A woman in the window seat on a three-hour flight got more than she bargained for from the passenger next to her.
When Fanny Gagnon O’Donnell, an au pair living and working in Munich, boarded her return flight from a recent trip to Spain, she was delighted to have secured a window seat.
O’Donnell even went so far as to take a photo of herself next to the window and send it to her mother. But that feeling of joy was short-lived, as shown in a video she posted on her TikTok account @fanntayeule.
Air travel can be stressful even under the best of circumstances. Expedia’s 2024 Air Travel Hacks Report found that 55 percent of Americans consider it their “leading cause of stress.”
For O’Donnell, it was the man sitting next to her on that flight who constantly leaned over her to repeatedly take photos out the window, without much consideration for his fellow passenger.
The video O’Donnell shared online shows her expressing that she didn’t know “what personal space was.” In the clip, she said she was “confused at first” but assumed it would be a “one-time thing.” It wasn’t.
“They were trying to take pictures of the clouds and the window,” O’Donnell said Newsweek. “One or two are OK, but he started coming near me more and more often and I looked at him strangely.”
@fanntayeule/TikTok
O’Donnell managed to secretly film the man, who seems unaware of the impact his actions have on his neighbors.
Eventually she had had enough and tried to make her point. Unfortunately, the man missed his point.
“I closed the window to signal that it was over, but then he seemed confused,” she said. “A few minutes later, he tapped me on the shoulder to tell me to open the window again. I felt bad, so I did.”
The situation remained that way for the rest of the flight. While it may have made for an uncomfortable trip, the video proved popular on social media, with the clip garnering 3.3 million views on TikTok and thousands of comments from viewers in disbelief at the man’s behavior.
“This is seriously so weird,” wrote one user, while another commented, “Honestly sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live like this guy instead of my anxiety making me apologize for breathing.”
A third said: “I felt uncomfortable… sitting in the middle seat and even looking out the window… I felt like I was invading their space just by looking… I can’t even imagine that.” A fourth added: “That’s why I fly business class.”
O’Donnell may reconsider taking the window seat in the future.
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