Plane passenger ‘gaslit’ after asking to switch seats to not be in the middle of strangers

A plane passenger is wondering what they did wrong after offering friends the chance to sit together and getting a rude response for it.

Pretty much everyone knows it's not much fun having the middle seat on a plane - you don't get to look out of the window at the sights you can only get thousands of feet in the air and you can't stretch out into the aisle either.

Perhaps the only perk is that you're officially allowed to use the armrests on either side of you, they belong to you and you alone for the duration of the flight.

Still, the novelty of being able to rest both of your arms doesn't half wear off after a while and you might wish you were sitting somewhere else, especially if the people either side of you appear to know each other and spend most of the flight talking over you.

That's what happened to one passenger who took to Reddit to ask whether they were being 'gaslit' after an unpleasant encounter in the sky.

They explained that they 'fly standby', meaning they pretty much have to take whatever seat is available and get the last pick of all the passengers.

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Of course this often means the dreaded middle seat, and on this occasion they were sandwiched between two women 'who very obviously knew each other and were friends travelling together'.

Undeterred by the stranger in their midst the two kept talking to each other, leaving our poor passenger stuck in the middle of a conversation where they just felt in the way.

When they sat up the women would lean back, when they leaned back the pair sat up to continue their conversation and after a while it was untenable.

Asking if one of them would like to switch seats so the two women could sit together and talk without a stranger in the middle they were instead told 'I didn't know we couldn't talk on a plane'.

The pair then stopped talking and started texting each other about the person sandwiched between them, who said they felt 'gaslit' for offering to swap.

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People have consoled the passenger that they did nothing wrong and were actually 'rather kind' to offer the swap.

Another said the passenger 'literally purchased this airspace' and had every right to be annoyed at two people 'invading it' when they wouldn't even swap seats.

A third was astonished to find a seat swapping story on a plane where the person asking for the swap 'wasn't rude, entitled or in any way out of line'.

Someone else suggested that the two women might have booked seats with a gap in the middle in the hopes of nobody taking the third seat, thus granting them the extra space.

This is actually a bit of a hack some people do when they're flying, taking the window and aisle seat on a row of three and hoping nobody wants to book to sit between them.

Of course if that was the intention for the two women then it backfired on them this time.

Topics: Travel, Plane Etiquette

Joe Harker

Joe graduated from the University of Salford with a degree in Journalism and worked for Reach before joining the LADbible Group. When not writing he enjoys the nerdier things in life like painting wargaming miniatures and chatting with other nerds on the internet. He's also spent a few years coaching fencing. Contact him via [email protected]

@MrJoeHarker