Some people like to exaggerate their ailments

I dislike the label ‘diva’, ‘entitled’, and ‘Karen’ as much as the next person because sometimes the point being made by the person being labelled as such is perfectly valid. But that being said, some people can be a real pain in the neck. We all know how hard travelling can be. It’s especially hard if you have personal health issues such as allergies which require special attention. But if that is the case, should you stop travelling altogether? Is it right for you to impose your travel requirements on fellow travellers?

One passenger boarded an aircraft and handed one of the flight attendants a list of things she needed during the flight and a list of things she wanted the crew not to do. The list asked them not to serve coffee or cashew nuts. She said she could not stand the smell of chemicals, aircraft fuel and perfumes. So other passengers should not be served coffee and all passengers needed to shower before boarding the aircraft just in case they’d sprayed on perfume before heading for the airport. She said all of these smells would cause her to go into some kind of shock. Even the smell of coffee would cause her to have a severe allergic reaction causing her to stop breathing; so please do not brew coffee. Are these demands reasonable?

There are roughly 200 passengers on a normal aircraft. I passenger has problems that affect just her but the demands she makes affect 199 other passengers. No coffee and no nuts are allowed to be served and no one is allowed to wear perfume. The crew could have controlled one of these but they were all absurd demands. On top of all that she had problems with aircraft fuel wafting into the fuselage, something over which they had no control.

It is odd that the passenger did not advise the airline of her issues at the time of booking her seat. Could it be that had she done so, she knew the airline would have told her that they could not guarantee her safety on the aircraft, given the demands she was making were impossible to carry out? Maybe the airline would have refused to give her a seat on the aircraft because they themselves would not want an extremely ill passenger onboard. Passengers with such unreasonable expectations of an airline should seek alternative modes of transport. In fact, when the crew reported all this to the captain he told her that she should get off the plane and fly with another airline. She then changed her story saying she was just allergic to peanuts to which the airline responded, ‘we don’t serve peanuts’.

Some people like to exaggerate their ailments. Maybe they like to garner sympathy from those around them or they just want to try it on. Was she entitled? Or was she delusional to think that the airline would stop serving coffee to 200 passengers because she was allergic to its smell? I think she was both entitled and deluded.

If this passenger really did have a deathly allergic reaction to all those things she listed, she would not have boarded the plane but sought an alternate mode of completely solo transport with no contact with anyone. She could not have taken a bus or even a taxi because there’s a chance she would have been exposed to nuts and car fuel. In fact, wherever she went she’d be exposed to all of these, even when walking in the street. I am surprised the airline didn’t insist she left the plane for her own safety and because they didn’t want to be held responsible for anything that happened to here as result of food being served on the plane. The fact that she stayed on the plane and nothing happened to her, even though coffee was being served, proves that she was trying it on. Someone commented that, by presenting the note to the crew, she was trying to set the airline up for a possible lawsuit but it backfired when they told her she could get off if she didn’t feel safe.