Woman in Window Seat on Flight Not Prepared for What Man Beside Her Does

A woman got more than she bargained for from the passenger next to her while sitting in the window seat on a three-hour flight.
When Fanny Gagnon O’Donnell, an au pair living and working in Munich, Germany, first boarded her flight back from a recent trip to Spain, she was delighted to discover she had nabbed a window seat.
O’Donnell even went as far as taking a picture of herself alongside the window and sending it to her mom. However, that sense of joy would prove short-lived as a video posted to her TikTok account, @fanntayeule shows.
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Air travel can be stressful at the best of times with Expedia’s 2024 Air Travel Hacks Report finding that 55 percent of Americans consider it to be their “leading cause of stress.”
For O’Donnell on this particular flight, the leading cause of stress was the man sitting next to her, who insisted on leaning over her to repeatedly take pictures out of the window with little regard for his fellow passenger.
The video O’Donnell shared online highlights how, as she puts it, didn’t know “what was personal space.” In the clip, she said that she was “confused at first” but assumed it would be a “one time thing.” It wasn’t.
“They were trying to take photos of the clouds and the window,” O’Donnell told Newsweek. “One or two is fine but he kept coming more and more into my space and I looked at him funny.”
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O’Donnell was able to covertly film the man, who appears oblivious to how his actions affect his neighbor.
Eventually, she decided enough was enough and tried to make a point. Unfortunately, that point was lost on the man in question.
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“I closed the window to signify that it was over but he then seemed confused,” she said. “He tapped me on the shoulder a few minutes later to tell me to open the window again. I felt bad so I did.”
That was how the situation stayed for the remainder of the flight. Though it might have made for an uncomfortable trip, the video proved a popular one on social media with the clip racking up 3.3 million views on TikTok and thousands of comments from viewers in disbelief at the man’s actions.
“That’s actually so strange,” one user wrote with another commenting: “Honestly sometimes I wonder what it would be like to live like this guy instead of my anxiety that has me apologizing for breathing.”
A third said: “I felt awkward…when I had the middle seat and even LOOKED out the window… felt like I was invading their space just with my vision… I can’t even imagine doing this.” A fourth, meanwhile, added: “This is why I fly on business class.”
O’Donnell might have second thoughts about taking the window seat in the future.
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