An aide for people with hopeless time management skills

Back in Melbourne now, and sure enough, another topic for the blog was provided for me on the flight that just landed about three hours ago.

Because I was quite out of it at the start of my first movie of the flight, I went back to watch the very beginning of it again at the end of the flight. Mostly I wanted to get more context for some of the events that followed, because I hadn't paid sufficient attention to the setup. That movie was Mothers' Instinct, and it was followed by the 2024 movies Summer Camp, Turtles All the Way Down and Lee.

I had no intention to rewatch any more than the first 15 minutes, and in fact, I forwarded through most of that to get to the inciting incident. But of course United Airlines didn't know that. And so, when the remaining flight time decreased to below the remaining time in the movie, the following message appeared on the screen when I paused it:

And it is very clear to me that some people need this.

Because I consider the watching of a movie from beginning to end to be a sacrosanct activity -- especially if it's a movie you've never watched before -- it always leaves me perplexed and nonplussed when I see someone starting a new movie while the plane is starting its initial descent. Even if you have to taxi to the gate and then wait for a bunch of people ahead of you to get off the plane, I'm sorry, that's just not enough time to watch a movie.

And yet I see people do this all the time. Perhaps some of them are giving themselves just a taste of a movie they already like, or maybe even rewatching part of a movie they saw earlier on the same flight, as I did today. More often than not, though, I think it's a case of people just not caring how much of a movie they see, or having a poor ability with basic timekeeping skills. 

Well, United has taken that problem out of their hands. What's more, they've created a separate menu in the movie area (not pictured) that groups movies by their length, so you know which movies will kill a greater percentage of your flight, and which to watch when that percentage has already dwindled to its last 10%, meaning you need something short. (Yes, on the long flights from Melbourne to LA or vice versa, 10% of the flight is almost enough to watch a movie.) 

I didn't like United's system thinking I was one of those bozos who starts watching a 94-minute movie with about 20 minutes left in the fight, but then again, United's system would know that the same movie had already been watched on this flight in this very seat.

At worst, United's system probably just thinks my taste in movies is poor enough to want to watch this messy and problematic film a second time.