I did not press it once.
And when I finally did get help, it was because a woman two rows up pressed hers.
A stranger in 19-something, who I never saw and never spoke to and who is not in any version of this, reached up and pressed a button on my behalf after four hours.
That is the actual rescue in this story.
Not the fifty seconds. The fifty seconds only worked because somebody else called the crew, and if that woman had not, I would have been standing in an aisle at thirty thousand feet arguing with a man about a handbag with no one coming.
I have told this forty times and I have never once put her in it either.
At the gate.
She caught me up on the walkway.
And I was pleased. I thought I knew what was coming, and I had something ready, which was going to be about how we should have said something sooner.
