Mr. Stewardess

Ten Years Ago Today

2011-09-11T06:10:00.004-06:00

My New Tattoo in 100 Words

I work on the airplane, but this is better than flying. Especially today. I slip between the waves and the very atmosphere, now thick and wet, lifts me up. I hover above the turtles, roll among them, dive. Under the dancing shadows of the great round shells, I look up; the sun behind them sparkles impossibly close, riding the waves just like the blondies on their longboards up the beach. I hear wet, the occasional wave, but little else. No cacophony, certainly no cries, here where there are no skyscrapers, and, in any case, no airplanes to fly through them.

Reclaiming September

2011-09-03T10:36:00.005-06:00

I don’t expect that I will ever forget waking to the news that my workplace had been flown through the side of someone else’s, resulting, naturally, in the fiery destruction of both. The memories of the ensuing hours and days of fear, uncertainty, and What The Fuck? are equally vivid, more so this year than in some years past. As ultimately benefited me enormously in September of 2001, I am trying to avoid as much of the still-sensationalist media coverage of the arbitrarily significant tenth anniversary of these events as I can. The horrifying and spectacularly visual outcomes of these hijackings have themselves been hijacked and used primarily as excuses. By my company, whose executives gleefully started cooking up their record-breaking bankruptcy scheme that very afternoon, with thousands of their employees and tens of thousands of their passengers stranded in all corners of the world, their aircraft still smoldering on TV. By single-minded, fearful bigots whose personal brand of “religion” drives them to preach the persecution of a vast swath of the people of the world based on these and similar actions of an equally single-minded, fearful, and bigoted few. By the government, who launched as many ill-conceived tangential wars of revenge as they could get away with and who continues to squander its fortune along with the lives of its sailors and soldiers in the name of… well, nobody’s really sure what. It is right to try to honor the people whose lives were taken or rent asunder on September 11th of 2001, but, despite myriad new heavily funded, poorly researched, invasive layers of so-called security at the world’s airports, anyone who wants to can still carry a box cutter aboard an airplane. We have learned nothing, and changed even less. It could happen again, rendering every death on September 11th even more pointless, which hardly seems possible.

I did not know any of the flight attendants who were used as weapons that day. I am not ashamed to say that my primary reaction to the sickening list of names that one of our union reps read into the phone was relief; I went weak in the knee under a great flood of gratitude that none of my friends was among them. Many of my friends, especially based in Boston and Newark, were forced to endure a horribly opposite experience, and it is for them that I continue to grieve. I try to honor the memories of our flying partners as best I can, especially each year come September, without getting bogged down in a self-congratulatory, garment-rending grief to which I have no claim. I also still mourn the precipitous and permanent decline in the quality of our work lives, which fell victim not to wild-eyed raving terrorists, but to appalling individual avarice masquerading as “corporate greed.” With barely even the most token recognition that its employees that had not just been sacrificed to a mad man’s box cutter while the world watched in horror may have been impacted by what just happened to those that had, management began immediately to slash and burn, hacking furiously away at jobs, pay, and benefits, flagrantly pocketing every penny of “cost savings.” Ten years later, the richest executive suite in the industry has given nothing back to its front-line employees, going so far as to refuse even to pay to replace a weatherbeaten American flag that flew in memoriam at the Newark departure gate of United 93.

The first part of September is emotionally taxing for me every year, and I think it is right to remember my co-workers who were killed in the line of duty that morning. The first victims of the September 11th hijackers, and the only ones actually murdered with box cutters, were flight attendants, and if other flight attendants don’t honor their sacrifices, virtually ignored by the media, they will soon be forgotten. It is also my right to grieve for what was taken from me and my co-workers in the aftermath. But it is my choice whether to wallow in misdirected fear and pointless resentment. This year as I meditate around my September 11th experience and emotions, I am focused on the lessons on serenity and the circle of life that an extraordinary bale of sea turtles imparted to me that same day, and on the celebrations of renewal in my own life in the intervening ten years. The three women with whom I was “stuck in Hawaii,” for want of a more elegant (and less oxymoronic) phrase, have all (or will, in November!) become mothers, welcoming new life into the world and nurturing it along its way. Hating my job ⎯ or, at least, hating all the petty and demeaning ways the company keeps trying to make it worse ⎯ helped me to shift my focus to my life away from work. I have cultivated new and rewarding friendships, and sought to reinvest in valued old ones. My niece and nephews came into a post-World Trade Center world and will learn about what happened on September 11th as History. Through them, and through my concurrent relationship with my husband, I have been reborn as an artist, and been gifted a life of inspiration, creation, and celebration. I see that I have much for which to be grateful, not least the purpose and the peace conferred by gratitude itself.

