Smoke Gets in the Air

Not long ago a nonsmoking lawyer found that there was seating only in the smoking section of the airplane he had boarded. Knowing federal regulations require airlines to provide enough seating in the nonsmoking section, he requested that the area where he was seated be made nonsmoking. This was done. But once in the air the other passengers lit up anyway​—and then the real fire started! The passengers fumed at each other so much that the captain finally came back and told the smokers to stop. They defied him. “I cannot have an insurrection on my aircraft,” he reportedly said, and shortly thereafter he landed the plane at an airport a couple hundred miles short of its New York city destination.

Apparently, these smokers took their “right” to pollute seriously.