Fear of Flying

Елена Максимова Back in USSR Голос Полуфинал Сезон 2
The Voice Russia
 'Man, I had a dreadful flight. I'm back in the USSR', er, USA. I really detest flying on commercial airliners. It might be the very peak of technology, but it is the very pit of civilization.
     I tend to think of myself as an average sort of guy, a little smarter than average in certain narrow areas, but for day-to-day affairs, fairly average. And so I imagined that everyone felt the same way about flying as I did. This trip I had a little time to think about it. Four hours in Buenos Aires waiting to take-off, ten hours and one minute flying to Atlanta, another four hours hanging around Atlanta doing my best impression of a Zombie, and then six hours to Portland, where I got to collect my luggage and drive home. Call it 25 hours and I got maybe 3 or 4 hours of sleep. I was not happy.
    If everyone experienced airline travel the way I do airliners would have ten seats and there would be one flight a day leaving Portland. You want to go to New York? We have a flight leaving early next quarter. So we've got a slight disconnect here.
    Sleep, or lack thereof,  has a lot to do with it, and restricted legroom becomes actually painful after a few hours, which means sleep is very elusive.
    On another note, those stories where the hero goes without sleep for 72 hours running and still manages to make any kind of sense? Pure fantasy. If I don't get eight hours a day, forget it, I'm not even going to try functioning. I don't get eight hours all at once, mind you. Three hours here, two hours there, but eventually I usually manage to get eight hours and around 5PM I become a human being.

P.S. While I was looking for a music video of this tune I came across one done by a Russian (I think) woman. She is pretty durned good. I was going to give it top billing, but the embedded version starts with an ad, and we can't have that.

Update March 2017 replaced missing video with the one I mentioned in the P.S. I have gotten used to YouTube ads. Still don't like them, mostly, but occasionally a good one pops up, so there is that, and it's free, which is good.

Update July 2022 replaced missing Russian video.