Weighing in to debate
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By Sarah Caden
Sunday Apr 26 2009
THE most cunning part of Ryanair's plan to penalise "very large" passengers is that once the measures are in effect and we start moaning about them, they can point out that we've only ourselves to blame.
In much the same way as we consider weight gain and being fat as something within our control that we've let out of our control, so too are the recent Ryanair online polls that will conclude tomorrow in extra charges for fat passengers. Nobody made us vote for excess fees for overweight passengers and nobody made us then select their punishment.
All Ryanair did was nudge us in the general direction and then sat back and watched us create the inevitable future misery. Tomorrow, voting closes on how Ryanair will, in future, impose extra charges on larger customers. The choices are basic, charges will be based on either waist size, on every extra kilo of body weight over a certain limit, on points on the Body Mass Index scale, or, my favourite, the charge for a second seat if the sides of the passenger's waist touch both armrests simultaneously.
All have potential for airport humiliation should you underestimate your weight -- or lie, as it's also known -- but the last is potentially catastrophic. After all, what if the two seats you pay for are not situated together?
Any Liveline listener knows how hard it is to get anyone to move and allow you sit with your small children, so pleas for an adjacent seat for your extra girth just might fall on deaf ears. And prove unbearably humiliating.
When crafty old Ryanair ran their original poll, the extra charges for large passengers won out with 29 per cent of the vote.
Given the other options included a charge for toilet paper embossed with Michael O'Leary's face and a "corkage" fee for any food brought on board, the winner was a foregone conclusion.
Fat, after all, only happens to other people, but you can bet this will hurt more of us than we like to think and, this time, we'll have only ourselves to blame.
Sarah Caden
- Sarah Caden
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