Cruising Attitude (22 page)

Thank God
, I thought, when I heard not one, but two call lights ring. The man in the button-down shirt across the aisle turned out
not
to be a doctor, dammit! He wanted to know if he could get another gin and tonic. The woman sitting in first class also turned out not to be in the medical field, but just a concerned passenger, which would have been nice if what she cared about hadn’t been whether whatever was going on in the back would affect her connecting flight! In the meantime the unconscious woman came to, passed out again, and then came to again—and thankfully stayed that way. I learned she was an up-and-coming fashion designer who hadn’t eaten all week, so I handed her a wheat roll and went back to work. The most disturbing thing for me was not one person who had witnessed the event inquired about her well-being. They were more concerned about drink refills and whose tray I would take away first since they’d all been waiting a long time and needed to get back to work.

Although I dread medical emergencies, I’ll take one any day over a New York–Miami flight. Demanding, ballbusting, ick, hellacious, unfrigginbelievable, avoid, and the F word are a few of the words my coworkers use to describe the route. Lycratubetop and Sickcall deserve an honorable mention. It’s one of the most, if not
the most
, difficult routes in the system. Flight attendant Sherly needs Prosac, Valium, and a shot of vodka after just
thinking
about working the trip. The problem stems from combining passengers possessing two completely different yet very strong personalities. Mix them with the most junior flight attendants inside a confined space for two and a half hours, and you better believe there’s going to be drama!

I make it a point to avoid the route altogether, but if I do get the city pairing on reserve, I try my best not to smile during boarding. It’s essential to set the tone for the flight. I don’t want anyone to come to the (correct) conclusion that I’m the one they can walk all over. These passengers seem to come with the mind-set of whoever yells the loudest wins. They think the nice one is the weak link, as well as the ticket to free booze, and depending on how badly they’ve abused the crew, sometimes they’re right. One New York–based crew fought back by refusing to work after passengers booed them in the terminal for arriving late to the gate. It wasn’t the crew’s fault their inbound flight had been delayed taking off from wherever they had flown in from, causing a domino effect for flights using the same equipment (and crew) later on in the day. Passengers sometimes mistakenly think there are extra airplanes lying around the airport waiting to be had when a situation like this occurs, but there aren’t, and the best you can do is just go with the flow and try to relax. Instead, this particular group of obnoxious passengers caused the crew to deem the environment too hostile to work. They walked off the airplane and refused to go back to work, forcing the airline to call out reserves to staff the trip, delaying the flight even longer. And that’s just one New York–Miami flight.

Still, New York and Florida aren’t the only states with a reputation. Thanks to Eagle County Airport, the gateway to Vail, Colorado, has a bad rap, too. In fact the New York–Vail route is so bad a friend of mine will take Miami any day and every day over that crowd, “the worst bunch of selfish A-holes in the world,” she says. This from a girl I’d never before heard curse! But I know how she feels. It’s a route where every single person sitting in coach truly believes she (or he) should be in first class. And they’re irked about it, too, from the moment they step on board wearing Chewbacca boots and carrying Louis Vuitton luggage to the time the plane touches ground and they’re calling their drivers and ordering the nannies to gather their belongings. PETA would have a field day if they took one of these flights. The full-length furs are out of control! I’ll never forget the lady who called me over and then silently turned her back to me. It took a few seconds before I realized she expected me to help her take off her mink coat. Because the tiny closet in first class isn’t big enough to house more than a handful of these furry monstrosities, and because nobody is willing to stow them inside an overhead bin, they wind up on laps of sulking owners who are upset about the inconvenience. They take it out on me by
not
ordering a drink because there’s not enough room to get their tray table down. Life is really tough sometimes.

The thing about problem passengers that bothers me the most is they always seem to have problems (thus, the name). When problem passengers are on board they’ll take up all our time, as if they’re the only passengers on board. Usually they make themselves known right away, either by having to be told several times to turn off an electronic device before takeoff or by complaining about a passenger who has reclined his seat right after takeoff.

