Let this be a warning to all of you travelers who are obsessed with your cellphones: Airlines mean business when they tell you to shut up.
It’s a lesson one Southwest Airlines passenger learned the hard way on Monday.
For some reason 50-year-old Joe David Jones refused to get off his cellphone during a flight from Austin to Dallas and he’s now having to pay the price for it.
According to police reports, Southwest flight attendants repeatedly asked Jones to hang up his cellphone while the plane was in mid-air, but he refused to comply.
When the jet landed at Love Field in Dallas, police were waiting for the chatty passenger. In the end the Austin man was cited for disorderly conduct and could be fined up to $25,000 for his crime.
The Federal Aviation Administration bars the use of mobile phones on airborne planes due to concerns about interference with navigation systems.
PARKING VIOLATOR FINALLY PAYS UP
Better late than never I guess.
Police in Calumet, Michigan found a surprising payment in the mail last week. According to officers in the Upper Peninsula town, a woman sent them a $20 bill and a note regarding a $1 parking ticket that she received in… 1976.
The handwritten parking violation was issued on September 1, 1976. It along with a $20 bill and a short note arrived at police headquarters last week in a plain white envelope with no return address.
The note read: “I always had good intentions of paying it. I put it aside and every once in a while I would come across it and said ‘someday I’m going to pay it.’ Now I think it’s time.”
Police say the fine for an unpaid parking violation increases to $5 after 72 hours, but doesn’t go any higher than that.
According to a local paper, police say they can’t remember someone making good on an unpaid ticket after so much time.
Apparently the woman wanted the matter closed once and for all as she ended her note with this line: “Please don’t try and track me down. I am a respectable lady.”
I guess so.
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