I was on an American flight with my boss about 25 years ago. I am 4’10” and weighed about 135 pounds. I was seated next to my boss (a tall skinny guy about 45 years old) in the emergency exit row and the female flight attendant came up to me and said loudly “You need to change seats.” I looked confused but got up and my boss and I traded seats. She said, “ Not like that! You have to move to a different row. You are too fat to sit in the emergency exit row.” She said it very loudly, so all the people around me heard her clearly. (Now if she said I was too short, I might understand but too fat? Excuse me! I wore size 10 ladies clothes. That is not “too fat,” perhaps kind of chubby but not anything like not strong and able-bodied.) My boss told her that we were not moving. She said he was okay but I wasn’t. I was so humiliated that I just said I’d move and to find me a seat to trade. A really big fat guy in the row behind me said he’d trade, so we did. Then he sat down and asked Ms Snotty Loudmouth for a seat belt extension. She got him one. Not a word about him being too fat.

When we landed, my boss and I sent a letter to American Airlines about the incident. In a return phone call, they said they’d be counseling the flight attendant, and offered me free flights for a year. I accepted, with the condition that I receive a personal apology from Ms Snotty Loudmouth. Which I got, apparently very reluctantly from her tone of voice. But at that time I was flying about 300,000 miles a year, so I guess it might have been worth the humiliation.