As the honu taught me, we are lucky to be in this world, however long our particular book stays open. It is natural and right to mourn what you lose, beautiful and healing to find ways to carry your loved ones with you after they move on. Loss is but a part of the cycle of renewal, and there is much to celebrate in new life, new love, and new discoveries. This year, as every year, I strive to honor the memories of the crews of United flights 93 and 175, and of American Airlines flights 11 and 77, and the difficult journeys of their friends and families. And if I’m hit again by one of those floods of gratitude? Let it carry me away.

Dinner

2011-05-19T10:05:00.002-06:00

This story turned out to be about more of an Experience than an Encounter, and so will not be submitted to the contest. It remains, however, a particularly memorable experience, and so I share:

You’ll know this story is from a while back, because it opens with me at the gym. With three other flight attendants on a Sydney layover, mind you; I had mostly gone along to be sociable. I think we were all a little surprised by quite how sociable our work out turned out to be.

Except for maybe Mark. A broad-shouldered, booming Southern queen who turned every chance meeting of two or more men into a tea dance, he was the first to zoom in on Henry. More specifically, the first to zoom in on Henry zooming in on our friend Jim, of which he immediately made a big deal.

Henry was wielding some free weights across the room, stealthily sizing Jim up in the mirror, and Jim⎯strikingly handsome, short, and shy⎯was trying to blush unnoticed, but Mark jumped right in.

“You should come over here and say ‘hi’ to us,” he called out across the gym. “We’re not exactly regulars.”

Henry smiled at Mark in the mirror while he finished his set and set his weights back on the rack, but he only had eyes for Jim when he crossed the room. “Yeah,” he cracked, “your accent gave you away.”

“You don’t have an Australian accent, either,” Mark noticed. “Where are you from?”

Henry smiled again, quickly meeting Mark’s eyes. “You’re right. I live here, but I’m from South Africa.”

“How exotic,” purred Mark, who I knew for a fact had been to South Africa more than once. “You should meet my friends.” He waved a perfectly dismissive hand at me and my buddy Taylor, and we smiled, waving politely, quite aware of our role as Non-Speaking Townspeople in this particular tableau. “And this,” he announced⎯triumphantly, as if he was somehow able to take credit for him⎯”is our friend Jim.”

Uncomfortable as the center of attention, Jim nevertheless remembered his manners and shook Henry’s hand with a friendly ‘hello.’

“How are you?” he asked Jim and only Jim.

“Fine, thanks.”

“We just got in from San Francisco,” Mark chimed in.

“Ah. Cabin crew, then?” Henry guessed without effort; most Americans out on Oxford Street were. Same with many of the Aussies, for that matter.

“That’s right,” Mark said.

“How long are you in town?” Henry asked, turning his body slightly to isolate Jim as his interviewee.

“Til Monday,” Jim practically whispered.

“That’s right,” Mark said again. “We’re here all weekend with not a thing to do.”

“Something will come up, I’m sure,” Henry said, focusing his attention on Jim. “Maybe you’d want to get a drink or something?”

Jim blushed. “Gosh, thanks. That’s real nice of you,” he said, “but I don’t think so. I’m here with my friends, we’ll probably stick together.”

“Sure,” Henry said. “You guys have fun.”

How Mark sized this stranger up so quickly and with such deadly accuracy, I’ll never know, but he hopped off his treadmill and followed Henry over to the water fountain. They chatted amiably for maybe three minutes before Henry went into the locker room and Mark rejoined us.

