What's it like to fly in a plane with a 100 year-old?

I don't know if I'm young or old, I'm in my 30s and from that narrow slice of America that was too young to fly commercial prior the eternal September 11th that was post 9/11 security theater.

I still remember my first transatlantic flight:, some ancient (by my standards) woman (probably more like 60s or 70s) was tearing apart the first class crew to CDG that they weren't serving tea, just bags of... she stopped overdoing the posh accent and just did some some kind of weird British hand gesture to indicate the plant matter in bags steeping in front of her did not fit her definition of tea. She didn't have a cognitive impairment, she was just posh by Pittsburgh standards and didn't seem to understand you can just bring tea onto the plane and ask for hot water if you're that OCD and/or Oxbridge.

I walked my fat Appalachian ass to the back of the plane, and promptly became sad that I hadn't threat modeled that my heavily encrypted laptop full of softcore pornography and pirated episodes of Dexter[1] was too large for the economy seatbacks if the geriatric in front of me reclined their seat, so I promptly and promptly started downing tiny bottles of wine I'd filled my TSA approved quart bag with rather than shampoo or conditioner to get in touch with my Catholic heritage and nudge myself to sleep, having given up on reading my copy of "Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" I'd removed the cover from lest I look like some kind of weird Nazi rather than merely a dark, brooding intellectual, since it was... massive, and thus had all the issues of the laptop plus nearly broke the seatback when I placed it daintily upon to distract myself as we prepped for takeoff rather than risk blowing up the plane by texting about how I was annoyed I was seated next to a 9/11 truther.

(You haven't lived until you have to whip out a copy of popular mechanics and start circling shit in it in the middle of the boarding area to some future Q-anon)

Anyways, walls of gonzo written... on the fly... aside, I agree age is more of a feeling, but sadly some people abuse the spirit of that idea, hence ten-ish years later us having what seems like seven different podcasts about Jeffrey Epstein, smaller seats, and pretty much the same people "up front" ;-)

TL;DR: Yes it's a good article, and yes, age is more of a feeling... but don't abuse the spirit of the rule.

[1] those SHOULD be two separate things, but I can't control what people do in their free time