The 10 tech things… you only do at 33,000 feet

1/ Spend the cost of your flight on unnecessary tech tat

Whether it’s the altitude depriving your brain of air or a symptom of pure, sense-numbing boredom, you splash your holiday money on a Rotary watch, a computer mouse in the shape of a car, a miniature model of the aircraft and a universal travel adaptor. Then leave the latter in the cab en-route to the hotel.

2/ Fear your smartphone

You know that nothing bad will happen if you don’t put it into Airplane Mode, they proved it on Mythbusters. However, willed on by the overly earnest cabin crew, it’s hard not to fret that a sly bout of New Star Soccer during take-off is the equivalent of pulling a pin from a live grenade. Doesn’t stop you doing it, though, does it?

3/ Overestimate the length of blockbusters

“If I watch three movies with a couple of meals and toilet breaks, plus a handful of really old Simpsons episodes, that should keep me occupied all the way to Paris.” Not quite. It turns out the average film isn’t eight hours long and, after a third consecutive viewing of We’re The Millers, you’ve developed severe bed sores and just passed Cairns.

4/ Avoid working at all costs

update those important spreadsheets or crack on with the novel? Never going to happen. “I’ll just have a mini bottle of red and get down to business,” swiftly turns into, “I’ll just have four red wines and watch Game of Thrones for nine hours… with breaks every five minutes to check if the little GPS plane animation has made any progress”; it hasn’t.

5/ Put your iPod on shuffle

You made a pretentious playlist full of hot new acts suggested by cooler friends. Unfortunately, you hate all of them. Time to begin manically flicking through the songs on your mostplayed lists – all bought decades ago, of course – searching desperately for something that will hold your interest beyond the first chorus, before getting a bit teary listening to Three Lions five times in a row. Probably shouldn’t have had that fifth wine, eh?

6/ Listen to a meditation channel

appear to be playing Rockstar by Nickelback, you eventually land at the sanctuary of channel 12, home of the soothing sound of waves lapping against the shore and a man with a deep voice telling you to breathe. Much like what you might hear if the plane had to crash land in water. Just joking – if that happened you’d, of course, die on impact. “And relax…”

7/ Fall asleep with earphones in

One side of your earbud-filled head has been pressed against a headrest that’s as hard as a stale scone, causing you to wake up feeling like someone’s been slowly pushing their thumb into the left-hand side of your brain, whilst piping in meditation noises for three hours. External symptoms? One alarmingly swollen, beetroot-coloured ear.

8/ Check your face using Gorilla Glass

You’re not vain, you just want to make sure you don’t actually look like the pale alcoholic ghost with spots, visible even though they’re covered with beard, that all plane toilet mirrors would have you believe. Nope, you look fine. Thanks, Plane.

9/ Take the worst video ever

Yes, the one of fluffy clouds shot through a condensation covered plane window. The world definitely needs another one of those.

10/ Lower your tech standards

As a minimalism master, you decided to travel light and leave your gadgets at home? Well, planes are media pleasuredomes nowadays, right? After playing the longest, laggiest game of Tetris on what appears to be the original Soviet source code, whilst feigning amazement when sporadic news updates permeate the Wi-Fi-less clouds, you conclude that they are not. Now, where’s that in-flight catalogue…?