The latest bonehead comment of the day comes to you from Ryanair, with whom I flew with a couple times in the past few weeks.
For those fortunate few not familiar with Ryanair, it’s basically an infomercial at 30.000 feet. The tickets tend to be dirt cheap, but then you have to pay for everything on top of that: seat reservations, priority boarding access, extra baggage, and, once you’re up in the air, food, duty-free items, and lottery tickets. (Yes, lottery tickets in the form of scratch cards. And, like the duty-free items, they’re usually introduced using the word “amazing”.) At one point, there were even musings about charging to go to the toilet during the flight. Ryanair has been doing this for years and are now the model most other airlines are gravitating to by charging for stuff that used to be included in the price.
In any case …
A recent, pandemic induced change is that you could now only pay for the inflight unnecessities by card and not cash “because of COVID-19 restrictions”. We’ll ignore the fact that it has long been known that corona is unlikely to spread through surface transmission or that cards and the stuff you’re buying also have surfaces. What makes this explanation particularly boneheaded is that it was thoughtfully provided to us by a flight attendant who was not wearing a mask, who had earlier informed us that our wearing of a mask was only recommended but not mandatory, and who worked for an airline that no longer checked our vaccination status before boarding.
Breathe all you want, but God forbid that you ask me to carry change …
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