GUM IN THE SEAT POCKET

A piece of chewed gum ended up jammed in an airplane seat pocket on a short hop from Spokane to Seattle, and the person who found it didn't let the man in 7B get away clean.

"Just got off DL3754, a short jump from Spokane to Seattle," the poster wrote. They'd been in 7A, next to a stranger in the two-seat configuration. "We didn't talk the whole time, no problem there."

The flight itself stayed quiet enough, until it didn't.

As the plane prepared to deboard, the poster says they caught a quick, ugly motion out of the corner of their eye. "I swore I saw him take a chewed piece of gum out of his mouth and stick in directly in the seat pocket." The man stood up, and the moment he cleared the row, the poster checked the pocket to see whether they'd imagined it.

They hadn't.

"Sure enough a piece of gum smooshed in there rudely awaiting an unsuspecting passenger or cleaner," the poster wrote. The pocket didn't just hold the gum, either. "BTW he had other trash he left in the pocket he could have easily put it in."

That detail made the whole thing stranger. The same man who had already wiped down the armrest with a disinfectant wipe when he sat down had apparently been careful about one tiny surface, and careless enough to leave chewed gum and other trash behind in the seat pocket.

The poster didn't leave it there.

"I hurried my butt up the jet bridge and told him how beyond rude I thought what he did was," they said. The confrontation happened before he could disappear into the terminal. His reaction was simple: "He was too stunned to speak."

The story didn't end at the gate. Later, the poster says, they wound up in the same train compartment. This time, the man didn't engage at all. He "avoided my gaze like the plague."

What happened on DL3754 left the poster with one question: was this "a weird power/asshole thing," or had he done it "without thinking?"