Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck (24 page)

They’re flight attendants, not Teamsters, bouncers, biohazard cleanup workers, or your mother.

I got upgraded to the very last business-class seat on a Delta flight, and the only meal left by the time the flight attendant got back to my row was one I don’t eat—pasta. And I was hungry, too.

“Don’t worry about it,” I told the flight attendant. “You can just give it to me, and I’ll eat the salad. And if you have an extra piece of cheese back in the galley, maybe I could have that.”

“Oh, my God,” he gasped. “Thank you for being so nice about it.”

I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the situation, but I wasn’t quite sure what else I’d be.

“A lot of passengers get furious at me,” he explained. “They really take it out on me.”

Well, there’s some ugly. As big a bummer as it is to just sit there while other passengers scarf down their meals, does anybody really think the flight attendant got with the catering people and hatched a plot to screw 4D out of dinner?

Yet, this flight attendant and all the others I spoke with told me that passengers are increasingly going off on them for anything that goes wrong on a plane, including mechanical problems, a broken seat, and how airlines now provide little bags of pretzels instead of peanuts (lest passengers with peanut allergies go into anaphylactic shock in flight).

The more beaten down the flight attendants feel, the uglier flying gets for all of us. But making them feel less like one of the Christians thrown to the lions doesn’t take much. It starts with saying hello to them when you board instead of wordlessly blowing past them to your seat. The same goes for when you leave the plane. Don’t forget to thank them and the pilots, if you see them, and say goodbye. They’re people, with feelings, not skybots.

Elizabeth Coulter, an Atlanta-based AirTran flight attendant for seven years, talked to me about how awful it feels to greet people boarding with a friendly “Good morning … good afternoon … welcome aboard” and to then have twenty-five people just ignore her and walk on. She’s not even looking for much. You don’t have to say hello, she said. “Just give me a man nod.”

What many passengers don’t know is that flight attendants don’t start getting paid until the door of the aircraft closes. That’s right: They aren’t even getting paid to be snubbed. So being pleasant to them and showing them consideration from the moment you get on can actually mean a lot to them. There are pissy people in any job, of course, but probably many flight attendants are looking for reasons to like you and be nice to you. Do your best to help them out.

They’re asking you to turn off your phone, not sacrifice your firstborn.

When flight attendants give you instructions, like telling you to turn off your phone or other devices, understand that it isn’t because they’re really mean and they’re looking to deny you your special moment with your electronic binky. They are required to do this by the airline, and many flight attendants believe they can personally be fined by the FAA—perhaps even $10,000—if they don’t ask you to comply. This is a myth, according to FAA spokesman Ian Gregor. Unfortunately, it seems to be a widely believed one that has many flight attendants living in fear of some secret-shopper FAA inspector being on board. Luckily for these flight attendants, even according to the myth, they just have to
ask
passengers to follow the rules. For example, if the seat belt sign is on during turbulence and you get up anyway, Coulter said, “all I’m required to tell you is, ‘Ma’am, the seat belt sign is on.’ I can’t tackle you, much as I’d sometimes like to.”

Even without FAA fines, passenger misbehavior can end up costing flight attendants by causing them to spend even more time working without pay. “Any kind of incident that happens on the plane, you have to document within twenty-four hours, and all three of us [flight attendants] have to write the report,” Coulter said. Flight attendants aren’t compensated by the airline for the time it takes to do that.

“Get another job if you don’t like it!” some will sneer.

Sure, the flight attendant could quit a job she may love … go for career counseling, apply for student loans, go back to school for two to four years, and try to get hired somewhere or open a new business. But wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier—and nicer—if passengers would just turn off their phones when asked?

Flight attendants are supposed to provide food and beverage
service
, not
servitude
.

Once in flight, if you need something and a busy-looking flight attendant is passing your row, say “When you have a moment…” getting your message across without also sending the message that you’re yet another economy-class princess who expects her foot rub and expects it NOW.

