BOSTON, April 1 (UPI) — A man who spotted a fellow plane passenger with her ponytail hanging over the back of her seat joked about the scene on Twitter — and was shocked by the response.
Dante Ramos, a columnist for the Boston Globe, tweeted a photo Monday showing a fellow plane passenger with her long ponytail hanging over the back of her seat and partially obscuring the screen on the back of the chair.
“Congrats to the ponytailed woman in seat 22B. You’ve invented a whole new way to be awful at 35,000 feet,” Ramos tweeted.
A second tweet from Ramos said the woman eventually moved her hair.
“For the record: After marveling for a bit at her obliviousness, we got her attention. She moved it,” he tweeted.
Ramos elaborated on the event in a Boston Globe column this week. He said he was taking a plane with his partner, Ryan, when they spotted the offending ponytail.
“I snapped a photo, because the sight itself was comical. We waited. Once it was clear the ponytail owner, who was playing a game on her phone, was indifferent or oblivious, Ryan stood up and got her attention. Barely looking up from her device, she moved her seatback forward, and her ponytail flopped back out of our sight. We chuckled about the episode until we landed,” he wrote.
The columnist said he was shocked when the photo went massively viral and he discovered the unexpected downsides of such an accomplishment.
“I heard from creepy misogynists and assorted angry others, and regretted that my original tweet — the digital equivalent of an eyeroll at an anonymous fellow passenger’s misstep — had, when magnified thousands of times over, unleashed a massive trolling campaign against someone who had in fact fixed a problem. Meanwhile, one user accused me of plagiarizing my own photo from Reddit, where someone else had posted it without crediting me,” he wrote.