“Good news!” he sang.

“What?” Jim asked.

“You’ve got a date!”

“I what? Mark⎯”

“Relax,” Mark commanded. “We’re going with you. I explained about how you were really quite attracted to him⎯”

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Jim interrupted him.

“But that you’d be more comfortable if you had your friends with you,” Mark carried on, uninterruptable. “At least, you know, on the first date.”

Jim rolled his eyes. “I wish you hadn’t…”

“Relax,” Mark said again. “It’s just dinner. But wear something cute.”

***

As directed, Taylor and I met Mark and Jim in the hotel lobby a couple of minutes before seven. Henry was obviously prepared to wager that Jim was worth jumping through a few hoops for, because he rolled up in the driveway in his shiny red convertible right at the appointed hour and greeted all four of us with a kiss on the cheek. Mark, Taylor, and I piled into the backseat, leaving Jim his rightful place, as our Meal Ticket, in the front. And away we went, zipping through Sydney’s after-work traffic, back down Oxford Street and through the neighborhoods to the glittering slope of shops and restaurants lining the hill down to Bondi Beach.

Whatever deal had been struck with Henry, Mark had struck it, and Henry only had eyes for Jim, so Taylor and I tagged cluelessly along, content to gossip and boywatch, and eventually Henry led us up the stairs to a crowded, convivial restaurant, wall to wall with hip, hungry Sydneysiders. There would obviously be a long wait, and we were settling in when a tall, thick beefcake with a unibrow and a ponytail shouldered the crowd aside and greeted Henry with effusive kisses.

“Hello, Eitan,” Henry said.

“Henry! Have you come for dinner?”

Henry nodded. “With some friends.”

The beefcake beamed at us. “Excellent,” he declared. “I’ll have your table ready straight away.”

Anything under an hour seemed unrealistic, until we saw him careen through the crowd and onto the patio, sailing up to a table of young after-work types. There was little discussion; he promised them or threatened them with something. But they were relocated to the bar, their dishes were whisked away, and we were ushered through the crowd to the romantic and glittering patio to overlook Australia’s favorite beach.

Introductions were made, along the lines of “These are some people I’ve met, and this is Jim.” Eitan was suitably pleased to meet us all, bade us welcome to his restaurant, and scurried off to the kitchen.

I never saw a wine list, but was plied with glass after glass of a sweet, fruity white by a sweet, fruity waiter. I never saw a menu, but our table groaned under Technicolor spreads and dips, piles of warm pita bread, plates of seasoned, spicy meats and cool, clever sauces. Taylor and I contented ourselves to sit in the corner, sampling everything set in front of us, watching Henry ask Jim questions to which Mark had a never-ending supply of loud, long-winded answers. The sky was ablaze as the sun set behind the hillside of houses that overhang the beach, ever-darker blues wafting from the pink and orange horizon out over the ocean, from deep within which the shimmering moon seemed to rise, filling the sky. By the time dessert was served, the stars were fairly dripping from the Southern sky, silvering the crests of the waves as they washed ashore. I certainly never saw anything as crass as a bill for this dinner, and precisely what it cost our friend Jim was never fully disclosed, despite Mark’s fervent cajoling for the duration of the 14-hour flight home, but Taylor and I agreed: even though the handsome man paying for dinner scarcely even knew we were there and we went back to our rooms alone, it was the best date either one of us had been on in a long time.

The Rain, The Train, and The Birdcage

2011-05-11T10:17:00.004-06:00

OK, so there's this travel writing contest seeking stories about Your Most Memorable Travel Encounter (more on this, including how to vote for my story, later), and I figure as a writer who travels and encounters people for a living, I should probably at least show up for it. I wrote a few different stories, and the Prize Winner I'm going to submit (which I almost didn't write, which is how this stuff goes) was my writing group's unanimous fave. We didn't pick this story for the contest, so you get to read it here!

It was one of my very first trips to Japan. I had been to Narita, of course, as all good flight attendants eventually must, but this was my first Osaka trip. I had just finished reading Memoirs of a Geisha like two weeks before, and I was dying to see the Gion district in Kyoto. It was April, so I sold one of my flying partners on the prospect of a cherry blossom photo safari, and shortly after breakfast, we set out.

