Is this a nightclub or an aircraft ?

There are many unwritten rules in life. We know about them, they exist
but they are never written down.
There are some things that you should just be aware of.

"Look both ways before you cross the street" is one such rule. It has
appeared in writing at times, but not so much as a warning, but instead
as a posthumous statement, usually by a close relative when they were
asked by the authorities questions like "Did you offer him any advice ?"

Like most things we tend to encounter in the day to day, they happen so
often there is no point in writing them down. It is also worth noting
that the same rules are broken in the same ways by the same people.

Like red-eye etiquite.

If you are, as I have been on too many occasions, stuck on a plane for
more than 5 hours in the middle of the night; the thing you most want to
do is sleep.

So the the most important thing that you MUST do is shut the fuck up and
let the people around you sleep.

You should not, and this brings us back to the reason such unwritten
rules exist, transgress these boundaries and do something unthinkable like
spend all night talking very loudly to the attractive woman next to you in
the hopes of getting a second date. ( We will ignore for the moment that
the first one is under duress )

I have been victim to this twice and it is always the same.

A guy ( it is always the males that instigate this ) finds himself
sitting next to the most attractive women he has ever met, this week. He
realises that he has only the duration of this flight to impress her and get a
phone number.

He thus weighs up his options, reaches for the unwritten rule book,
promptly throws it out the metaphorical window, and forges any attempt
at sleep in deference to trying to 'Pick up the hot chick in seat 16D'

As a result those of us within earshot ( i.e. most of the plane ) have to
suffer through the night as he tries his to sound intelligent and
interested in the face of a woman who is, mostly, just being polite.

It never works, he never gets her address and in the mean time the rest
if us can't sleep.

Earplugs, a business class upgrade and a pillow over the head were still
not enough.

More than once I considered getting up and telling the poor sap that
there was "no hope, you aren't getting in her pants". But fear of
situations like 'Making a Scene' and 'We had to find an Air Marshall'
made me change my mind

In the end I just had to ride it out and wait for that final point in the
evening where the poor victim ( her ) decided enough was enough and she (
and the rest of us ) also needed sleep.

So, should you ever think that a seat by the exit aisle has lots of leg
room and is worth fighting for, I would like to point out that this seat
is also right by the toilets and will usually result in 'jenny' the
dancer meeting 'frank' the idiot and you end up learning far too much
about why a dancer needs to do her stretches and why a horny male thinks
this is interesting.

Take a seat in the back of the bus. It is quieter there.