Flight of fancy

If Colleen Wade hadn‘t been in the ‘wrong seat’ on a plane flight, she might never have met the love of her life. By Gillian Tucker.

Put it down to travel nerves, airline rules or a simple twist of fate, but none of this would have happened if Colleen Wade had only remembered to book her usual window seat. As it happened, she had forgotten. And that was why she found herself in a cramped middle seat in the centre aisle of the plane. With 30 hours of travel ahead and a week’s worth of work to catch up, she asked politely if they would move her. After all, this was business class and she was a Gold Card holder. But the answer had been a firm nein. Passengers were not allowed to change seats. She tried pleading. Just this once, couldn’t they bend the rules? This time the flight attendant’s nein was steely. Colleen had little choice but to hunker down and focus on the mountain of emails waiting for her on her laptop.

Lost in work, she was barely aware of other passengers, except to note a young man busy stowing his briefcase in the overhead locker near her. Then he took the seat alongside her. Colleen had a sudden brainwave. Perhaps he could intercede for her with the crew. Turning to him she asked: “Do you speak German?” The young man looked at her. His eyes were very blue. “No,” he said, with a surprised expression. Colleen told him she wanted to change seats but the flight crew refused to speak English to her. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than she realised her gaffe. She hadn’t meant to imply he was the reason, but that’s how it sounded. Pink with embarrassment, she quickly retreated behind her earphones. 

To make matters worse, she hadn’t really wanted to do this trip in the first place. Yet she had to show her new company what she was made of. “I’d only been working in the US for a couple of weeks when I was asked to go to Lagos in Nigeria to help launch a wireless network for a client,” she explains. Colleen had come to the United States after making her name in Australia working for Optus Communications in Sydney. There, she’d been headhunted for a job in California because of her expertise in wireless technology. But the new position in San Diego had come with risks as well as rewards, and one of them was the demand to build up new markets in ‘exotic’ locales such as Africa.

The project she was about to embark on was short-term, yet Colleen had felt uneasy about it from the start. Even the Australian Government advised registering with its embassy there before setting foot in Nigeria. Then there had been the endless paper chase for a visa and vaccinations, as well as the very real threat of contracting malaria while she was in the country. Before she left San Diego, she’d telephoned her mother in Australia to ease her anxiety. “Big companies would never send you to places that were dangerous – would they?” her mother had asked. The question had echoed in her mind. “I was a fool to think companies really cared about the safety of their personnel,” she says, and that morning, waiting for her boarding call in the lounge at Los Angeles International Airport, she had thought briefly about returning to San Diego, packing her bags and going home to Sydney where she’d be safe. At that very moment she heard her flight called and that was when she found she’d drawn the dreaded middle seat. In the rush of putting together her travel plans, she had forgotten to pre-book her usual window seat.

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