A quick aside here on reclining: anti-recliners need to understand that all passengers are allowed to recline their seats, even during the meal service. (Although I’ve heard there are some foreign carriers that do require the seats to be put back up during the meal service.) Of course, recliners should be mindful of the way in which they recline. We see laptops get damaged all the time by speedy recliners who whip back and break the computer screen leaning against their chair. And if you’re an anti-recliner, do not block the recliner with your knees or threaten to punch him in the face if he reclines one more time. This is not acceptable behavior on or off an airplane. As for those seat-blocking devices that attach to the tray table and keep the seat in front from leaning back, leave them at home. We will confiscate them. Flight attendants hear more complaints about recliners from anti-recliners than anything else. A woman wearing Coke-bottle glasses called me over to show me she could not put down her tray table because of the seat in front of her. I suggested that perhaps if she removed the very large fanny pack from around her waist it might go down. By the way she looked at me, you’d think I was the crazy one. And don’t even get me started on the big guy who had the nerve to complain about a recliner even though his own seat was reclined!

As far as bad passengers go, Tony Last-Name-Starts-with-a-D (not Danza) is by far the worst I’ve ever encountered in my fifteen years of flying. I should have known he’d be a problem the moment he stepped on board, considering he was the first person to walk on the plane and he wasn’t even sitting in first class. Even though all the overhead bins were empty, he wanted to stow his rolling bag in the first-class closet and became angry when I wouldn’t allow him to do so. It’s against FAA rules to stack bags in the closet and it was already filled with my crew bag and a passenger’s wheelchair the agent had brought down earlier. I tried to explain this to him but he wasn’t having it. He stormed off and threw his bag inside a first-class bin. I asked him to take it down and find another bin in coach closer to his seat. Even though it’s first come, first served when it comes to overhead space, first-class bins are only for first-class passengers, who, incidentally, get boarded first. He knew that, but he got pissed off about it anyway. We were off to a great start. For the rest of the flight it was one thing after another, starting with my insufficient explanation about our twenty-minute weather delay on the ground to the alcoholic drink he wasn’t allowed to finish because we were on descent and about to land. As I passed him on my way to my jump seat, he reached out and grabbed my wrist roughly.

“I want your name!”

I gave it to him. I even spelled it out for him. Then I went up to the front to grab the list of passenger names, which comes in handy during times like this. All I’d done was what the airlines hired me to do, so I wasn’t worried. But it was his word against mine, and because I didn’t trust him I wanted to write my own letter to explain how it really went down.

Well, life happens and sometimes we just forget to write those letters we had every intention of writing. What doesn’t usually happen is that we run into the very person we had planned on writing about a week later in a totally different city, just as he is cutting the line to talk to the gate agent. I wasn’t on the clock, so I wasn’t wearing anything navy, flammable, or polyester. That day I was just a regular (standby) passenger trying to get home, which is probably why Lance didn’t recognize me when we first locked eyes. But I must have looked familiar because he actually smiled at me. Too stunned to do anything else I smiled back, but just barely.

I don’t know how to explain what happened next. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m not a confrontational person—I’m not! But something weird happened to me that day. My feet suddenly began to move my body toward Lance. As if in a movie, he shifted to face me, and if you didn’t know us you might mistake us for long lost-friends, or even worse, lovers. Before I knew it I was almost upon him and that’s when I heard the dreaded words come out of my mouth.

“Ya write that letter yet, Lance?” And my feet kept walking, while my heart pounded double-time and my brain wondered what the heck my mouth had done! I regretted it as soon as I had said it. I really did.

He sounded more like a volcanic eruption than a human being, “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOUUUUUU—YOU—YOU—YOU—YOU!”

The agent pulled me off the flight. Three managers were called to the gate to take care of the disturbance—me! At least that’s how the agent had made it seem. Lance wanted my job, and every single person traveling through the terminal that day knew it. I probably would have gotten into pretty big trouble if Lance had been able to calm down at some point, but I had pushed him over the edge and there was no coming back. Even the managers seemed a little taken back by his behavior. Eager to put an end to it, one of them assured him they’d take care of me and then sent him on his miserable way. As for me, my punishment was having to fly back to New York via Newark because the last flights to LaGuardia and JFK had just departed with Lance and without me. Flying into Newark Airport is pure torture for flight attendants living in Queens because of the amount of time and cash it takes to get home, which means in the end Lance kind of won.

Or maybe I won, because the lesson learned by far outweighed the two and a half hours lost and the sixty bucks spent making the trek back home. Problem passengers are problem passengers and nothing is going to change that. We can’t take nasty passenger behavior personally and truly, for every jerk there’s a plane full of wonderful passengers. So when a similar situation occurred the following week, I considered it a test of my newfound knowledge.

It was my last leg of the day and I had been assigned to deadhead to New York out of Miami in first class. No sooner had I taken my seat when the agent came down to tell me a first-class passenger had checked in at the last minute so she had to switch my seat to one in coach, an aisle in the bulkhead row. I collected my things and moved a few rows back.

“I wanted to sit there! Why does she get to sit there? She’s an employee!” whined a voice a few rows behind me.

“I’m so sorry,” said a working flight attendant leaning in close to me, “But a passenger is really upset that you’re sitting here. Would you mind switching seats?”

I had no problem switching seats. But it had been a really long day, I was exhausted after working a ten-hour shift, and he was still complaining in that annoying voice about why the airline would treat an employee better than a passenger. As I bent over to collect my things for a second time, I might have mumbled, “What a jerk.”

“What did you say?!” said the voice. Oh God. I stayed low, pretending to be still collecting my things. “Did you just call me a jerk?”

I didn’t know how he had heard it or why he seemed to think that the other flight attendant had said it. Slumping down in my seat, I stayed that way while the flight attendant tried to calm him down. When that didn’t work, the flight attendant went to get the captain who came back and tried to rationalize with the guy, who then made the major mistake of calling the captain a fucking idiot. This is a great way to get kicked off a plane, and that is exactly what happened. Five days later, I kid you not, the exact same passenger wound up sitting in the row directly behind mine on a flight from Chicago. I kept my head down and didn’t dare ask if he’d written a letter yet. I never wanted to have to fly back through Newark again! As I said, lesson learned. Confrontation avoided for a turbulent-free flight.

Working to Seattle today. When I get back tomorrow night I’m taking you out to celebrate. Happy Birthday!

Love, Jane

P.S. Enjoy your day off with Yakov!

P.S.S. I’m evil, I know. Sorry.

I
FOUND THE YELLOW
Post-it note stuck to the mirror in the bathroom. It was noon. I had just woken up. Based on the deafening silence, I had the house all to myself. Normally I would have been thrilled, but today wasn’t just any day. It was my birthday. I wanted to cry. I’d been doing a lot of reflecting and analyzing in the weeks leading up to the big cake-eating event, and I’d come to the conclusion that life sucked. I had no life. No friends. Not even a steady boyfriend! I was spending my twenty-sixth birthday all alone in Queens, New York, with my cab driver landlord and his border collie who didn’t want anything to do with me regardless of how many of Jane’s organic dog treats I offered her.

By the way, did I mention Yakov had moved in? As in
into
the house with us. Oh yeah, out of the dungeon and into the front room where Jane used to live before Tricia got engaged and moved out to be with the man she always dreamed of. We were in the process of reshuffling bedrooms so those with the most crash pad seniority could occupy the best rooms when we discovered that Yakov had installed not one, but three deadbolt locks on the bedroom door, not so quietly claiming the tiny space for himself. It happened so quickly Jane didn’t even have time to post the roommate wanted—no drama please! sign up on the bulletin board in flight operations at LaGuardia Airport. If that wasn’t bizarre enough, Yakov then hung white paper over the front window so we couldn’t see in. More disturbing than that was the XL brown terry cloth robe I found hanging in the coat closet right next to my wool work coat.

“Whose is this?” I asked, holding up the ratty thing. Jane covered her mouth with both hands and that’s when I knew. Immediately I dropped it on the floor.

“I’ll get the Lysol,” offered Jane. That’s what friends are for.

So while my ex-roommate Tricia spent her days planning a lavish wedding in the Hamptons to a pint-sized bazillionaire she’d met on a flight, I spent my birthday doing laundry and eating a can of chicken noodle soup. All alone. In a house I shared living space with five other women and a plus-sized Russian Hugh Hefner wannabe in Queens. Why didn’t I pick up a trip? That way I could have been miserable and angry about having to fly on my birthday instead of feeling lonely and depressed while not working on my birthday. Feeling down in the dumps, I did what any other single girl in her midtwenties would do. I called my mother.

“What do you mean you have no life?” my mother exclaimed over the phone from Dallas. I could hear my sister laughing in the background. “Didn’t you just fly in from Paris this morning?!”

She had a point. Which reminded me I had a jar of Nutella chocolate and a day-old flakey croissant from Paris still inside my unpacked bag. As well as a forgotten bottle of El Yucateco hot sauce and six packages of $5 birth control pills I had bought on a whim the week before during a three-hour sit in Mexico City. Happy birthday to me.

People with regular jobs aren’t very understanding when flight attendants complain about their lives. Our bad days automatically sound good if we’re able to toss in words like Paris, Buenos Aires, Rome, and Madrid into random sentences on a regular basis. Even if we don’t fly to those kinds of places, people automatically assume that we do. Sadly the majority of flight attendants get stuck working cities like Dallas, Dulles, and Denver instead. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dallas, Dulles, or Denver. It’s just that when we’re flying to one of the three Ds, we won’t have to advise passengers how to inflate the life vest because those cities, like most domestic cities, aren’t located over or near water.

Seniority is everything at an airline and those who have it take full advantage of it by flying international routes, making the rest of us suffer in their glamorous wake. I don’t blame them. One day I, too, hope to have enough years under my thin blue belt to work all the best trips and make junior flight attendants (and some passengers) cry by not retiring when
they
think I should. Why retire when all I’ll have to do is work two five-day trips to Narita each month? Gardening is nice, but so is eating sushi with real wasabi and shopping in the Ginza district! Until then you’ll find me laying over in St. Louis with nothing to do except browse the Hustler store or go to Denny’s for the early-bird, super-bird special. Both establishments are located directly across the street from our airport layover hotel, right next to a cemetery that, if I’m desperate enough, doubles as a running path.

Whenever I tell anyone where I’m going or where I’ve been, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. There’s no respect flying domestic! It’s like comparing Walmart to Barneys. My friend Melanie can tell international flight attendants from domestic ones based on the shopping bag hanging off the back of their roll-aboard alone—Harrods versus Trader Joe’s. No one wants to hear about my layover in Orange County spent eating fish tacos and wandering around a high-end mall when my roommate Dee Dee is talking about lying on a beach that has its own Barry Manilow song.

Hey, I get it, because I feel the same way about foreign-based flight attendants. Their lives can’t be all that much different from mine, yet they seem so much more exciting and glamorous, even when they end up on the opposite side of the same hotel pool. Perhaps it’s the accent that makes the grass seem so much greener. Maybe it’s the uniform. Because something tells me the Air France flight attendants aren’t wearing skirts made in China or pants made in Poland with blazers made in Guatemala, which explains why my navy blues don’t always match up and why I look like one of the Bad News Bears whenever I’m surrounded by my stylish foreign counterparts. For a while I wondered if the airline I work for, an equal-opportunity employer, wanted our uniform pieces designed by every country we flew to.

The first time I came into contact with a foreign-based crew was at the Milford Plaza Hotel in New York City. Located in the heart of Times Square, it’s the kind of place tourists stay when they’re on a budget. Today the going rate is $109 a night, but something tells me it wasn’t all that much more than that when I first started flying and my airline housed crews with layovers more than twelve hours there. Crews with less time stayed closer to the airport on the wrong side of town. The Milford had tiny rooms, dark hallways, and a restaurant located on the street level that served up a very questionable pastrami on rye. Basically, it wasn’t the kind of hotel I would have ever imagined an overseas airline would choose to house its beautiful flight attendants, who wear gorgeous silk saris in soft shades of orange, yellow, and pink. But they did. And I could not stop staring at them! I was sitting in the lobby waiting on a pilot I can barely remember to take me out on a date I wish I could forget when I spotted a group of women huddled off to the side of the check-in counter giggling. I had no idea they were flight attendants until a lanky, brown-skinned guy with an overgrown mustache and wearing a pilot’s uniform two sizes too big walked over to the group and handed each woman a room key. Immediately questions began to fill my head.
How long are they here for? Are they allowed to go out alone? How long are they allowed to work? What will life be like once they go back to their normal lives after having seen the world?

The women took turns whispering a three-digit number as the others scribbled it down on the back of paper-covered key cards. As I watched them waiting for the elevator, another crew walked in, an army of matching flight attendants, all with sleek black hair pulled back to expose luminous pale skin and blood red lips. Thirty sensible low heels clickity-clacked single-file to the desk. Each woman pulled a black roll-aboard exactly like mine at home, along with a gigantic hard-case Samsonite on wheels. More questions filled my head. I could have sat there all day watching the parade of different crews from around the world, but unfortunately my date didn’t show up late and he had no desire to stick around the lobby. Not when there was a sports bar serving cold beer on tap with spicy chicken wings and greasy potato skins within walking distance.

