From a bloke named Bob
Ryanair really is the epitome of dismal.
The service, the scratchcards, the ability to make something so pricelessly cheap and poxy still so relatively overpriced (even the 1p seats), the horrible conditions you are forced to endure: it is all the absolute distillation of sheer awfulness.
The last time - in every sense - that I flew with Ryanair, I had made the mistake of letting somebody else book my flight for a stag do. Upon arriving at the airport (a little village outside Norwich, called Stansted) I then couldn't bring myself to talk to that person for an hour after I heard who they'd booked with.
Yet I can honestly say, hand-on-heart, the service was actually indescribably worse than I had imagined prior to boarding.
I would rather try and get anywhere I need to go clinging onto the dorsal fin of a hungry Great White shark, or being dragged behind a dustbin lorry on a hot summer's day than step on one of their flights into the unknown, yet always surprising, inadequacies of humanity and customer service.
It is as though the whole thing has actually been designed in the nightmarish labs of some inhumane regime to shake your faith and belief in humanity and, more fundamentally, civilisation.
From the very first moment the lurid, acidic yellow of their fixtures and fittings (the same colour, I can only imagine, as the last squeak of piss from a man who died of dehydration and a Berrocca overdose ...some weeks ago) hits you, the sensory violation is too much to take. Who could ever sleep *again* after seeing such a colour, let alone within minutes on the very same flight!
So, denied the easy release of sleep, you then are forced to sit, hopelessly stuck in a balancing act of universal impossibility and discomfort, stripped of basic necessities such as leg room or a seat back pocket to hold objects of unimagined controversy among the travelling fraternity - such as a book.
You could put your possessions in a bag of course and put the bag in the spacious overhead luggage rack, but if you're clinging to such a foolish notion you're clearly a first- and last-timer on Ryanair.
So, packed in but balancing some not-unreasonable possessions uncomfortably upon your lap for the seemingly interminable duration of your flight, you are then kept busy by the irresolvable questions your flight conjures in your fevered mind:
- Who buys a ringtone from a budget airline?
- What could Ryanair possibly have that I would ever want; let alone want enough to buy one of their lottery tickets?
- What the hell did the man in front just buy... it kind of looks like a sandwich?
- How depressed must first-time visitors to the UK be upon receiving the answer to the question 'How far is it from London Stansted to London?'
- Why did I ever think I'd be able to take luggage on an flight?
- If even one of my fellow passengers think this is acceptable, then what half-breed of degenerate are we inflicting upon foreign cities with these flights... and should we declare this grotesque export to the UN or Nato?
- Why take us through the safety procedure...? I actually WANT to die right now, as long as it happens early in the flight
- Wasn't that passenger limping on a different foot on his way to the toilet?
- Did I miss the bit in the terms and conditions about wearing a tracksuit?
- Is it possible to walk home from Barcelona Girona airport?
- If I wrote a letter of complaint about all this to Ryanair, would customer service burn it, then piss on it, or piss on it and then try lucklessly to burn it?
The only possible use I personally can see for Ryanair is in the occasional transport of convicted war criminals. Give them a choice: You can either spend your remaining days locked up in a military prison outside The Hague; or we'll simply fly you there and back in a day on Ryanair and call it quits.
Frankly I'd not only ask for the life sentence in the military prison, but I'd even say they could rough me up a bit, by way of a tip for letting me duck the flight option.
I should stress, that's just my opinion though and my experience of their service. I'm sure Ryanair is right and it has many happy customers. And I wish them all the very best of luck.