This was well before I got to know My Kyoto: the Kyoto of the World’s Largest hundred yen store and the all-you-can-drink Karaoke Room; of Starbucks and stick-pics and the Shakey’s corn-and-mayonnaise pizza buffet. My wacky romance with Japan was barely budding, and the whole country still struck me as a different Universe. Oddly parallel to ours, with its Toyotas and vending machines and smiling people, but hopelessly ⎯ perhaps purposely ⎯ indecipherable. While we walked through ultra-modern Kyoto to get there, my memories of that day are all of Gion. Its wooden houses surely bursting with geishas and other ancient secrets, its tunnels of cherry trees sprinkling the streets with their blossoms as dutifully as the earnest little flower girl that makes the wedding of a friend of a friend surprisingly memorable.

Crossing the river, we made for the Imperial Palace. When the rain came ⎯ in sheets, mind you, and with no warning ⎯ we were smack in the middle of the Palace grounds, about as far as possible from shelter in any direction. Without an umbrella between us, there was nothing for it but to scurry across the park, the subway station as promising a refuge as any other, and when at last we slipped and slid onto the train, we were drenched.

It was no rush-hour mob scene, but the train was crowded enough, and we were lucky to get seats. As they will, passengers piled on at the next stop, including an elderly(ish) woman loaded down, not just with shopping bags and her carpetbag purse, but also an occupied birdcage. I stood and offered her my seat, but she shook her head. Smiling, she indicated with her armload of luggage that I should please sit again. I insisted, though, on account of the birdcage, and she sat gratefully, smiling and repeating what was surely the Japanese version of “You shouldn’t have.” My flying partner gave his seat to her husband, and we rode strap-hanging back to Kyoto station. Balancing the birdcage on her lap, our new friend sympathized with our soggy state. She pointed to our wet clothes, then mimed wringing out her own clothes with an understanding frown. She pointed to my friend’s hair, then dramatized for us what would be her own chagrin at being caught on the train with such an unsightly ‘do. We laughed and shrugged, What are you gonna do?, and she laughed with us. Eager to make conversation, she was deterred neither by our utter lack of Japanese nor by the insistent absence of her own English. We were wet; she was sitting down; something about the bird in the cage ⎯ all apparently hilarious topics, and along with her feathered friend, she chirped cheerfully for the ride into town.

As we rolled into Kyoto Station, she revisited the topic of our wet clothes, pressing her collapsible yellow umbrella into my hand. I made a face as if to say Yes, an umbrella would have been a good idea, and then handed it back to her, but she just laughed, refusing my return. She gestured again at our wet clothes, my friend’s hair. “Take the umbrella,” she must have said, or something like it. She cued her husband with an elbow, and he held up another umbrella. They had two, she was saying, and we had none, and if we shared, everybody could stay dry. I tried to refuse ⎯ can you just take an umbrella from an old lady on the train? ⎯ but she wouldn’t take it back. I had given up my seat, she would give up her umbrella; we had a problem, she had a solution. It was settled. I did not yet know that this desire to share ⎯ their food, their language, their umbrellas ⎯ was an indelible part of Japanese culture, but now there was a crack in the code, and I remember wondering if this Universe was really so indecipherable after all.

The Tasty Kake Incident

2011-01-22T11:05:00.000-07:00

So I ran into this guy Miller the other day at the airport. Always a pleasure; he’s gay, he’s gorgeous, and he’s always happy to see me. We first flew together when he was brand spankin’ new and I was still based in San Francisco, and shared some memorable experiences in the three days we were together, not the least of which was getting drunk out of his flask in the aisles of the Dollar Tree at the Mall of America, but it always takes him a second to place me. His “hello” is always gregarious, his cutie-pie face always lights up under his latest haircut or facial hair experiment, but his eyes invariably narrow while he racks his brain, and I brace for the announcement. Because we are always in the computer room with a hundred other flight attendants, and he always remembers, loudly, with a snap of his fingers: “We had the Tasty Kake incident!”

