At slightly later than advertised but nowhere near late enough to complain a random group of people united by nothing but their desire to reach Hobart without getting seasick obediently clambered up a rickety looking gantry to gain entry to a rather small aircraft. The aircraft it had to be admitted was an awkward size. It was too small to use the usual terminal gateways but wasn't quite small enough that you could simply walk up to it and hop in, hence the meccano set inspired stairway. If you don't know what meccano is, ask your parents to ask their parents.
Once we were all stuffed in a narrow metal tube the safety briefing began. I have sat through so many of these that I could recite them in my sleep or at least I could if I had listened to any of them. There was a new twist to the standard "in the unlikely event that you survive an emergency" talk this time though. Just ahead of me a pair of wings sprouted from the sides of the plane and those passengers fortunate enough to be sitting beside them were taken aside by the stewardess who quizzed them on the likelihood of their keeping their wits sufficiently about them in a crisis to open the evacuation doors which were apparently right over the wings. Apparently sufficient greasy assurances were provided by the passengers to satisfy the stewardess and she got on with the rest of the briefing. I eyed my fellow passengers suspiciously, one of them was already toying with the safety release and I wondered how many previous passengers had precipitated an emergency by being a little too eager with the evacuation protocols.
The rest of the briefing was all the standard stuff. We were told that our life jackets were under our seats where they would be easy to grab assuming the aircraft crashed on a perfectly even keel. If it tilted at all passengers were far more likely to be trying to remove the seat in front of them from their face to reach for a life jacket which was now likely above their head. Said life jacket was equipped with a whistle. Air passing through this whistle would produce a high pitched screaming noise which would save the passengers the effort while they were plummeting to their deaths. A convenient light which would activate in water was also provided to assist rescuers in finding your corpse. If the plane isn't going down over the sea try and aim for a swimming pool or large puddle otherwise they may never find you.
In case you weren't listening to the stewardess all of this information was conveniently printed on a card that you didn't read either. I must admit I'm usually pretty sanguine about the safety briefing but sitting in a small, narrow plane that could apparently be torn apart by a couple of passengers certainly helped to focus my attention. What it didn't focus my attention on was the safety briefing, rather I focussed my attention on my fellow passengers to see which ones I was most likely to be able to kick out of the way as I scrambled for one of the holes ripped in the fuselage by someone who was almost certainly out of the plane already and probably dead.
After this build up it was actually a little bit of a let down when the plane landed in Hobart with barely a tyre screech to announce our arrival.