3. Lost your daughters?

An airline lost our two daughters at the Atlanta airport, even though we had paid extra for stewardess escorts. We were freaking out and they didn’t even bother to apologize.

When we got mad at them for losing our children, the airline staff actually behaved as though we were the nuisance! We finally found them after two-and-a-half hours in the airport lounge. Someone had taken them there and just left them.

4. “Are you sick?”

I was about eight years old. Due to some issue or another with our tickets, the four of us – myself, my younger brother, my mother, and my father – had been seated in seemingly random spots throughout the airplane, and none of us were next to each other. This would have been fine if it hadn’t been for the fact that my neighbor was a chatty Cathy.

Within moments of sitting down next to this woman, she’d done her best to engage me in conversation. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to speak to strangers, and thus her friendly small-talk made me very uncomfortable.

About midway through the flight, she dug through her purse and pulled out a small package of something, which she opened with a nonchalant smile.

“Max,” she said to me, “would you like a very special candy?”

She held up a medicinal cough drop and offered it to me.

Alarm bells rang in my head like they never had before. My mother had always told me that any stranger who offered me medicine was gearing up to do some very nasty things to me. Maybe, though, just maybe, the girl didn’t realize that cough drops were medicine, and was simply one of those people who ate them for their flavor.

“Oh, no, no thank you,” I replied. “I’m not sick or anything.”

“Okay!” the girl said brightly.

“… Are you sick?” I asked, hoping to prod the conversation forward.

The young woman shook her head. “Nope!”

I felt the panic in my chest start to subside. “Then why are you eating cough drops? They’re medicine, you know.”

“Oh, I know!” the girl said with a laugh. “But they help me relax. They make you feel funny.”

So not only was this stranger talking to me, but she was also one of those people who ate medicine for fun… and she was trying to offer some to an eight year old!

I spent the rest of the flight in complete silence, all the while ready to scream if the petite seventeen-year-old next to me showed any signs of attempting a kidnapping.