501

Sometimes I wish I could buy a sign that said, “LEAVE YOUR SENSE OF ENTITLEMENT AT THE DOOR.”

And I bet there are plenty – and I mean PLENTY – of people, who have to deal with entitled people as part of their job, day in and day out, who feel the same way.

Case in point…

Malcolm, a resident of the UK, planned to take his son, Joshua, on a ski trip in Switzerland. But when they got to London Luton Airport (LTN), Jane, who worked for EasyJet, was concerned that Josh’s passport wouldn’t pass muster because it was probably expired.

Malcolm is positive it won’t matter. “The debate is whether it expires at the end of January or whether the fifth, at the beginning, means it expires on the fifth. Nobody in Europe is going to care about a 10 year old boy traveling with that passport. We will walk straight through customs, they won’t even look at it but they have to let us on the plane first or we can’t…put it to the test.”

Maybe Malcolm isn’t so much entitled as much as not having a clue of how passports work? Passports have expiration dates. And except for during the pandemic (this video was shot in the late 90s, 20 years before Covid), no one can travel on an expired passport – not even a ten-year-old boy.

Jane, an EasyJet employee, was a rockstar through this – she looked through all the documentation she had, and it appeared the passport wouldn’t be valid (well, DUH!). So she contacted someone in Geneva to see if they would accept a little boy’s expired passport.

Malcolm was still insisting passport control in Switzerland would let the kid walk on through, but Jane reiterated that she couldn’t let him get on the plane with an expired document.

She said it would be a while before she heard back from Geneva, so she suggested Malcolm get a cup of coffee while they waited. Malcolm was not pleased.

“We’ll wait here,” Malcolm replied. “I’m not going to get mad yet. I’ll get mad if…we have to go on a later flight and have to go to a passport office in that which will be silly. It’s my son’s first skiing trip so it’s quite important that we do this and…we don’t cancel it.”

You know what? I take it back. Malcolm’s entitled. It was his responsibility to check the passport’s expiration date and ensure the implications of the same. Now, he’s threatening to get mad if the trip has to be delayed because of a passport that HE should have taken care of long before the ski trip.

Jane eventually gets back to Malcolm and his son. She explains that no, Joshua wouldn’t be able to enter Switzerland with that passport because it’s expired.

“They’re going to send you right back,” she said. “So we need to get you another passport and try and get you on standby on the next flight.”

Malcolm was more understanding and cooperative now. So he and Josh ventured off to London to get an emergency passport. They’ve got 5 hours to get it done and make it back for the next flight…where they’ll be on standby.

Jane’s response? A wry, “he’ll kill me if they don’t get on it.”

The rest of the story continues on in this video (spoilers – they did make it to Switzerland. And, in thanking her, Malcolm gave Jane a kiss…which I thought was just…weird).

The video is part of a series called Airline, that was on TV in the UK from 1998 to 2007 – the series followed the employees of Britannia Airways in its first season, and then EasyJet for the following seasons. The US-based Airline TV show that was on A&E a few years later (that one focused on passengers and flights of Southwest Airlines) was based on the British series.

Here are links to several seasons of the UK series (Each show was 30 minutes, but these videos are in big chunks. Yay binge watching!).

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Season 4

Season 5 (episodes 2-12)

Enjoy!

Want to comment on this post? Great! Read this first to help ensure it gets approved.

Want to sponsor a post, write something for Your Mileage May Vary, or put ads on our site? Click here for more info.

Like this post? Please share it! We have plenty more just like it and would love it if you decided to hang around and sign up to get emailed notifications of when we post.

Whether you’ve read our articles before or this is the first time you’re stopping by, we’re really glad you’re here and hope you come back to visit again!

This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary