It's hard to sympathize with Alec Baldwin, a short-fused celebrity living a rarified life ignoring the pleadings of a lowly flight attendant and yet... I kind of know where he's coming from.
I too have a problem with many of the rules and regulations of air travel that can make anyone a bit bonkers. I consider the many announcements made before takeoff the equivalent of noise pollution and I just wish I could turn them all off. Let's face it, if you do not know how to buckle your seat belt by now or that no one has smoked in an airplane for 25 years then, well, you're just plane dumb (pun intended.)
Nothing gets me more irritated than the rule that states I cannot use my ereader, whether it be a Kindle, a Nook or an iPad, while the plane is taking off. I find this 'rule' particularly abhorrent not because I cannot be without my e-reader for 20 minutes or so but because IT MAKES NO SENSE. When turned to the airplane mode, these e-readers are the equivalent of books. They do NOT emit any signal whatsoever. Read this article if you don't believe me; it makes the case that announcing everyone should turn off their devices might actually be more dangerous!
If you ban the use of e-readers, you might as well ban the reading of all books. After all, there is always the possibility that a bat could fly out of one. Sound ridiculous? Of course, but so is demanding that passengers turn off their e-readers.
In fact, e-readers are less offensive than many women's magazines with perfume strips that offend my senses, but there's nothing I can do about that.
When rules make no sense and you know it, the pilot knows it and the flight attendants know it and yet, they demand you follow those idiotic rules for the sake of nameless bureaucrats in Washington D.C., it leads to aggravation and, in the case of someone like Baldwin, an eruption. No one seems to know the details of his incident, but if the plane was sitting at the gate, as he says, why did he or anyone else on the plane have to stop playing his silly word game? Makes no sense.
I don't know about you, but I do not follow rules just because someone tells me they're rules. They also need to make sense or else, well, I just might ignore them. My one wish in life is to live long enough to see the FAA waive the rule requiring flight attendants to tell all of us how to buckle a seat belt. That will never happen, of course, so I believe I'll live a very long life, indeed.