Depending on where you sit on the plane, your air travel can either be a great experience or a complete nightmare. Things get even worse when another passenger asks you to switch seats with them. On one of her plane trips, a woman named Cristina Yang (@not.cristinayang on TikTok) encountered a fellow passenger who was giving Yang a headache during the ride. So she took drastic but hilarious measures to prevent the elderly woman next to her from having to switch seats, and the internet cheered her on.
Yang recounted in her video how she was on a flight from Hawaii to Seattle and had paid extra to secure a window seat in premium economy, which comes with benefits like more legroom and unlimited drinks and snacks. In the middle was a polite old Japanese woman and another passenger in the aisle seat. However, the woman in the aisle seat was traveling with her friend who was sitting at the back of the plane in aisle 26, and she wanted the Japanese woman to switch seats with her friend.
But that wouldn’t have been a fair trade for the Japanese woman, because you could “smell the toilet in the back” and when the Japanese woman tried to move, Yang had to step in and help her seatmate with an effective lie. Yang – a Chinese-American woman – told the lady in the aisle that she and the Japanese woman were traveling together and had no interest in sitting separately. “Hi, we’re both Asian, obviously we know each other!” she joked.
“Sit down, Connie,” Yang said to the confused Japanese woman, pretending to be her relative. The aisle passenger didn’t believe her lie at first, so Yang had another trick up her sleeve. She started speaking Cantonese to the Japanese woman. Although the elderly lady didn’t understand a word of Cantonese, she started answering Yang in Japanese after she understood that Yang wanted to help her.
As expected, the woman who requested the seat change couldn’t tell the difference between the two languages and fell for the scam. “I looked up at the lady who was still standing there and said, ‘Okay, we’re going to continue to talk about you in our language, so go back to row 26 where you belong.’ If you wanted to sit next to your friend, you should have booked a ticket next to her, not 20 rows behind!” Yang concluded.
People on TikTok were well entertained by the events described by Yang, and most of them talked about how “Connie” would have returned home with an interesting memory of the flight. @sfoss33 wrote, “It’s like when you get to the movies early to get good seats and people just want you to move down a seat. Nope!” @nunya joked, “She’ll remember you for the rest of her life. There will be a story about it every Christmas or any other holiday that’s big in Japan.” @chichagoprgirl75 quipped, “May your coffee always be hot, green lights on your driveways, and tight parking spots in the parking lot.” @hipsterwriter commented, “I can’t imagine asking someone to trade a better seat for me. What’s wrong with people?”
