Andrex Trail

It's strange how many stories of extraordinary passenger behaviour involve lavatories. Or perhaps not given that the conditions aboard a passenger jet really cut down the occupants' activity options to those of a newborn; essentially they eat, s**t and sleep. This might go some way to explaining their infantile conduct in certain cases. Or then maybe it's just that there are only a few places to cause mayhem, so the facilities are going to get their fair share.

The incident which has prompted this philosophising involves a rather elderly female passenger who was very hard of hearing. So much so that it took the cabin crew several attempts to bellow the safety briefing into her. During the flight she took a trip to the restroom and, upon exiting, was noticed by one of the flight attendants to have tucked her skirt into her under garments along with a long tail of toilet paper. The senior flyer walked back down the aisle towards her seat trailing her tissue tail like an Andrex puppy.

The flight attendant was naturally concerned about the poor lady's dignity and hastened to assist. She nimbly leaped upon the toilet paper streamer, breaking it off and shortening the problem. A bigger challenge was the skirt etc. Sadly her attempt to subtly extract the offending item from the pants without the wearer noticing didn't quite work. The outraged pensioner only calmed down after repeated attempts to yell an explanation had failed and the hapless crew member had written down a detailed summary of events. So much for sparing the passenger's blushes...