I met up with my traveling companions / coworkers, Coryndon, Brandon, and Ian bright and early and boarded our flight to London.

After walking past the decadent first class terminal, we were greeted in our seats with a pillow, blanket, and a plastic bag filled with a donation envelope that goes to a British Airways charity, headphones, and a toothbrush along with what appeared to be a single serving tube of toothpaste – perhaps an attempt to combat the stereotypical British poor oral hygiene.

The plane is a “Boeing Triple-Seven”, as the captain called it. It had the same issue of mismatched window positioning compared with that of the seats and the overhead bins. The overhead lights are aligned with the seats by the use of spacers of varying sizes. This is probably the case in every plane I’ve been on, but I am trying to be more observant on this trip. The ceiling has a nice sweeping arc which affords ample headroom in the aisles, and the lights are mounted in a diagonal panel with their paths pointed inward such that they intersect. I’m not sure why they do that – it makes it a slightly longer distance to their target area. I imagine the thinking might be that since each set of three is mounted in a recessed panel, the rim might block the outer two lights if they were pointed outward (particularly in the center seats), but there seems to be enough clearance to prevent that.

While the direction is adjustable (at least when standing) by manipulating a ball-and-socket joint, the arrangement is hard wired in since the control on one’s arm rest switches on and off one’s designated light. It would be an interesting social experiment to change the angle of the lights to point outward so that the aisle seat’s armrest controlled the light pointed at the window seat and vice versa. I’ll have to keep that in mind as an entertainment idea for our next flight, which is overnight.

The service is quite good. The demeanor of the flight crew reminds me of a British family friend named Joanna who Em and I got in touch with when she came to Providence for an internship. They seem to put quite a bit of effort into every social interaction as if it is a performance (yet still a genuine one) for an audience of one. We traveled through some turbulence that might have registered 8 on the Richter scale, but even still, the flight attendants didn’t lose their composure. The captain thoroughly explained to all of us that he was hoping the turbulence would be short-lived, but he realized this patch we were in joined up next to another patch, and we were in for about another hour of the same. He mentioned that he checked with some other planes in the surrounding area to see if there was relief at other altitudes, but he reported back that all the airspace that we would want to fly in would have the same conditions. That is the extent they go to with service. I’m not sure if American pilots switch to smoother altitudes without saying anything about it or they just don’t give a damn. In any case, the level of communication here was a step above. Even the way the flight attendants pestered passengers to turn off their smartphones was charming because they did so with an apologetic tone paired with an explanation that if they have an “airplane mode”, we would be able to power them back on “during the cruise”. Also in British vocabulary, I learned that the wheeled cabinets that the flight attendants push up and down the aisles are called “trolleys” and that some of them collect “rubbish”. Everything sounds more adorable in British.

The vegetarian choice for breakfast was a “cheese omelet” with chips (in the British sense of the word), a fruit plate, yogurt, a bread roll, a strudel, and orange juice. The flight attendants made a point to ask everyone to put their seats up for the meal service so that the people behind them would have room to utilize their trays.

Interestingly enough, said “cheese omelet” didn’t seem to have any cheese or anything at all inside. I think they were made from liquid eggs in a carton, so maybe they just mixed some grated cheese into the liquid eggs and called it a cheese omelet. Not that I’m complaining – it was pretty good.

The chap sitting near me took a few nibbles and then pushed his mostly uneaten aside to the empty middle seat between us. I wanted to pull a Napoleon Dynamite and ask him if he was going to finish his tots, but his eyes were closed, and I didn’t want to disturb him, so I just stealthily grabbed his still-plastic-wrapped strudel. The turbulence had caused his orange juice to spill all over his tray, so I wiped it off of the plastic and set the strudel aside for a snack later. My father instilled in me at a young age a virtual inability to let food go to waste.

As a side-note, this passenger bears a striking resemblance to a middle-aged Tom Miaskiewicz (another coworker of mine who is not joining us on this trip).