If you’ve read our blog for any amount of time, you probably noticed that we tend to post a mix of (what we hope are) informative and helpful posts, mixed in with a healthy dose of human interest and, I daresay, quirky travel stories. AND, if you REALLY pay attention, you’ll also notice that my husband, Joe, tends to write the former and I, Sharon, tend to write the latter LOL!
And speaking of quirky human-interest stories, we (well, I) have encountered many over the years. Especially about guest/passenger complaints:
- The sneaky way a Texas airport ended passengers’ complaints about long waits
- Complaining business class passenger got exactly what he deserved
- Hotel guest complaint: Japanese hotel cancelled reservation, citing “war crimes”
An airline complaint that went viral
But in my perusing the internet, I found an old story (like, 20+ years old story) about a passenger complaint to an airline that became so viral that even Snopes made a page about it. Read on…
“I feel like I’m bathing in a toilet bowl of blue liquid, and there is no man in a little boat to save me,” read the tormented, handwritten letter to Continental Airlines that was passed around the Internet in late 2004 and well into early 2005.
(for those of you who have no idea about the toilet bowl, blue liquid and the little man in the boat, U.S. brand Ty-D-Bowl toilet cleaner had a series of commercials in the 70s and 80s that included all 3 things (note – the first snippet, from the Carol Burnett Show, was a parody of the commercials):
Anyway, the letter was dated Dec. 21, 2004 and stamped as having been received by “Customer Care” on April 13, 2005. It’s the narrative of a passenger who had the misfortune of sitting in seat 29-E, which was apparently “directly across from the lavatory, so close that I can reach out my left arm and touch the door. All my senses are being tortured simultaneously,” the letter writer wrote.
A PDF of the letter can be found on this page. But here’s the text of the letter, complete with original misspelling and grammatical errors:
Dear Continental Airlines,
I am disgusted as I write this note to you about the miserable experience I am having sitting in seat 29E on one of your aircrafts. As you may know, this seat is situated directly across from the lavatory, so close that I can reach out my left am and touch the door.
All my senses are being tortured simultaneously. It’s difficult to say what the worst part about sitting in 29E really is? Is it the stench of the sanitation fluid that’s blown all over my body every 60 seconds when the door opens? Is it the wooosh of the constant flushing? Or is it the passengers asses that seem to fit into my personal space like a pornographic jig-saw puzzel?
I constructed a stink-shield by shoving one end of a blanket into the overhead compartment — while effective in blocking at least some of the smell, and offering a small bit of privacy, the ass-on-my-body factor has increased, as without my evil glare, passengers feel free to lean up against what they think is some kind of blanketed wall. The next ass that touches my shoulder will be the last!
I am picturing a board room full of executives giving props to the young promising engineer that figured out how to squeeze an additional row of seats onto this plane by putting them next to the LAV. I would like to flush his head in the toilet that I am close enough to touch, and taste, from my seat.
Putting a seat here was a very bad idea. I just heard a man groan in there! This sucks!
Worse yet, is I’ve paid over $400.00 for the honor of sitting in this seat!
Does your company give refunds? I’d like to go back where I came from and start over. Seat 29E could only be worse if it was located inside the bathroom.
I wonder if my clothing will retain the sanitizing odor . . . what about my hair! I feel like I’m bathing in a toilet bowl of blue liquid, and there is no man in a little boat to save me.
I am filled with a deep hatred for your plane designer and a general dis-ease that may last for hours.
We are finally decending, and soon I will be able to tear down the stink-shield, but the scars will remain.
I suggest that you initiate immediate removal of this seat from all of your crafts. Just remove it, and leave the smouldering brown hole empty, a good place for sturdy/non-absorbing luggage maybe, but not human cargo.
There’s always been a question if the complaint letter was real or a hoax – particularly because there were some incorrect technicalities in regards to:
- The path of Continental’s flight 888
- If 29E was actually as close to the lavatory as the letter writer said
However, in July 2005, Eric Zorn, then a columnist for the Chicago Tribune (and now a blogger for the publication), said that a Continental spokesperson confirmed that the letter was not a hoax, but 100% legit:
It’s genuine, according to Continental spokeswoman Courtney Wilcox. She sent me the airline’s official, potty joke-intensive response:
The letter is not totally accurate and uses sarcastic humor to make the seat sound a lot worse than it is. But we don’t want to pooh-pooh this customer’s concerns — seat 29D is less than ideal. Most flights are not sold out and normally we can easily re-seat a customer who prefers not to sit in this location. However, the Dec. 21 flight was completely full, and we have apologized to the customer who wrote to us about the concerns. If there was a quick and easy solution to this problem we would do it in a whiz. However, the aircraft configuration is fixed and there is little we can do at this point to just flush away the issue.
So how did Snopes get involved?
Established in (wanna feel old?) 1994, Snopes
Anyway, Snopes got wind of this whole Seat 29E controversy and wrote an entry about it on June 6, 2005, about five and a half months after the letter was dated. You can find it here. Anyway, they label the story as true.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
