His eyes were the only thing that moved. “Didn’t I tell you to clean it?!”
Other passengers turned around.
“I . . . I . . .” I turned and ran to the galley in tears. We had not been trained for this particular situation. My coworker took one look at me and demanded to know what the hell was going on. After I told him what had happened, he grabbed my silver tray and swished down the aisle, lips pursed.
“Excuse me, sir. I’d be more than happy to help you with that.” The jackass stood up, snatched the towel and club soda, and headed straight for the lavatory.
Helping passengers is a huge part of our job. But some passengers take advantage of our kindness. It took a long time to learn that going above and beyond can actually make these types of passengers even worse. On a flight to Los Angeles one elderly woman had me running in circles all through the flight. I didn’t complain. She reminded me of my grandma, only she was my grandma’s difficult twin with an addiction to plastic surgery. When she told me to carry her bag to her seat—an order, not a question—I complied. No biggie. I placed it inside the overhead bin. She asked me to fold her sweater just so, complaining about the first two ways I folded the oh-so-delicate garment, and then I placed that right next to the bag—sorry, on top of the bag. As instructed, I placed her pocketbook under the seat, but not too far underneath. I even opened the window shade, closed the window shade, and opened it again as per her request during boarding. Whatever she needed I took care of, and I did so quickly, “no dillydallying.” And near the end of the flight, when she asked for a piece of paper so she could write a letter, I obliged by ripping off the catering papers taped to the carts and gave them to her. When she asked to borrow a pen, I handed her my last one from the Marriott. And I thought nothing of it when she handed me a folded piece of paper and instructed me to give it to the one in charge.
Silently the lead flight attendant read the letter, looked at me, and folded it in half.
“So what does it say?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure it had to be a raving review of the wonderful service I’d provided her. Honestly, I couldn’t do any better than that.
“She’s not happy. The help isn’t wearing a hairnet.”
What? I was in shock. After all I’d done for her! And anyway, my hair was in a regulation ponytail; tied below the ear, hanging no longer than six inches from the neck.
A few of the crew members who were standing around the galley started to laugh, which led me to believe this had to be a joke, like some kind of trick-the-new-hire-on-probation initiation. It had happened before. On my last flight the captain asked me to walk through the cabin and collect air samples with a plastic bag. I probably would have done it if one of my roommates hadn’t fallen for the same gag a few weeks ago and then come home to tell us all about it. Another roommate had been asked to jump up and down as hard as she could to get the breaks to lock into place. “On the count of three,” the captain called from the cockpit. And soon all the new hires were up in the air.
Pilots go through the same type of thing. One victim fell for the advances of a sexy first-class flight attendant. While checking into a hotel, she slipped him her room key and told him to stop by at a certain time. When he opened the door to her room, he could hear the shower running. Come in and join me, she instructed from behind the bathroom door. Unable to believe his good luck, he quickly got undressed and did as he was told. Bare naked, he walked into the bathroom. That’s when the entire crew whipped back the curtain and yelled “Surprise!”
But something about this joke didn’t feel so funny, because the purser didn’t toss the note into the trash. Instead, he stashed it in the outermost pocket of his bag.
“You’re not going to turn that in, are you?” I asked. No way. Flight attendants don’t rat each other out.
The purser shrugged. “I haven’t decided.”
“Dude, she’s on probation,” a coworker exclaimed.
“I’m on probation!” I agreed quickly.
That didn’t matter to the one in charge. Thankfully, I never heard anything from the company about the hairnet letter, but not too long after I did find myself sitting across from my supervisors at a big wooden desk to address a different letter, this one from another passenger I couldn’t actually remember.
Passenger letters, good and bad, take months before they’re passed along to those involved in whatever incident made the flight wonderful or horrible enough for someone to take time out of their busy day to write about it. This is why when we find a copy of one in our mailbox at work it’s always such a surprise. Many times I’ve received good letters only to wonder if I’d really done what the passenger raved about. I’ve even suspected that perhaps passengers have gotten me confused with someone else. That’s how old these letters are. There have even been emergency situations that passengers have written about, congratulating the crew on a job well done, and I’ve just stood in Ops holding the letter and trying to remember anything about it. Maybe it just goes to show how much drama we deal with on a daily basis.
