This is the "Courtesy Card" that comes with your "Knee Defender," a device you haul onto your airline flight and clip to your tray table so that the person in front of you may not invade your personal space by reclining their seat.
It's pretty obvious that this card is not used much. Most of the self-centered male-member heads who would use a Knee Defender (trademark thingy here), would wish to avoid the person in front of them confronting them with an angry glare and spluttering "Say what?" upon reading it. They simply employ their Knee Defender without notice and let their victim in the row up assume their seat is broken, which happens.
To cheerfully mix a metaphor here, when we're in a plane we're all in the same boat. Many people are not the correct size for an airline seat, but we resign ourselves to sitting in them for the duration of the flight anyway, because we have all bought our tickets on Cheapassair.com, which sold the seat for six dollars less than anyone else, and the airline's only way to make money is to cram us aboard like Roman galley slaves, only obese ones.
Me, I'm in the Goldilocks zone for height at 5'10." My knees fit in the seat fine, even when you, the passenger in front of me, decides to recline your seat and test my ability to tolerate claustrophobia. I just endure this feeling of being lightly entombed until I get to where I'm going. My problem is that the average seat width in coach maxxes out at 18 inches, while I have 44 inch shoulders. They don't sell a "Shoulder Defender,' which would be something like blow-up swimmy arms for adults, and could instantly be deployed by yanking on a string when you see that another full-size adult male is going to be seated next to you.
Or you could inflate it by blowing in the tubes.
Likewise, there is no "Armrest Marauder" available. This would be a spiked forearm sleeve made of ceramic or hard rubber so you could slip it through security, designed to give you an edge for those dogfights for the armrest at 33,000 feet.
Even if they did sell those devices, I wouldn't use them. One of my few accomplishments in life is not yet turning into a whiny, self-centered bunghole who thinks that my inconvenience is everybody else's problem.
The whole tone of the Courtesy Card reeks of whiny bungholism. Take Clause 2, ""my legs are so long etc." If this over-height crybaby was sincere about being sorry to have inconvenienced you, he might add a couple paragraphs apologizing about all the times he has blocked your view at the movies or a ballgame with his elevated noggin, or for snatching up all the attractive women who are taller than you when they are wearing heels, or for dunking over you in pickup basketball games. But no; he has found the one circumstance where his overactive pituitary is a disadvantage, and he needs you to appreciate his mewling and piddling over it. Intercourse him.
Likewise, the card's suggestion that you join the Knee Defender member-head in complaining to the airline about the discomfort he has forced on you. Yeah, right. If you want a bigger seat, stay off my Cheapassair.com.
But the Courtesy Card itself is a worthwhile idea. We all have our idiosyncrasies, and having explanatory Courtesy Cards to hand out to other people after personal interactions would help alleviate the vague sense we get sometimes that every person we meet is an offensive idiot. Mine, for example, would read:
I am a wiseass. I am using wit, humor and sarcasm in order to avoid dealing with you in a way which would be mundane and boring. I would like you to know about this and provide the following information:
_If you are a Jehovah's Witness or a Mormon, and are knocking on my door in the misguided notion that I would be interested in joining a religion that requires you to knock on stranger's doors, strangers who might be having sex or concealing corpses, the answer is simply, no. It is not "I Am a Follower of the Great Lord Lucifer," which is what I told you. I actually don't believe in The Great Lord Lucifer any more than I believe in whatever cultic God or Savior you do. I advise you to go home and drink or play touch football with your kids or whatever else amuses you in the interval between now and your inevitable death. If Almighty God was really looking out for you, He wouldn't have sent you to me. Think about it.
_If you are a homeless person, and have asked me "Do you have money for a cup of coffee?" and responded angrily to my answer, "Yes, but I don't feel like having coffee right now," know that it was precisely true. It was your lack of originality that kept me from giving you a buck I could well afford to part with. On the other hand, if you were waving a cardboard sign that proclaimed you were a homeless veteran and took offense at my inquiry "Do you know any homeless guys that are not veterans? Because I would really rather give my money to them," that was sarcasm.
_If you are a supermarket checkout clerk, and asked everybody in the line in front of me if they would like to donate a dollar to fight cancer, but then failed to ask me that question, you are a good judge of character.
_If you are some sweaty person gathering petitions for a ballot on Proposition Anything outside that supermarket, please know that when I said "So what you think we ought to do, instead of letting the politicians we elected actually lead us, we should block their decisions by putting it on the ballot so people who have thought about the issue for maybe six seconds can make the call? Because I think we usually get these things because the bloated oligarchs that promote them haven't been able to buy enough politicians to pass their pet legislation, and are now foisting this on us because they think they can buy enough advertising to persuade enough dumbasses to vote against their basic interests so they can once again get what they want and screw the rest of the state," that was exactly what I think is true. On the other hand, after wasting your time with that speech and then I saying I wasn't registered to vote, causing you to want to kill me, that was a lie.
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