Stanley Bing: A Flight to Nowhere

For all of Stanley Bing's columns on TheStreet.com, click here.

I flew from here to there last night. As sometimes happens in business, I ran into somebody who is in business. We swapped a few observations for a while. After some time, I felt so appalled that I was forced to feign sleep. I think it was over St. Louis.

I should have known I was in some trouble when we were still on the ground in Los Angeles. The chief flight attendant had just announced that turkey wraps were available for $10 each to people in coach.

"Boy," he said. "Why don't they just charge an extra $10 for the ticket and give the things away for free?" I didn't know and told him so.

"These guys who run the airlines are so stupid at that kind of little stuff. What makes you think we can trust them to service and fly airplanes with all these people on them?"

This violated the first rule of in-flight discourse: No talk about anything related to airplane malfunctions.

It developed that we had both been in the same business at one point. I asked him what he did now. "I sold my business a little while back for a small fortune," he said, indulging in the kind of bragging you get used to after a while. Not. "Now I'm an investor."

"You must be taking it on the chin," I said, possibly to get back at him for being so forthcoming about all that small-fortune stuff. He allowed that he had been hurt, but was still investing.