As my supervisor read the letter out loud, I kept my mouth shut, as all good flight attendants learn to do when it comes to management. Better a slap on the wrist than having someone on the other side out to get you for a bad attitude. Mine came from a passenger who was upset that I didn’t do anything to help a crying baby, and not just any passenger’s crying baby, but the crying baby belonging to the passenger who had written the letter. Perhaps I could have been a little more helpful if they’d asked me for assistance at the time, rather than writing a letter after the fact. Flight attendants can’t read minds! This after one passenger had barked at me for touching her infant son’s tiny bare foot without asking and washing my hands first. Another passenger became annoyed when I handed his crying child plastic cups for stacking and a puppet barf bag. Hearing my supervisor rehashing the details of a flight I couldn’t remember about a baby I didn’t take care of, reminded me of a totally different passenger situation: this passenger had come to the back galley with a baby cradled in her arms and asked in a thick accent where she could put it.
In the overhead bin, I’d wanted to say, but I was too new to joke around like that, so I politely asked, “What do you mean?”
“How you say . . . child care?” she said.
You don’t. But I didn’t say that. Instead I explained to her that she’d have to hold the baby throughout the eight-hour flight from New York to London. She looked shocked. But not as much as I did when she told me she didn’t have any diapers or baby food with her. I wondered if my manager could blame it on me as well.
“Do you have anything to add?” my supervisor asked after he finished reading the letter, dropping the red folder marked Poole back into the metal filing cabinet behind his desk. I sure did! But instead I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. Sometimes it’s best to have zero opinion about something, kind of like a Stepford wife at 35,000 feet.
Not every flight attendant keeps her mouth shut. Some of us actually do break. These flight attendants become folklore heroes to crew, nightmares to passengers, and their stories live longer than most of their careers. One of these flight attendants went by the name of Susan. In her midforties, quick-witted, kindhearted, and extremely attractive, she made pilots drop their kit bags in the terminal just to take a look. After six months of faking a smile while putting up with too many unruly passengers on probation, Susan finally hit a wall and dropped the good-girl act when a passenger walked on board complaining about something, dropping a few F-bombs along the way.
“Sir, I understand you’re upset, but you can’t talk like that on the airplane.”
“Fuck you,” he said under his breath.
Enough was enough. She crouched down on one knee in the aisle beside his seat, and whispered very quietly, “Fuck you.”
He flew out of his seat. “What the hell did you just say!”
“I told you—you can’t talk like that, sir!” Susan ran to the cockpit. “Captain,
we have a belligerent passenger on board, and I refuse to work this flight as long as he’s here.”
The captain placed a large map in his lap, turned around in his seat, and squinted behind thick glasses at a man now stomping up the aisle ranting and raving about the bitchy flight attendant. “Call the agent. Have him taken off.”
A large and nervous-looking gate agent came on board to escort the angry passenger off the aircraft and onto another one leaving an hour later. That’s how things like this usually go. Susan stood in the entry doorway. When the passenger glared at her, she smiled and said, “Buh-bye!”
That set him off. “She said ‘fuck you’ to me! That bitch said ‘fuck you’ to me!” Unfazed the agent kept on walking him up the jet bridge. The jerk looked over his shoulder at Susan one last time before entering the terminal. Not one to miss a beat, she mouthed two little words: Fuck. You.
Nine days after Georgia left the crash pad to work the turn that led to blocked ears, a nurse employed at the airline medical facility in Chicago released her back to work. Her ears were clear. She could finally board a flight. When the agent handed her a first-class ticket bound for New York, Georgia couldn’t contain the tears. She’d never been so happy to get on a plane in her life.
“Are you okay?” I cried when she walked through the crash pad door. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy.
“There’s just nothin’ like bein’ home after bein’ gone for so long.”