Not every pilot is so quick to turn away from the international allure. Jane’s latest boyfriend, an Airbus captain based out of Miami, proved to be one of them. I ran into him at our layover hotel in São Paulo as I was on my way out to grab a quick lunch before pick-up. He walked through the revolving doors trailing behind a crew of ten tired-looking flight attendants and two pilots with tennis rackets strapped to their backs. Immediately I recognized Jane’s future fiancé from a framed photograph she kept in her room on the bedside table: the two of them arm-in-arm, helmets in hand, on top of a mountain with dirt bikes on the ground behind them. He had to be a good two feet taller than her.

“What do you have planned for your layover?” I asked, just to be nice, after officially introducing myself for the first time.

One of the other pilots, the youngest-looking one, spun around and slapped him hard on the back, a thin gold wedding band wrapped around his ring finger. “He’s coming with me to check out the Finn Air flight attendants! I hear they lay out topless.”

“Oh really,” I said, and that’s all I said. The future father of Jane’s children blushed.

Thirty minutes later I was peering through the glass doors leading out to the sun deck, under strict orders from New York to go up to the rooftop deck and check out the situation
now
! I was happy to report back to Jane over the phone that there were only four attractive blondes lounging around the pool in string bikinis, all eight nipples barely covered, but hidden nonetheless. As I stood in the doorway, I couldn’t help but wonder if the buff, bronzed dude getting out of the pool might be a Finn Air pilot dreaming about a soon-to-be bikini-clad American me!

“If I made as much money as passengers thought I made, worked as little as my neighbors thought I did, or had as much fun on layovers as my friends think I do, I’d have one helluva of a job!” exclaimed one of my friends after he heard me trying to explain what it’s like
, really
like, to work for an airline without enough seniority to hold the good trips.

If you meet a flight attendant and you’re wondering if he or she works international routes, don’t bother asking. Those who do will make it known ten minutes into a conversation. Or the moment they walk into flight operations and find themselves surrounded by lowly junior flight attendants like me. It starts out innocently enough, I’ll give them that, but very quickly it becomes quite unbearable. It goes something like this:

“Anyone working to Paris?”

“Nope. Tokyo. Again.”

“I thought you did the Caribbean?”

“Thought I’d try something new. Have you been to the new layover hotel in Delhi?”

“No, but I hear the one in Frankfurt is wonderful!”

The rest of us will silently print out our itineraries, and then, sooner rather than later, make our way down to a gate where a small jet is departing to a city like Jacksonville, which now sounds even less glamorous than it did before sign-in. If I sound jealous it’s probably because I am. How could I not be?!

What most international flight attendants don’t realize is we know who they are—they don’t have to rub it in. Their age and uniform size is the first thing that gives it away. So do the number of bags they’re carrying. All that shopping requires extra luggage, making them look more like glamorous homeless people than flight attendants. One senior mama travels to London with a lunch bag, a computer bag, a tote bag, and two roll-aboards: one for clothes and the other for a full-size espresso machine. All for just a twenty-four-hour layover! In the morning she likes to make coffee in her room for the entire crew because the hotel only provides electric teapots for their guests. At the airport, the pilots have to help her up the metal stairs after the van drops us off on the tarmac underneath the belly of the plane at London’s Heathrow Airport.

Junior flight attendants normally get stuck with the short hops on single-aisle aircraft. An aircraft with two aisles means your crew is either on reserve or has quite a bit of seniority with the airline. The size of the aircraft is the second clue you might be on an international flight (the first and most obvious being the flight’s listed destination). Longer flights require bigger planes and, in many cases, an extra pilot, so when one takes a break there are always two in the cockpit. Bigger planes equate to nicer flights for a flight attendant. Not just because they’re more comfortable for passengers, which makes for far less complaining and a lot more snoring, but because flight attendants have extra places to hide out if someone does become difficult. Because longer flights almost always result in longer trips for passengers, there’s a lot more overpacking taking place. This means their luggage will get checked. After all, if they have to wait around baggage claim for one suitcase, they might as well wait around for all their bags, which is why they walk on board empty-handed and looking, dare I say it, happy! A stress-free boarding will do that. Trust me, there’s nothing more worrisome for passengers (and flight attendants) than overhead bin space—or lack thereof. But when passengers check their luggage, as most international passengers do, flights get off to a good start. Flights that start off well usually go well. Passengers will actually thank us for a great trip as they deplane.