We’ve all had them at one point or another. You don’t really know how you got them, sometimes you have trouble getting rid of them, and sometimes you miss them once they are gone. These are your inflight friendships.

Tyler Durden called them single-serving friends. Along with the pack of peanuts and a miniature Jack Daniels bottle, these friends are also only packaged for consumption in limited bursts of time. With the time constraint understood from the outset, the acquainting process is expedited. Recently, on an oversold overseas flight, I was moved down from business class to economy (subject for another tale at another time) and placed specifically in seat 29B. Putting two and two together, you may realize that “B” means I had clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right.

So there I was, stuck in the middle seat, united with two travelers with whom, for this spell of time, I have happened along the same path. One guy, we’ll call him aisle-seat Allen, occupied himself with the inflight entertainment; and the other guy, let’s call him window-seat Wally, struck up a conversation with me.

At first, Wally and I talked about where we were from and what we were traveling for, and by the end of the very long flight, we were acting like old friends. On the other hand, aisle Allen and I never spoke much aside from an occasional “excuse me” when crawling past.

When the flight was over, we all grabbed our carry-ons and marched lemming-like to the baggage claim and immigration counters. At this time, my new single-serving friend, window-seat Wally, and I exchanged business cards and went our separate ways. While it’s not likely we will ever be as close of friends as we were for those 13 hours at 35K feet, the serving size of friendships like these makes traveling a pleasure, regardless of seating class.

— David Coker, advertising manager