Unless it’s your first time on a plane, you know that big metal box the flight attendants push is not a roving puppet show. When it comes to your row, have your earphones off and some idea of what you’d like to drink so the flight attendant doesn’t have to stand there while you meditate on it. Also, be a dear and say how you’d like your beverage—i.e., “club soda with ice” or “coffee with two creams, no sugar, please”—so they only have to ask whether a passenger wants ice or cream or sugar 299 times instead of 300. This is a small thing but doesn’t go unnoticed, and it’s especially appreciated when the flight attendant has just had some jerk shake his glass of ice cubes at him or her, as if this is an acceptable way to demand a refill from the airslave.

Coulter said one of flight attendants’ pet peeves is parents using drink ordering as a teaching moment for their toddler, “asking their two-year-old what they want to drink out of a choice of seventeen—‘Do you want juice? Do you want Dr Pepper?…’”—and expecting the flight attendant to just stand there as the kid puzzles it out. “I don’t have forty-five minutes,” Coulter said. And although passengers tend to see flight attendants as sky waiters and waitresses, Coulter explained that her primary job is not slinging drinks but “to make sure, from takeoff to landing, everybody’s safe … [to] get everyone calm, [and] get people safely off the plane in an emergency situation.”

It’s also good to take note of a flight attendant’s attire and how little it has in common with that of the guys in the coveralls and heavy gloves who dump your trash cans into a garbage truck. Just before landing, when a flight attendant asks whether she can take “any” trash off your hands, she means a granola bar wrapper or a newspaper, not any medical waste or poopy diapers you’ve accumulated in flight. Don’t hand her anything you wouldn’t want to be handed, and don’t leave that big ball of snotted-up Kleenex in the seat back for the next passenger, telling yourself that the airline hires people to pick up the trash. Pick up the trash, yes—not go on a scavenger hunt for it.

Mediation at 30,000 feet is not in a flight attendant’s job description.

Too many people start looking for the flight attendant at the first sign of a dispute with another passenger. A flight attendant on
Flyertalk.com
complained: “Passengers are always coming up to me and tattling on each other. ‘Can you tell him to put his seat up?’ ‘She won’t share the armrest.’ What am I, a preschool teacher?”

If, on the ground, you resolve conflict by implementing valuable preschool lessons like “use your words,” make that your first course of action in the air. As soon as somebody starts doing something rude, ask them to stop—politely and without anger in your voice. Waiting leads to hating and to suggestions (usually about forcing some item up the offending person’s rectum) that are ultimately counterproductive. On some occasion that you’re unable to solve the problem and it’s truly making your flight a nightmare, you’re better off asking a flight attendant to move you than to try to referee. (A willfully inconsiderate lout doesn’t transform into Citizen of the Year because he’s asked by a lady in a blue uniform with a pair of wings pinned to it.)

When you notice others being abused by some rudester, don’t be afraid to be part of the solution. Since we’re all frisked to the point where we have anything more lethal than dull tweezers
⁴⁴
removed from us, probably the worst-case scenario if you speak up is that somebody will clock you. More likely, they’ll either growl at you or heed what you’re suggesting they do. And should you observe another passenger trying to squeeze a little human decency out of a boor, you might pipe up in support. Because we evolved to care about preserving our reputation, group dismay at our behavior weighs heavily on us—even when it’s just a group of two. Even the tiniest squeak of “He’s right, you know!” can serve to temporarily civilize the airborne savage.

Lack of space: The final frontier.

If the airlines continue shrinking passenger space at the rate they have the past few years, coach-class seating will soon be patterned on the mass grave. What airlines haven’t taken away is the ability to recline, which means you can sometimes be pressed as far back as possible into your seat and still be able to lick the bald spot of the man seated in front of you.

If your airplane seat reclines, you do have the
right
to recline, but that doesn’t mean it’s the polite thing to do. Some claim reclining is a must to alleviate their back problems, but the way I see it, I don’t get all that much out of reclining and the person behind me gets a lot out of my not reclining, so I almost never put my seat back. My big-guy boyfriend feels similarly: “Unless I look back and see Kermit the Frog, I don’t recline. If it’s a slighter adult, I might recline a few notches, but not all the way.”

