A mother decided that destroying my daughter’s iPad would stop her son’s hysterics. But what happened next was an unexpected form of karma. My name is Bethany, I am 35 years old. I flew on vacation with my daughter Ella, who was quietly watching cartoons on her iPad. After a while, a woman came to us, accompanied by her husband and a son the same age as Ella. The boy complained of being bored, kicked the seat in front of him, and his mother tried to calm him down by saying that there would be no screens on vacation. But her eyes immediately fell on Ella’s iPad, and she asked me to put it away. “Could you please put the tablet away?” – she said. – “We have decided that our son will not use screens.” I was a little surprised by her audacity. “Excuse me, but my daughter uses the iPad to sit quietly during the flight,” I replied. The woman insisted: “That’s unfair to our son.” I stopped talking and went back to my book. But when the boy started whining again, the woman could no longer control herself. In a fit of anger, she reached across the aisle and pushed the iPad out of my daughter’s hands. The tablet fell to the floor and shattered. “Mom, my iPad!” Ella screamed in shock.
The woman took a deep breath and acted as if she was very sorry. “Oh no! How clumsy of me!” she said, but her satisfied face betrayed her. It was anything but an accident. Barely able to contain my anger, I hissed: “What’s wrong with you?” She shrugged her shoulders and replied with feigned innocence: “Maybe it’s a sign that your daughter should spend less time in front of the screen.” At that moment, a stewardess came, and the woman immediately switched to a whining tone: “That was terrible!” The stewardess nodded sympathetically, but explained that nothing could be done about the damaged tablet during the flight. I tried to calm Ella down, but that was not the end of the story. Without the tablet, the boy started to get hysterical again.
He kicked the seat, pulled on the little table and did not stop complaining: “Boring! This vacation is the worst!” At that time, Ella pulled my sleeve and asked: “Mom, can you fix the iPad?” I hugged her and said that we would fix it as soon as we landed and that we could read a book for now. But while I was tending to my daughter, a new nightmare was unfolding across the aisle. The boy, disappointed, knocked over the coffee cup, which fell on his mother’s knees and soaked her handbag. The passenger ID fell out of her bag, landing right under the boy’s feet, who stepped on it and smeared it in the coffee stains on the carpet. Her face was full of panic. She tried to fish the passport out of the puddle, but it was already too late – the passport looked like a wet cardboard box, the pages stuck together, and the cover was deformed.
The stewardess came back and informed her that the damaged passport could cause problems at passport control, especially during a stopover in Paris. The woman was completely distraught and tried to do something. And I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of satisfaction. Karma had made itself known again. As we descended our flight, Ella sat quietly, leafing through a book, completely forgotten in all the chaos. As we exited the plane, I took one last look at the woman, now nervously clutching her damaged passport. It turned out that it wasn’t just my daughter’s iPad that was damaged on this flight.
