into Elbow Guy. This felt somehow invasive of my privacy/space in some way related to larger issues with the information economy.

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