United Airlines’ disturbing attitude toward hygiene, and other outrages.

For those of you soon to be flying somewhere, hopefully this message will be of some use to you. As if flying weren’t undignified enough already with the incompetent security probing you like a science experiment, the lack of privacy on board the aircraft, and the way one looks after getting off the plane, there’s a new (or is it?) biological hazard to watch out for. So when you are doping up on whatever you have on hand to forego consciousness for the next few miserable hours, pretending it’s possible to get comfortable in your narrow seat of abrasive synthetic textile with your 30 inches of legroom, remember one important thing:

DO NOT USE THE PILLOWS OR BLANKETS!

That’s right. “Complimentary” pillows and blankets are soft, fuzzy Petri dishes and their stuffing may as well be agar. On a flight on United Airlines from Chicago to Seattle, I found this out. It so happens that the stewardess, I presume the head stewardess, though it may just have been her imperious nature, had been an unholy terror the whole flight through. We weren’t passengers to her, not paying customers, but enemies. Enemies of her ability to sit on her saggy, cottage cheese ass. During turbulence, rather than sweetly announcing over the intercom a request for us to buckle up, she barged through the aisle bellowing at us to “fasten your seatbelt. Fasten your seatbelt! Fasten your seatbelt!” It must have been at a 2 or 3 row interval that she repeated her refrain.

So it was well in character when she got on the intercom and ordered us to fold our blankets so people could use them on the next… WAIT! WHAT? Did that old crone just imply that these blankets and presumably pillows are multiple use things? She probably was not supposed to but in her zeal to make us do her bidding, she revealed the dirty truth about complimentary bedstuffs. I put those things over my head to sleep, or at least… did.

Now here you were thinking these blankets and pillows were sent after each flight to some processing plant where they were boiled and thoroughly sterilized for use on the next, or perhaps they were just so cheap that they were simply recycled. WRONG! So very wrong. At least on Unitwit Airlines. It may well be true on other airlines, though I have the feeling Singapore or Midwest would not sink so low.

It’s no secret that cost-cutting is a longtime cancer upon the travel industry but it is getting out of hand with airlines passing every cost possible along to their customers. But that is in no way, shape, or form, an excuse to put people’s health at risk. There is zero, absolutely zero justification for this type of stunt. If a business can’t survive without nickel and diming their customers they don’t belong in business. And United Airheads does not belong in business.

The plot thickens, however, as the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees is making similar accusations against a “widely used Long Island-based airline laundry service” (anyone who knows what company this is, please write in!) and is being sued by said business for libel. In other words, even if the airline you use is not engaging in a practice of immediate re-use of pillows and blankets, the laundry service may be sending dirty, infectious ones back to the airline. To be safe, I recommend you bring your own blanket and pillow. While you’re at it, you may as well wear a surgical mask for all the pathogens floating around on board.

 Addendum: Thanks to Oliver for this tipoff. It looks like United doesn’t just harbor germs in their pillows… but mice too!