A mother decided that destroying my daughter’s iPad would put an end to her son’s tantrums. But what happened next was an unexpected form of karma.
My name is Bethany, I’m 35 years old. I was on a plane heading for a vacation with my daughter, Ella, who was quietly watching cartoons on her iPad. After a while, a woman came over with her husband and a son about Ella’s age. The boy was complaining about being bored, kicking the seat in front of him, while his mother tried to calm him down, explaining there would be no screens during their vacation.
However, her eyes immediately landed on Ella’s iPad, and she turned to me.
“Could you please put the tablet away?” she asked. “We’ve decided our son won’t be using screens.”
I was a bit taken aback by her boldness.
“Sorry, but my daughter uses the iPad to stay calm during the flight,” I replied.
The woman persisted: “It’s unfair to our son.”
Not wanting to argue, I went back to reading my book. But when her son started whining again, the woman couldn’t hold back. In a fit of frustration, she marched across the aisle and knocked the iPad out of my daughter’s hands.
Mama, my iPad!” Ella cried out, stunned.
The woman took a deep breath and pretended to be truly sorry. “Oh no! How clumsy of me!” she said, but her smug expression gave her away. It was anything but an accident.
Barely able to contain my anger, I hissed, “What is wrong with you?”
She shrugged and replied with fake innocence, “Maybe it’s a sign your daughter should spend less time on screens.”
At that moment, a flight attendant arrived, and the woman immediately switched to a whiny tone: “It was terrible!”
The flight attendant nodded sympathetically but explained that nothing could be done about the damaged tablet during the flight.
I tried to comfort Ella, but this wasn’t the end of the story. Without the tablet, the woman’s son began to spiral into full-blown hysteria. He kicked the seat in front of him, tugged at the tray table, and kept whining, “This is boring!
This vacation is the worst!”
Meanwhile, Ella tugged at my sleeve and asked, “Mom, can you fix the iPad?”
I hugged her and reassured her that we’d get it fixed as soon as we landed, and for now, we could read a book together. But as I focused on comforting my daughter, a new nightmare was unfolding in the aisle.
The boy, upset, knocked over a cup of coffee, spilling it onto his mother’s lap and soaking her handbag. The passenger ID card fell from her pocket and landed right under the boy’s feet, which he stepped on, spreading the coffee stains onto the carpet. Her face was full of panic. She tried to pull the passport out of the coffee puddle, but it was already too late. The passport looked like a soggy cardboard box, the pages stuck together, and the cover was warped.
The flight attendant returned and informed them that the damaged passport could cause problems at passport control, especially during a layover in Paris. The woman was completely desperate, trying to do anything to fix the situation. And I couldn’t help but feel a certain sense of satisfaction. Karma had struck again.
As we disembarked from the plane, Ella sat calmly and flipped through a book, completely unaware of all the chaos.
As I left the plane, I took one last glance at the woman, who was now nervously clutching her damaged passport. It turned out that it wasn’t just my daughter’s iPad that had been ruined during the flight.