Even though Georgia seemed happy about bein’ “home,” I couldn’t help but wonder if that bus ride had done a number on her. I could see it by the way she now wore her unbrushed hair in a messy ponytail on top of her head, and by her preferred choice of outfit on days off, pink sweatpants paired with an oversized T-shirt. But her makeup still looked flawless, even when we were just hanging around doing laundry across the street, so I didn’t worry too much.
While Georgia and I soldiered on, our classmates began dropping like flies. It seemed like almost every day we heard about someone else who couldn’t hack the lifestyle. One classmate quit because passengers didn’t respect her, she said. She went back to being a dental hygienist. Another left because she couldn’t get off reserve for her own wedding. A third actually had plans from the very beginning to quit after she got her passes and could take that round-the-world trip she’d been dreaming about with her husband for years. Most of the time we had no idea someone had left until we noticed their names were missing on the reserve page of the bid sheet. We’d ask around to see if anyone had heard anything about them until we learned what exactly went wrong. It wasn’t unusual to find out no one knew anything, not even their roommates. Just as in training, one day they were here and the next they were gone. Thankfully, Linda, my old roommate from training, wasn’t one of them. We never talked or ran into each other, but I’d heard through the grapevine that she was still on the line, not always picking up all the meal trays before landing, but doing the best she could, and passengers loved her for it.
It’s funny, isn’t it, what will actually break a person. I would’ve thought for sure that the dead body might have just been the very thing to push Georgia over the edge after the naked woman in the closet incident, but I was wrong. Just the opposite happened. It’s like it almost gave her life.
“I knew that man was dead the moment I saw him all gray and slumped over in the wheelchair,” she whispered to me late one night in the dark while our roommates slept in twin beds that lined the walls. “His wife said he’d been sick with the flu all week, and then when his daughter piped in and said they just wanted to get him home I thought to myself, if he’s not dead now he certainly will be soon. The captain agreed. We diverted an hour after we took off.” Before I could ask why in the world someone would try and smuggle a dead body on board, Georgia added, “Do you know how much it costs to transport a dead body the proper way? It’s insane! No wonder that passenger out of Miami tried to get away with packing his mother in a garment bag!” Honestly, I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t read the company email discussing the incident myself.
Before long, the beauty queen I’d met on day 1 of training reappeared, better than ever.
“When a gay man calls you fierce, you know you’ve got it goin’ on!” she confessed over a container of sweet and sour pork after returning from a trip. I had to agree.
The only thing that made me nervous was that, even though Georgia and The Cheater had broken up, she continued to stay in touch. Whenever something weird happened on a flight, Georgia would call him right away. Most of these calls also ended with her hanging up on him or slamming down the phone and, on at least one occasion, ripping his letters to shreds. But despite everything, Georgia still wanted to make it work. I couldn’t figure out why. Before long she started questioning herself, wondering if maybe he was right, maybe if she hadn’t taken the job to begin with, none of this would have happened.
“I can’t blame him. He’s a man. Men get lonely,” she sighed.
Nothing annoyed me more than the lonely-man card. “Don’t take the blame for his stupidity. You didn’t do anything wrong! He’s the one who—”
Georgia held up her left hand and there on her ring finger I saw a simple silver band.
“He proposed?”
She blushed. “Actually he promised to propose when the bar starts doing better. It’s a promise ring.”
Thank God I still had time to make her come to her senses and see the light.
Well, the light never came. Two days later the airline canceled service to the city in North Carolina where Georgia’s soon-to-be fiancé lived. While I figured this was bad news, I didn’t realize just how bad until I came home from a trip and spotted Georgia sitting outside on the stoop in the freezing cold smiling ear to ear. I hadn’t seen Georgia smile like that since, well, ever. As much as I hated to admit it, the girl was glowing with happiness. I knew my worst fear was about to come true. I could feel it. In fact I didn’t even want to get out of the cab, but when the driver who always seemed overly appreciative of his $2 tip—“Oh thank you, miss, thank you! That is very kind of you!”—got another call I quickly grabbed my belongings and began walking up the sidewalk very slowly.
