The sight of a stag or hen party boarding your plane can often make you question whether you really need the holiday you’re about to embark on.
Most of the time, it’s far too early in the morning for anyone to be that excited, yet here they come with their funny outfits, the inevitable inflatable penis and the stag or hen in a veil and tutu. The originality of it is stag-gering (thanks).
And while we’ve all heard the horror stories of stags being the worst people ever, it can be refreshing to see a stag party having some fun without really doing much to annoy those around them.
You can watch it unfold here:
Groom-to-be James Ormond was one such stag. As he was on his way to his party in Karkow, Poland, his best man Dan Rawlinson started handing out the boarding passes to the group.
As the rest of the group received their regular passes (which are often an odd shape themselves when you think about it – got to fold that thing at least two or three times to put it in your pocket), James was handed a folded piece of paper that turned out to be almost the same size as himself – almost 6ft 10″.
As you’d expect, James was made to unfold the giant piece of paper at every security check, and as he entered the plane.
The joke’s mastermind, Chris Hodkin, said:
It was hilarious, I just couldn’t stop laughing and felt like we pulled an appropriate gag for him based on his height.
One of our friends Isaac [Pailing] works for the council and paid for their printing services – the pass was the size of a bus shelter. It was custom-made.
James is six-foot-10 and we struggled to get it that big but we pulled it off. It was six-foot-two.
When the best man was handing out the boarding passes, he didn’t hand James one at first and we were winding him up that he was going somewhere else.
Then he whipped this massive sheet out and it was folded down to bigger than A4 and that was the smallest we could fold it.
As they went to board the plane, James was forced to reveal his huge ticket again and was horrified when security staff were unable to scan it.
The towering NHS worker even tried walking further back to try and scan it from a greater distance, but thankfully his mates had printed a spare for size-related emergencies.
Chris said:
We went through the scanners and the two officers asked for his boarding pass.
They made him hold the whole thing up. One of the lads asked if he could walk really far back and try to scan it from far away, but luckily they’d printed a small one off in case.
We took it back off him though, so he still had to keep getting it out every time.
As we were going on to the plane, we walked through and I asked ‘will you make sure you check this guy’s boarding pass?’ The air hostess said ‘we have to, it’s the law’.
We stood in the corner as he came through and had to open it up to be checked. The staff all took it really well and were laughing too.
Thankfully, James saw the funny side, even saying the prank helped to cheer up some passengers who were giving an emotional farewell to their family.
If you have a story you want to tell send it to UNILAD via story@unilad.com
Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.