We’ll shock no one by saying that the gilded age of air travel ended a long time ago. True, it is now much easier, not to mention more affordable, to get to a cross-continental destination. But you end up paying for your high-flying hubris in other ways: stingy baggage allowances, sloppy food with prices to match the altitude, and the hidden costs of every additional basic provision beyond actually securing a seat on the plane. The oxygen is complimentary, but even that seems to be open to question.

But if we’re being honest, the main problem with air travel – as with most things in life – is the other people. Which is to say: everyone else but us. And yes, sure, sometimes the problem is us. Being confined to a metal tube at 30,000ft can bring out the very worst when really, given the circumstances, we should all be trying to be our best selves.

Here, then, are five men you’re likely to encounter between your 4.00am and the frantic rummage through the duty-free shop in search of a present for your neglected loved ones on the way home. Our advice? Avoid eye contact, blast those headphones and disembark via the nearest emergency exit if you have to. Life is too short to be stuck next to one of these guys, and a one-hour wait in a grounded aircraft ahead of a 90-minute flight is already too long.

Travelling with small children isn’t easy, and anyone attempting such a feat deserves more medals than were ever dished out in Dastardly And Muttley In Their Flying Machines. But in a reverse spin on helicopter parenting, here’s a father who disappears at 30,000ft. Thing 1 is up on her seat flossing while squirting the contents of a juice carton over the aircraft cabin. Thing 2 is most of the way through dismantling his seat and has moved on to the one in front, kicking the back of the chair repeatedly. They say it takes a village to raise a child, but that doesn’t mean you should count flight attendants as childcare. Given that it’s an enclosed space – unless of course they trigger an escape hatch, which, now we’ve mentioned it, at least one of the two is plotting – what’s the worst that could happen? Someone in the adjacent row getting cuffed with a fidget spinner is a given. The likelihood of a collision between a hoverboard, somehow smuggled through security, and the drinks trolley is also close to evens. Meanwhile, Dad sinks slowly into his seat, earbuds in, blissfully oblivious, applying a parenting doctrine that is less free-range and more like raising freedom fighters.

This jaded Air Miler has landed in every last two-bit, semi-tarmacked field-dressed-up-as-an-airport on the planet. He’s stayed in most chain hotels from Kamchatka to the South Sandwich Islands and, should you ask, he can confirm that the rooms are all the same. (And will do so at length even if you don’t.) His passport, in a patriotic navy blue sheath, has more stamps than an overzealous philatelist. He’s eaten roast tiger quoll, Almas caviar and the world’s most exquisite fugu. He once dined on ortolan the traditional way – drowned in armagnac, popped whole in his mouth with a napkin covering his head, crunching the bones as it slowly dissolved – although it was a tad overdone. Now he’s making do with a limp cheese and ham sandwich. He spent last summer in Ittoqqortoormiit, Greenland – the Wi-Fi wasn’t much cop. The year before, he visited Bolivia’s much celebrated Salar de Uyuni and now he takes recommendations with a pinch of salt. He woke up naked on the beach in Ibiza in 1988. These days, he always packs extra swimming shorts. He’s seen things you wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. He watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. But in all of his travels, he’s yet to find a decent onboard pinot grigio.

Having arrived only four hours ahead of his domestic flight instead of his customary five-hour margin-of-error window, he’s already on edge. His caffeine intake, close to intravenous by the time his departure gate is finally announced, has ramped up his panic reserves further. Exploding into action, he sends an old woman flying into the discount book rack outside WH Smith as he darts towards the pre-flight holding pen. He jitters prior to boarding, then barges a pregnant mother and her small children out of the way to get on the plane first. After filling an entire overhead locker with his carry-on luggage, he takes a mental note of the emergency escape routes ahead of the flight and eyeballs anyone not giving the cabin crew’s safety demonstration their complete attention. He whimpers audibly during take-off, screeches after even a minor jolt and, at the slightest whiff of turbulence, screams “We’re all going to die!” while the toddler in the next row stares at him blankly. His grip on the armrests he’s monopolising is such that maintenance will have to remove both once the aircraft lands, while his aura of fear slowly seeps through the air-conditioning system. Once the plane finally arrives, he’s the first to jump out of his seat, blocking the entire aisle and lamping several passengers on the head while retrieving his heavy-duty suitcase stored above. He is, of course, statistically more likely to be killed by a hippopotamus, vending machine or, especially, a falling ladder than in an air crash, but that doesn’t alter the probability that you will be sat next to this guy on your next flight.

Some travellers excel – as in they make it look easy – while others Excel. In every available window, appropriately enough, he’s updating his Microsoft spreadsheet: in the cab to the airport, at the departure gate and in the plane itself. On the runway, while the flight is held, he pings a Google Doc over to the head of production – one-handed as he gestures with a solitary finger for the cabin crew to stop whatever it is they are doing. Pre-cabin check, whatevs. His OOO is on, but he’s still checking his email, all over Trello and clogging up Slack channels, keeping track of his team. Why hasn’t Jeff filed his report? It was in the handover notes, clearly marked, buried amid the tiers of tasks that will carry on ticking over regardless, but were added to sound important. Obviously, the developers could just talk to the design team and sort it out in a jiffy, if only the Spreadsheet Sauron hadn’t engineered a house of cards, ensuring that every decision went through him first. Back in the office, his presence is enigmatic – where is his desk? Does he exist only across cloud-based platforms, manifesting as a physical form for important client meetings and weekly check-ins? And what is it that he actually does?

Did you know that the typical 1kg bag of white rice crams in some 50,000 grains (which at least puts travel in economy class into perspective)? You soon will. Before it is ready for consumption, each single grain is passed through a machine called a huller, which removes the husk, part of the chaff of the rice, to produce brown rice and then milled further to remove the bran layer, ultimately resulting in white rice, the more digestible and more commercially viable variant of the cereal crop that provides more than a fifth of the world’s calorie intake. Designed by Brazilian engineer Mr Evaristo Conrado Engelberg in 1885, the Engelberg huller, which uses steel rollers to remove husks or “polish” rice, is the most popular means of processing the crop in Asia, although recent decades have seen a marked swing towards cono or disk hullers, which employ rubber rollers to reduce the amount of breakage, increasing the yield of top-quality head rice. Of course, rubber rollers require frequent replacement and expert maintenance, which is where your man, who travels the globe inspecting such machines, comes in – and the unfortunate person he’s cornered edges her digit ever closer to the cabin crew call button.