Annoying Group of People #1: Airline Passengers

Not that this hasn't been said before (by me), but people have way too much sense of entitlement when they fly. Whine about this, demand that, and oh by the way don't charge me more than $200. Continuous ugh. Recently, I read the following question to travel expert Tim Winship that seems to epitomize the selfish stupidity of those who fly:

"Dear Tim—I have a few miles in an American Airlines account that I would like to move into my United Airlines account. Is this possible?"

Now, Tim humors this person a great deal in his answer, along the wouldn't-it-be-nice lines, and he even explains a third-party-exchange possibility (in which you take a loss of miles). But I think he's way too nice as he "explains" why the passenger's wish would not be to the airlines' advantage. I wish he would have just said, "What kind of an idiot are you? Do you even understand the concept of a loyalty program? It's to keep you buying that brand. Your miles don't mean that you frequently fly, you monstrously stupid attempt at a human. Your miles mean that you frequently fly on the airline that gives them to you. While you're at it, why don't you take your Borders rewards card to Barnes & Noble and your Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf drink-punch card to Starbucks? I'm sure they won't mind."

God, I hate airline passengers. But for my pacifism, I would want to hit almost everyone who ever surrounds me on a plane. "You are being transported across the country in five hours!" I want to scream at them. "It would have taken previous generations five days, five weeks, or five months to traverse that distance. SHUT IT with the whining!"

I would also like to point out that the only thing the airlines do that really frosts my gizzard can be traced directly back to said passenger whining. I refer, of course, to the insane charges added these last couple years, particularly for checked bags. Not to mention soft drinks...but about those bags. As if we didn't already have enough trouble with carry-ons due to dumb-ass whiny passengers who have ZERO concept of using space efficiently in the overhead bins and, what's worse, will not get out their stupid bag from the bin while we all stand around doing nothing waiting to deplane, meaning they have zero concept of efficient use of time as well.

Of course, we already know they have no concept of time and space because they feel entitled to be in New York from L.A. five hours from now. Anyway, the reason the airlines of late invented all these retarded checked-bag charges that you can't really entirely avoid forever is that it cost them more money (fuel, oil, Bush lies, etc.) to transport the whiny passengers, but instead of, say, raising airfare $40 bucks per ticket on the average, they pretended to be charging for something else, and I can't really blame them, because I know all too well what the whiny passengers would say if their flights cost $40 more - which, hello, they cost more anyway, oh ye who are too dumb to realize this.

What the whiny passengers would do is whine and scream and bitch even more than they already do, and all the airlines had to do was shift the fee from one column to another to shut them up for a while, which I can see is kind of worth it. God, I really hate airline passengers. When I used to work for The Savvy Traveler, I answered listeners' questions. I read their e-mails and checked the show's voice-mail for listener inquiries that we'd want to put on the air with Rudy Maxa. When there were "189 new messages," I never felt overwhelmed by the selection, because undoubtedly a hundred of them were whining pleas, "Ruuuuuu-dy, how can I get a cheap airfare from ____ to ___?" How? You shop around, people. That's how. And, "Ruuuu-dy, is there any airfare cheaper than $200 from City X to City Y?" No! No there is not! At least, not for you, because it has already been snatched up by someone who was busy booking a ticket and comparison shopping while you were whining to Rudy's voice-mail to magically make flying cheaper for you. GO AWAY.

Remember that episode of Designing Women when Imogene visits Sugarbakers' and says all sorts of offensive things about AIDS and gays and drug addicts, and finishes with, "This disease has one thing going for it, it's killing all the right people!" and then Dixie Carter's Julia gets to make an awesome speech telling Imogene to go far far away and stop being a hypocrite? Well, let's just say this. Be glad that I am a pacifist and a Julia-type, and that I like pilots and flight attendants, or I might have made a super-offensive allusive joke here. That's all I'm saying.