Table Setting

One afternoon my new flight crew and I were eating a quick lunch in the Sacramento airport when I noticed a young man with a small group at a nearby table. He was sitting squarely on the table, and I remarked that apparently there weren't quite enough chairs in the food court area for this young man. I recited a poem my mother once told to me to the pilot and first officer, who got quite a kick out of it.

"Tables were made for cups and glasses,
Not for our children's cute little asses."

Captain Lyle Smith and First Officer Erick Zurita laughed so hard they both had to stop eating for several minutes. I laughed with them, but not as hard. I didn't think it was all that funny, but then again I had heard that poem quite a lot through life.

The young man later boarded our flight and we took him to his next destination before my crew and I returned to Sacramento again. Again the crew and I stopped to eat lunch, and even managed to sit at the same table with the umbrella, because as the Captain put it "it gives more of a picnic feel" to our lunch.

As we sat there eating, First Officer Zurita looked at me with a smirk. With a pleasant smile and accompanying Mexico City accent, he asked me "Did you happen to notice the guy who was sitting on the table earlier was on our flight?"

"Yeah," I responded, smiling at the memory of the two men laughing so hard at that crazy poem.

"Did you ask him nicely to not sit on his airplane tray table when he got on the plane?"

I thought Lyle and I would both pass out laughing so hard.