(Before you read any further, please excuse the poor camera quality, I was using my cell phone on a dark plane)
There is nothing better than being able to escape the cold weather of Philadelphia for the weekend in Tempe, Arizona. This past December, I won 4 round trip tickets from Southwest Airlines (to fly anywhere in the United States) through the My PHL-17 “My Entourage” photo contest and decided to visit a friend that attends grad school at Arizona State University for the weekend. Things started off smoothly, had a few drinks in the airport, told a joke to a very religious woman that ended with “where we are going there will be no churches” that left her speechless.
As you can see from the above picture, I did get very comfortable on the flight and dozed off for a while. My slumber was rudely brought to a halt when the older gentleman seated to my immediate left decided that it was time to spill his entire Bloody Mary on my lap. If you ask my friend Chris Deleon (Vice President of RCPT Fit) that was on the trip with me what my face looked like as soon as that drink hit my lap he would say, ” you had that what the f*ck look in your eyes”.
For the next 35 seconds of me sitting in the seating and the drunk guy sitting next to me freaking out and telling me over and over how sorry he was driving me nuts. Both of us proceeded to the back of the plane with a flight attendant so that I can get cleaned up. After blotting my jeans with about ten thousands napkins, the flight attendant has the most genius of ideas to clean the rest of the Bloody Mary residue off. The flight attendant says to me “this might sound weird, but I am going to use a feminine product to help you get the rest of this off of your pants”. With a raised eyebrow I looked at her and said, “do your thing”.
The flight attendant goes into the bathroom and comes out with a fresh Maxi pad (with wings!) and poured some club soda on it. Being that they are so absorbent, the Maxi pad is a great way to clean up a spill on your clothes because you can rub it against other fabrics and no cloth residue will left behind like using a paper towel would be. So now i go back to my seat with wet pants and I gained $20 dollars from the guy that spilled on me for a dry cleaning fee and the flight attendant gave me a free drink for my trouble. Within the next two hours on the plane my pants were dry and all things were well except for the fact that I smelled like a Bloody Mary the rest of the night.
When flying and someone spills on you, the best thing for you to do is to react calmly. If you have ever watched the Chapelle Show and have seen the “When Keeping it Real Goes Wrong” sketch, you that over reacting to a minor problem can have a not so positive outcome. Try not to wear light color pants because if that spill would have happened in khakis, white jeans, or even grey jeans I think my reaction would have been a lot different.
A new rule of thumb for me now is to always travel with a Tide stain remover stick just in case some more unfortunate spots end up on my clothes.
Thanks for reading,
Sabir M. Peele
