A couple of years ago I took the train to Montreal. The thing about the train is that there is no assigned seating (at least not for what I was prepared to pay) so you need to get there early to be close enough to the beginning of the line to get a window seat. Who would want to miss 4 or 5 hours of nothing but grass interspersed with the odd smallish town that you can't think of a reason to stop in?
So, needless to say, I arrived early. Painfully early. And I got my window seat. And then this guy sat down beside me, in the aisle seat, with his friend in the adjacent aisle seat. Then he asks me if I would switch with his friend so they could sit together. I said no. I mean, I came early for the window seat and besides, they were sort of sitting together anyway. The aisles are so small in these things that there's not much difference between that space and the space between you and your seatmate anyway. They had words with each other. They may have used the word bitch. I felt uncomfortable the whole trip. But then again, I probably would have just been pissed off at myself for being too accommodating of others all the time had I switched anyway.
I just read an article from the New Yorker that is the same story, only better. Okay, not exactly the same, and it differs in that it didn't happen to me, but it's really good. It's called Turbulence.
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