Please Secure All Belongings

In today's world of air travel there are so many restrictions on what you can bring on a plane. The size of carry on bag you can bring on the plane, how many carry on bags you can bring on the plane and how many personal items you can bring on a plane.  Soon we'll all need to take a seminar on the proper way to deal with carry on bags on airplanes. This posting is on air travel of mine that happened well before all of these restrictions.  The year is 1993 and I'm a multi line sales rep in the sporting goods industry. I'm representing 5 different sporting good lines and they each have a national sales meeting during the year. This particular sales meeting was being held in San Diego. Meeting went well and I'm on my way back to Chicago. I'm on a flight with my entire Sales Rep Agency which include myself, our rep from Ohio, our rep from Kentucky, our rep from Michigan and the boss of our agency from Michigan. Now the boss of our agency was a real piece of work.  He's about 6'4", loud and extremely fond of himself. The man has been in the sporting goods industry for about 20 years. He has been really successful or should I say his sales reps have made him very successful. This guy never worked. To his credit, he hired great sales reps who busted their humps to be one of the top sales agencies in the country. We made him a lot of money and he took all the credit. On this plane flight as always he was flying 1st Class and we had to fly coach. Not a big deal since we all liked each other and it gave us time to catch up since most of the year we didn't see each other. For whatever reason, the bossman's return flight got screwed up and he had to fly coach with the other peasants. The 4 of us are sitting together having a good time and the boss is sitting on the aisle seat in the row in front of us. Right across from him in the opposite aisle seat is an Asian man. The reason I bring up the fact that the man sitting next to him was Asian was because my boss was also a racist. Not a huge, hood wearing/cross burning racist but none the less a racist. If I had a $1 for every crack he made about me being Jewish, I could have flown 1st class too. Its a long flight and I can tell the bossman is thoroughly irritated with his seat assignment.  We finally land in Chicago and as the plane is coming to a stop the flight attendant says "Please be careful because items may have shifted in the overhead bins"  What happened next I couldn't have scripted better for our entertainment. The Asian fellow gets ups quickly and opens the overhead bin right above my boss. As the bin opens, the Asian man's metal briefcase falls out directly on the bossman's head. Unbelievable!  What made it extremely entertaining for all of us was:

1) The briefcase was one of those super hard silver metal ones, the kind you always see in the movies that James Bond Spy types have.  It was basically an anchor shaped like a briefcase.


 2) Not only did it hit him directly on the top of his head but the briefcase fell on an angle and bossman got nailed by a corner of the briefcase. OUCH!!!!

3) The combination of the Asian man apologizing to the bossman and the pain/irritation of the bossman was priceless.

It took everything for all of us not to just bust out laughing.  Believe me it was hard and when the bossman was out of our site, we all but had to replace our underwear we were laughing so hard.

So an on going theme of a lot of my postings is "What goes around comes around" but I think in this case "What goes up must come down" is more fitting!