I had an absolutely bizarre experience last week and I’m wondering if it’s worth saying something to AA. I don’t know if I’ve ever submitted a formal complaint to a company before about an employee. Flight was from DCA to DFW.

I boarded in Group 2 and had a window in one of the MCE rows. When I get to the row, an AA employee (I’m guessing flight attendant) is sitting in the middle seat. I let her know that I’m in the window. She moves, I get to my seat, but before I sit down she moves back to her seat and puts her elbows about 3-4 inches across both of the middle seat arm rests. She puts her elbows well onto my side of the arm rest and then does the same on the other side, and she locks her hands together so that despite the fact her elbow is now jammed into my rib cage, it’s not moving. She does the same thing to the lady sitting on the aisle seat. I asks, “do you mind moving your elbow?” and she pretended she didn’t hear me.

When boarding ended, she looked over and saw that the row across the aisle was empty. She said, “thank God,” unbuckled her seat belt, and flung the heavier metal end toward me (it hit me in the arm) and went over to that row. The lady next to her said to me after she moved, said “not sure what her problem is, but I’m calling that a win.” Well, turns out the people sitting sitting in the empty aisle had just passed their seats, so the employee came back to the middle seat.

When she sat down, she tried to do the elbow thing again, but this time I was able to get my arm between my ribs and her elbow, so she cut it out. But she then pulled out her phone and started a FaceTime call with someone (no headphones, just speaker phone). She then proceeds to explain to whoever she’s talking to that she “got stuck in the middle seat again” and then talks about nothing for the next 10 minutes. Mind you, she started the call after boarding ended. She continued through the door closure announcement, and kept going right through the start of the safety briefing as the plane was backing away from the gate. She made it to the oxygen mask demonstration before she finally got off the call.

Thankfully, she slept through the flight and we didn’t have any more issues. But it was weird. I would have considered it pretty rude for just a normal passenger, but I guess I hold airline employees to a slightly higher standard. I get that people don’t like the middle seat- I know I hate it. But fwiw, I always give the person in the middle seat the arm rest and usually do everything possible to make sure I don’t make their experience any worse than it already is. She was fine once she went to sleep, but the first 25 minutes of the flight were miserable. What would y’all do?