Why didn’t anybody tell me before?! Flying first class is awesome!

Last weekend my fiancée and I flew up to New York for the weekend, and I promised myself that I wasn’t going to bore you guys with yet another column ranting about flying … but that was before we got a call from the airline Sunday morning offering to upgrade us to first class if we were willing to take a slightly earlier flight. Hmmm, let’s see – eight hours of travel time being squished into breadbox-sized seats in coach with a two-hour layover in the airport-hell that is Atlanta, or a three hour direct flight home, living the swanky and spacious life up in first class, on a flight that was really only leaving two hours earlier than our original departure choice to boot! Tough call, indeed…

Of course, my only problem now is that now that I’ve tasted the sweet life and flown like businessmen and lower-caliber movie stars and other Very Important People Who Simply Can’t Afford Their Own Planes (or VIPWSCATOPs, for short), I don’t think that I’ll ever be able to fly back there with the common folk ever again!

I don’t really even know where to begin – the extra leg room, the free food, the copious amounts of gloating that took place as we watched all of the lesser passengers pass by us en route to their inferior seats. To start at the beginning, they boarded us on the plane before anyone else, which admittedly I was a little skeptical about because I prefer to board as late as humanly possible simply to reduce the amount of time that I have to sit wedged in that tiny, hope-your-neighbor-wore-deodorant-today seat of theirs, but shortly after walking a tedious ten feet to our oversized, leather, comfy-as-hell seats, we learned the real reason why first class boards before anyone else – so they can get the alcohol flowing long before we even taxi to the runway! By the time the rest of the passengers began boarding, we were each happily sippin’ on rum and Cherry Cokes, and that was only the beginning…

As it turns out, money can buy happiness, as we proceeded to be pampered with a variety of snacks that put those lame crackers and pretzels to shame, reading material, even more liquor, as we learned that only the less fortunate need stretch that single drink handed out mid-flight for the entire duration, not to mention enough leg / elbow / insert-third-appendage-that-always-seems-to-get-cramped-on-airplanes here to make flying the skies actually friendly once again! No more splitting half an armrest with some hairy dude on his way to Nantucket, and the kid behind me would’ve had to have been Gumby to be able to even come close to kicking the back of my seat! It was almost as if, at least for those three hours and nine minutes, life was perfect.

So perfect, in fact, that there’s really no going back at this point. I’ve seen the other side of that blue curtain now and I’ll be damned if I’m going to bump elbows with Attila the Hun or sit behind Baby Cries A Lot again in this lifetime! My butt grew accustomed to those plush, leather gifts from heaven between New York and Tampa – to revert back to those scratchy, coarse abominations beyond the curtain would practically be treason against my own rear! Besides, pay for alcohol during the flight?! What do I look like – somebody who just flew coach? This trip was a wake-up call for me so that I could learn that man doesn’t exist on this green Earth to ride six to a row on each other’s laps, scarfing down eleven pretzels and a swallow’s worth of sugar water for sustenance during a cross-country adventure…

…or at least I don’t exist for the purpose of riding coach, that is. Ya’ll can do what you need to do … I guess maybe some folks need to sit on each other’s laps and feel the pain of an infant’s ear-shattering scream as they puddle jump from one city to another. That’s fine – that just leaves more plush, leather goodness for me!

I wish I was riding first class right now…