If you must put your seat back, give warning to the person behind you and recline slowly and gently, lest you crack them in the nose or turn their laptop into a doorstop with USB. But, say the person in front of you reclines, giving you room to do little more than breathe in flight. To have some chance of getting them to give you a little space, swallow your hatred and ask very nicely, “Hey, I know you have every right to recline (killing what’s likely to be their first objection), but is it possible for you to maybe meet me halfway?”

The other seating element that causes much on-plane hatred and strife is the armrest. Many people contend that the armrests belong to the person in the middle seat. The truth is, each passenger has paid for the space that spans from one end of their seat cushion to the other, plus the corresponding under-seat space. Everybody’s entitled to an edge of a shared armrest—the one on the inner edge of their seat. Nobody’s arm—especially nobody’s gross, hairy, bare arm—gets to take up residence in anybody else’s paid space. One’s legs, likewise, should remain unsplayed (subway rules apply), and one’s feet should not be allowed to graze in another passenger’s under-seat space. The “No Grazing in Others’ Seat Space” rule also applies if you’ve got 200 or so extra pounds you keep meaning to lose. If you take up two seats, buy two—or at least offer the passenger next to you a couple hundred dollars for colonizing half of theirs.

Other passengers’ eardrums should not be considered shared space.

Assume that you are not fascinating and that we all hate the music you love. If you’ve got one of those big voices that carry, make like the iPhone and put your voice on airplane mode—both while in flight and while making pre-and post-flight cell phone calls. As on the bus, when taking the skybus, you need to see that your headphones don’t leak. And although using an electronic device with the sound up is not a federal crime, it should be—or at least reason enough to have you thrown off the plane at any altitude.

For some people, a total stranger’s striking up a conversation on a plane is an atrocity akin to that stranger’s plopping his head on their shoulder and taking a little nap. It is nice to say or nod hello to the people beside you when you first sit down—because it seems cold to say nothing whatsoever. But, if your seatmate responds with a brief hello and nothing more or otherwise shows signs of wanting to remain mum, save the exciting news about everything that’s ever happened to you for friends, relatives, and strangers who are coma patients. Even when a seatmate seems open to chatting, you should look for signs suggesting his openness has closed, such as fidgeting or a little trickle of blood coming from his ear. When in doubt, ask—something like: “Am I keeping you from your reading?”

If you are an introvert or just don’t want to talk to strangers on planes, pack a full set of boundaries in your carry-on: earplugs, a book, an eye mask, and asshole-canceling headphones. Despite your precautions, should your seatmate start gnawing on your ear, if the brevity of your responses—“True!” … “Uh-huh,” … “Mmmhmm”—doesn’t shoo him off, ramp up to tactful excuses: “I’d love to hear more, but I really need some think-time right now.” If these attempts, too, are a wash, point at the blowhard’s seat pocket, gasp “Airsickness bag?” and stick your face in it.

It’s an airplane, not a drum circle.

The passenger seated in front of you will thank you for small kindnesses like recognizing the difference between “touch screen” and “poke-really-really-hard-throughout-your-ten-hour-overseas-flight screen.” You should also avoid using the seat of the person in front of you as a giant handle when getting out of your seat, as this can cause their seat to snap forward and slam them in the head when you let go. This is unpleasant even if they’re reading a book or watching the movie, but there’s nothing quite like being startled awake by whiplash-lite.

If the kid (or ill-raised forty-five-year-old brat) behind you keeps kicking your seat or banging the tray table, speak up immediately—before you build up so much rage that you turn to the parents and hiss, “A pity you weren’t forcibly sterilized!” No, you shouldn’t have to ask parents to actually, you know,
parent
, but if you’d like to increase the possibility of it happening (or of any passenger’s doing your bidding), ask as nicely as possible and incorporate a reason—for example, “I just had back surgery.” The eighteenth-century economist Adam Smith explained that evoking sympathy is a strong human motivator, and studies have shown that giving a reason behind a request makes people more likely to fulfill it. (See chapter 9, “Eating, Drinking, Socializing,”
here
.)