A plane encounter

Am amused by what happened on the plane between Wellington and Auckland.

Normally I do not engage in conversation with my fellow travellers. Call me Mr Grumpy but I am happy to just read my book or play Sudoku. On international flights I’ll do the intro and chat for a few minutes, but not much more than that.

As I boarded the plane, a cupboard door was ajar and I grazed my arm on it. As I sat down on the front row, I noticed that my arm was actually bleeding so had to call the cabin crew for something to soak up the blood.

As part of this got chatting to the person next to me (had to explain that I didn’t want to lift my arm for the call button as it would probably drop blood on me), and what started off as a polite inquiry about where one will be watching the rugby, turned into a non stop conversation for around 70 minutes, which traversed numerous topics from travel, to technology, to careers, to partners, to sharks, to directorships, to Freakonomics, to science etc.

What was the amusing bit was as we got to depart, and we went to swap cards. The person sitting next to us exclaimed that she can’t believe we didn’t actually know each other, on the basis of our non stop conversation during the flight.

As I said was very unusual for me. Definitely normally a non talker on flights. But sometimes a conversation is just too good to stop. I do enjoy people who can talk, and with confidence and knowledge to back it up, on diverse topics.

So it was the only domestic flight in recent times, where I didn’t get through 100 or so pages of a book. Hell, I didn’t even get through one page.