Political correctness run amuck

I was just doing some housecleaning and realized that I had never posted this.  I should have.  LiveWriter lets me write local copies and then post them to the web at a later date but evidently this time I never got around to publishing what I had written.  I can date it to sometime in late August 2012 because of the reference to Hurricane Isaac.  Enjoy.

This morning I believe I was witness to a situation where political correctness trumped passenger safety.

Sitting on the tarmac in Baltimore our flight attendant, AKA porkchop, could barely wobble his way down the aisle. He literally had to do a kind of sidepass shuffle because his lardass simply wouldn’t fit between the seats. Once airborne he was bouncing off the passengers as he bobbled down the length of the plane. The only time he looked remotely steady was when he had the drink cart to hang onto.  And talk about slow - slower than the second coming of Christ is the best description I can think of.

Fortunately I was seated in an exit row so in an emergency I could look out for myself. Anyone who had to depend on lardo for assistance would simply be screwed. Its is astonishing to me that while American Air insists on asking me if I am "ready, willing and able to assist other passengers" when I sit in the exit row they are at the same time apparently prepared to trust our cabin assistance to someone who may be ready and willing but isn’t even remotely  "able" to assist us. This is either an out of control union or political correctness run amuck.  Either way it is clearly dangerous and ought to be criminal.

Lest anybody suggest that I'm simply prejudiced against fat people and claim that our safety really was never impacted, consider this:  About halfway through the flight we hit some turbulence as we bumped into the remnants of Isaac (more about that in a minute).  On came the seatbelt signs with a DING as is customary in those situations but - big butt - Mr. Porkchop didn’t bother making a waddle through the cabin to ensure that everybody had in fact done up their seatbelts. I suspect there’s actually an FAA requirement for him to do that but in this case his personal discomfort outweighed our safety needs. Small example I know but how many more were there that I didn’t notice?  The thing about safety procedures is that you only need them when you need them and by the time you need them its too late. 

When I wasn’t watching porkchop's antics with morbid fascination I was engrossed in the cloud show out my window. Flying from Baltimore to Chicago this morning we were coming into the leading edge of the blown out remnants of Isaac. Initially we had a pretty clear view of the ground, then some high thin cirrus or stratus type clouds appeared at around 30,000 feet with some scattered cumulous at about 15,000 and finally the ground was completely obscured and then opened up again as we got closer to Chicago. I was worried last night that we might not get into or out of Chicago due to Isaac but he appears to be largely played out now.