Considerate Mum With Baby Hands Out Sweets & Earplugs to Other Passengers on 10-Hour Flight

Last Updated on 2019-03-03 , 4:34 pm

The word viral has been tossed around rather flippantly this day and age.

But viral truly describes this post by Facebook user Talal Masood.

On February 24 2019, Masood took to Facebook to share a photo montage with the caption:

“On a Ten hour flight from Seoul Korea to San Francisco, a mother handed out more than 200 goodie bags filled with candy and ear plugs, in case her 4 month old child cried during the flight.”

And here’s the photo:

Image: Talal Masood’s Facebook page

As the caption and images suggest, a Korean mum travelling for the first time with her 4-month old, gave out 200 goodie packs to passengers on board a 10-hour long haul flight from Seoul, Korea, to San Francisco, United States.

Perhaps fearing that her child’s behaviour would disturb other passengers, the Korean mum might have felt compelled to hand out the welfare packs, which consisted of earplugs, assorted candies, a pack of biscuits and a note written from the imaginary viewpoint of Junwoo, the 4-month old boy.

It states:

“Hello, I’m Junwoo and I’m 4 months old.

Today, I am going to the U.S. with my mom and grandma to see my aunt.

I am a little bit nervous and scary because this is my first flight in my life, which means that I may cry or make too much noise.

I will try to go quietly, though I can’t make any promises..Please excuse me.

So my mom prepared little goodie bag for you! It has some candies and earplugs. Please use it when it’s too noisy because of me.

Enjoy your trip. Thank you. :’)”

This posts has since garnered 137K reactions, 10K comments and 58K shares in the short span of 3 days.

While Goody Feed hasn’t ever in its historical entirety gotten such an infamy nor applaud, this posts has truly gone bona fide viral.

Comments

Trawling the comments sections of a viral post comes as naturally to me as the next bigoted statement T***MP will inevitably make.

Here are some of them.

The compliments

Image: Talal Masood’s Facebook post
Image: Talal Masood’s Facebook post

The “She didn’t have to do it” camp

Image: Talal Masood’s Facebook post
Image: Talal Masood’s Facebook post

The compliments are issue-free to me.

Now, for the second camp though , I’m beginning to think it shows more about the natural human cynical mindset more so than the incident itself.

While the note from Junwoo seems to belie the fact that her mom was anxious about the potential ruckus he might make, it could have also be written in a tongue-in-cheek manner.

Which might consequently mean that the welfare pack was not a vessel for guilt relief and/or a placating mechanism in the event Junwoo does kick up a fuss – as all babies naturally would – as these people, myself and other writers thought it actually was.

In my head I’m asking: ” Could it not just have been a very BAU, every day, SOP sort of thing that a very nice lady does?” and “Why does every good and well-meaning intention and/or action be read as something more or less than what it is at face-value, aka a nice act?”

But then again, we’ll most likely never know her true intention.

Unless-

Little Junwoo, if you ever chance upon this article, let me know why mum did what she did, won’t you?