A kid spilled glittery hellscape on me midflight — so I reported him

Now we all know that glitter is the stuff of parents’ nightmares. 

The sparkly stuff somehow manages to get EVERYWHERE and is the absolute worst to clean.  

So imagine the frustration you might feel when a child (who isn’t your own) creates a glittery hellscape and unleashes the stuff all over you and your things midflight, while you’re minding your own business.

That’s exactly what happened to one man, who took to a popular forum to vent about a kid who he dubs the “glitter monster” and her mom.

“A selfish man with no understanding of children.”

“Am I the a**hole for reporting a mother and her glitter monster to a flight attendant?” the man began his post, which now has over 8K upvotes and 1.8K comments.

“I’d paid for an extra large aisle seat in the main cabin because of my long legs. It was a packed flight and my row-mates were a mother with a young child (maybe five or six). They brought a bunch of arts and crafts to keep the kid busy — things like glue sticks, markers, paper, and craft sticks. Sounds cute, right? Well, not when the glitter came out.

“The child, let’s call her Glitter Godzilla (GG), was making a mess and since she was in the middle seat, the glitter would spill over onto my side. If you remember glitter from primary school, it’s messy AF if you try attaching it to paper. There’s a lot of shake off and most of it doesn’t stick.

“So yeah the glitter was everywhere – on my shoes, my backpack, and my jeans.”

He then says that while he considers himself “patient” and understanding of the fact that kids can get messy, “this still felt crazy.”

While this was happening, the man was trying to catch the mom’s eye, hoping she’d step in but she just gave him a blank look as if to say, ‘This is how it is’. 

“I’m not confrontational so when I got up to use the bathroom, I quietly shared the situation with a flight attendant. She promised to discretely address it. When I got back to my seat, the mother was pissed. 

“I don’t know what the flight attendant said but the mom claimed I was being discriminatory against mothers, and since the flight was delayed she was just trying to keep her child entertained. Then she started raising her voice, accusing me of being ‘a selfish man with no understanding of children.’ All this despite the fact that my lower half now looks bedazzled.”

With no other seats available, the man was stuck there for the rest of the flight with the woman and her “verbal attacks.”

“Of course, the mother gave me a final ‘f**k you’ as we deplaned,” he added.

“I travel a lot and this was the flight from hell. Not to mention it was pretty embarrassing in the airport.

“AITA here? Was I wrong to get some help in dealing with what felt like a glitter assault? Should I have just sucked it up and become a human art project?”

“What moron brings glitter on a flight?”

Most people in the comments backed up the man, saying that he was totally justified in speaking up. 

“If even a few pieces of glitter work their way into the plane’s avionic systems, the entire flight is coming down. … I mean, probably not, but that’s what you say to the kid with a deathly serious face,” one of the top comments joked. 

Another member slammed, “Which freaking moron brings glitter on a flight? Whenever I’m packing activities for my kids, I have a list of no no’s. Does it make noise? It’s a no. Can it be used as a projectile? Also a no. Does it make a mess? Nope, nope, nope. Is it generally annoying? It’s a no.”

“I mean, I get that the mother was trying to keep her kid occupied, but she made a horrible choice of activity,” someone else wrote.

“Even if you’re adamantly against screens, there’s a TON of other things that don’t involve thousands of tiny sparkly things that inevitably get everywhere,” a fourth commented. 

Others said that the mom should have been the ‘glitter shield’ and be a barrier between the kid and the man. 

“NTA but you flew with one. She deserved to be called out. Having a kid doesn’t mean you get to impose their messes on anyone else. The kid should have also been in the window seat,” concluded one person.