Four months after graduation, two months shy of getting off probation, I sighed the longest sigh known to humanity. “Please tell me you didn’t do it.”
“I did. I quit. I turned in my manual and cockpit keys today.”
Chapter 8
Love Is in the Air. Sort Of.
IN THE 1970S, when flight attendants were stewardesses and traveling was glamorous and only for the wealthy, the average time spent on the job was eighteen months. Stewardesses were required to remain single and childless, which ensured that the position remained a job, not a career, and enabled the airlines to use their young, attractive, and somewhat mysterious workforce as a marketing tool. Today most flight attendants either last just a couple of months or hang in for a whole lifetime. It’s that extreme. In that first few months the drastic lifestyle change coupled with the difficulties of juggling a home life from 35,000 feet almost always results in pressure from loved ones to make a choice—them or the job. Flight attendants fresh out of training will either quit or watch their relationships crash and burn.
The day Georgia greeted me with the bad news outside on the front stoop, I had a phone number written on a beverage napkin for a new crash pad crumpled up inside my blazer pocket, and I didn’t believe in fate. I thought the idea of fate was for the weak of heart, the kind of person who sat around waiting for life to happen, which is how I came to the conclusion that this thing with Georgia was just a bad move on her part, something that could be rectified. That is, if I got involved. Certainly she wouldn’t have quit if I’d been home that day. While I knew she was under a lot of pressure from Jack, Jake, Jason, whatever his name was, I refused to sit back and allow her to throw in the towel so easily. I honestly believed if she’d just give it a little time in order to accrue more seniority, things wou
ld get better. They had to! Why else would anyone keep the job? It was up to me to make her see that.
Easy enough, I thought, picking up the phone and dialing our supervisor’s number at LaGuardia Airport. When I heard it ring, I handed the phone to Georgia.
“Just tell him you made a mistake,” I said.
Gently she placed the receiver back in its cradle. “I didn’t make a mistake, Heather. This is what I want. I’ve been thinking about it for a long time. I know it’s hard for you to believe this, but the job isn’t for everyone. I want to go home. I signed paperwork. It’s over.”
I took one look at Georgia’s giddy, ruby red smile and knew she needed help, the professional kind. “You’re delirious. You’re not thinking straight.” Quickly I dialed our supervisor’s number again. “Tell him you were depressed, that you didn’t know what you were doing. Do it now before it’s too late and he leaves the office.”
Without any sense of urgency, Georgia started tossing a few pairs of jeans and a couple of sweaters into an opened suitcase on the floor. “You don’t understand. You’ve never been in love before.”
“Excuse me!” I hung up the phone. Never been in love? I’d told her everything about Brent! Well, almost everything . . .
What I had accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to share was, well, Brent and I kinda-sorta hooked up last week. When crew scheduling assigned me my first trip to Austin, Texas, my heart dropped. That’s where Brent, my ex-ex-boyfriend lived. You see we hadn’t broken up once, but twice—both times on or around Valentine’s Day. The significance of the day didn’t matter to me. At least that’s what I’d been telling myself every day for a year and a half now. Which might be why as soon as I stepped off the airplane in Texas and found myself in familiar territory, feelings from the past came flooding back. It was torturous being there without him by my side. Looking out the window of the crew van on our way downtown to the hotel, I spotted all the same places I used to see while driving around with him in the passenger’s seat of his beat-up Corolla. I couldn’t stop myself from going down memory lane as Everything But The Girl blasted through my headphones. When the song “Missing” came to an end, I hit replay, quite a few times, until we pulled up to a hotel not too far from Sixth Street and I, too, could not move on, because I, too, missed him, Brent, like the deserts miss the rain. Hidden inside a drawer beside the bed in my hotel room, I found a phone book. All I initially wanted to do was see if his name was listed. That’s it. I just wanted to know if he lived in the same apartment we once shared. He did. Without thinking it over, I decided to call and hang up. Just to hear his voice. Nothing more. What could be the harm?
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