We all have bad habits on airplanes.
But draping your hair over the back of your seat so it covers the TV screen of the passenger sat behind could be going a bit too far.
Boston Globe columnist Dante Ramos tweeted this photograph from his verified account of a young woman doing exactly that early Tuesday morning:
"Congrats to the ponytailed young woman in seat 22B," the Pulitzer Prize 2014 finalist posted. "You've invented a whole new way to be awful at 35,000 feet."
The tweet soon went viral, with many commenters suggesting ways that Ramos could "solve" the problem. He later revealed that the unidentified woman had moved her errant locks shortly after “we got her attention.”
Ramos told The Huffington Post he was flying with his partner from Houston to Boston on board a United Airlines flight when the incident occurred.
"At some point, the ponytail just dropped down in front of his seat. It took us a few moments to realize that it was someone's hair," he said in an email. "Let's give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she didn't realize it might be affecting another passenger. It was off-putting -- but also hilarious."
Ramos described his tweet going viral as being "an interesting study in how social media works" and even wrote his own opinion piece on it.
"Somehow, the tweet reaches one person in, say, Malaysia -- and then all of a sudden lots of Malaysians know about this one goofy thing that happened for a few minutes on a flight from Houston to Boston," he told HuffPost. "If only I could draw the same response (4,600-plus retweets!) to the columns I write about higher ed and public transportation!"
While certainly being annoying, draping hair over the back of the seat doesn't actually feature in the list of the 10 worst habits of airplane passengers conducted by London City Airport in England in January.
The greatest source of irritation while onboard was excessive seat-reclining, followed by people who hog the armrests and customers who are rude to cabin crew. Here are the rest:
