Elan Gale has epic fun in an airplane

A couple of years ago I wrote about a relatively amusing experience I had with a man who, charitably, could win a bad-parent-of-the-year award with one hand tied behind his back. I wrote about the experience in this blog entry, The moron who slept on my shoulder. Go ahead and pull it up...we'll wait.

[Jeopardy theme plays]

Ah, glad you're back.

As you can see from the piece, my response to being stuck next to him in an aluminum tube for a couple of hours was to passive-aggressively not confront him while in flight. I simply wrote about it afterward and kinda forgot about it. Er, maybe not: If you pay close attention to the Google profile pic that I use to this day - posted again for your viewing convenience - you can see him after I've shoved his sleeping head off of my shoulder. Say hello to the doofus!

Fortunately, the world is filled with folks whose response is less polite-Canadian and more let's-have-some-fun-with-this. Enter Elan Gale, a producer for ABC's The Bachelor, who had a run-in this week with a whining fellow passenger known as "Diane". He live-tweeted the experience, and since then his story has gone delightfully viral as frustrated travellers everywhere cheer for a guy who deftly did what they've always dreamed of doing.

Here's the blow-by-blow, craftily summarized by the CBC's Lauren O'Neil (As an aside, she's another must-follow for the digerati. Her Twitter account is here.) Buzzfeed also has the lowdown, here, as does the UK's Daily Mail, here.

Kudos to you, Mr. Gale, for using humor in ways we won't soon forget. Well played.

Update: Aaaaand...he faked the whole thing. I suppose I could simply remove this entry from my blog and pretend it never happened. Or I could update this entry and keep it real. Since I'm not a big believer in deleting something once it's been posted, here it is. I guess we now know another brilliant-yet-deceptive way to boost your social media profile - he had 35,000 Twitter followers when this started, and he's now up to 176,000 or so. But credibility? Not so much. Le sigh.