Tightwad appreciates your help in keeping us out of bankruptcy by paying extra to sit in an aisle seat or to actually travel with luggage. While waiting to board your flight today, please look at this menu of choices we’ve added to fine-tune your flying experience. Select from the following options and return your completed form to the gate agent. The resulting fees will be charged to your credit card.

 

SEATING OPTIONS:

For a seat that isn’t near a howling baby. $10

For a seat that isn’t beside a morbidly obese fellow passenger.  $20

For a seat that isn‘t next to a woman going through a horrible divorce who desperately needs a shoulder to cry on. $50

For a seat that isn’t crawling with bed bugs. $100

 

FOOD SERVICE:

We will be serving thin gruel and recycled water during today’s eight hour flight. 

For an upgrade to a carcinogenic lunch meat wrap. $5

For an upgrade to a lukewarm vegan pizza. $10

For permission to cook and eat a fellow passenger. $35 

 

USE OF RESTROOMS:

We’ve installed pay toilets on our planes. You may visit the bathroom for a mere $1.00.  Other bathroom options:

For permission to smoke a cigarette in the bathroom. $10

For permission to smoke a joint in the bathroom. $20

For permission to have sex in the bathroom. $100

For permission to have sex in the bathroom with a flight attendant. $200.

For permission to have sex in the bathroom with the pilot. $300

 

YOUR PILOT TODAY:

Your pilot today will be Jeff, a twenty-two year old recovering alcoholic and sex-addicted recent graduate of Fly By Night Pilot School in lovely Tijuana, Mexico. 

To upgrade to a pilot who has had only one drink within the last two hours. $20

To upgrade to a pilot who has had only one heart attack within the last two hours. $50

To upgrade to a pilot who has never crashed a plane. $20    

To upgrade to Captain Sully Sullenberger. $200,000.

 

When we’ve collated this information and assigned your new seats, we’ll board the plane. Please be advised that anyone who complains about this new fee menu will be assessed a $10 “Please Close Your Pie Hole And Sit Down” Fee.    

And thanks again for flying Tightwad!

————

Roz Warren is the editor of twenty humor collections, including The Best Contemporary Women’s Humor and Women’s Glib. Her stories, humor, and essays have been published in the Utne Reader, Seventeen Magazine, The Funny Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and in many other magazines and collections. She is happily divorced and has one perfect son, who designed her website. Roz is an attorney who left the practice of law to work in a suburban library. She is currently working on a comic novel about working in a suburban library.