The Tasty Kake incident, which would have been unmanageably mortifying with pretty much any other flight attendant I’ve ever flown with, was actually quite hilarious in context, and I am not ashamed of it in principle. Miller and I had bonded over our common body image issues and love of snack cakes in general, and what happened on the flight from Minneapolis to Denver seemed almost inevitable in its poetic timing. But it would be OK with me if even once in a while he could say hi to me without telling everybody within earshot all about how we broke the jumpseat.

As you may or may not know, Tasty Kakes are more or less Philadelphia’s answer to Hostess; a line of mass-produced, packaged snack cakes that is one of the few truly “regional” foods this country has left and of which Philly is inordinately proud. Our airport layover hotel, which otherwise has few redeeming qualities, gives them to us for free when we check in (although the last couple of times I’ve been there we’ve practically had to beg), and there is a Customer Service Representative at our Philadelphia station who grew up across the train tracks from the Tasty Kakes factory and worked there summers growing up. He will happily talk about them at length, not only to anyone who will listen, but to anyone who will stand within earshot for more than a few seconds. More than once, including this trip I flew with Miller, he has presented the crew of whatever flight he might be working with an entire box, even allowing you to choose your favorite flavor from the variety stashed behind the counter.

Miller is the type of fat guy who has maybe ten extra pounds on his jock frame. Not in combat shape any more (ex-Army, in Miller’s case), but he can joke about being “fat” freely and easily because, well, A: he isn’t fat, and B: he is 25 years old and could lose all ten pounds in fifteen minutes if he applied himself. He’s even got a slew, apparently, of inside jokes with his friends about the Fat Girl inside him who is dying to eat her way out. I am the type of fat guy who loves to eat and hates to work out and is in total denial about not being 25 and not being able to drop so much as one pound any more without going on reality TV and having a personal trainer, a plastic surgeon, a dance coach and a D-list Celebrity Host to shame me into doing it. In my shorts-and-a-t-shirt, drinks-on-the-patio life I have few hang-ups about my body, and celebrate my love of red wine and ice cream even as I crow about the fact that I have finally, nearly 40, graduated to occasionally adding vegetables to the things I cook. I eat brown rice and whole wheat pasta specifically so there will be room in my diet for half and half and peanut butter cups. I had shared much of this with Miller, and we were unapologetic about working our way through the box of Tasty Kakes on the airplane on Day Two and Day Three, even after laying waste to the Dairy Queen at the Mall of America on our second night, while our (ironically) more Twinkie purser prudishly forbore.

But I am a member of a particularly image-conscious work group. Many flight attendants still judge each other by the 1960’s ideal of the Sky Girl as a false-eyelash-wearing, devastating young farm girl who chose a flying career because she was too beautiful to be believable as a model, whether or not they come close to living up to this ideal themselves (although you can always tell the ones who rather fancy that they do live up to it by their frequent and vocal lamenting of its passing). I am often told that I “don’t look like a flight attendant,” and am a staunch and vocal supporter of the notion that as long as you can open a can of pop, strap yourself into the jumpseat, and shout “Brace! Brace! Brace!” once in a while, there should be few requirements related to size, shape, or age for this job these days. As a rule, I try to take pride in both my job and my body, but I have to say that this is easier when I am not in a room full of people who are judging me based on my size, strolling (all loud) down memory lane with a little hotty, remembering how we “ate so many Tasty Kakes that we broke the jumpseat.” Like maybe I was 180 at the start of the trip? And I promise you, ain’t nobody in that dang computer room looking at Miller like Gee, no wonder.

Obviously the jumpseat would have broken anyway. I had been sitting on 737 jumpseats for 10 years prior to the Incident, and have sat on a hundred since. This jumpseat was busted, and should have been written up by the crew before us, if not the crew before them, if not a month earlier. It creaked and sagged the minute we first sat on it for taxi out⎯which got a big laugh out of us, of course, since our weight and junk food consumption had been the uniting theme of our layovers. But when we went to sit on it again for landing, after a hundred more jokes about being fat in the narrow-ass aisle of the stupid 737 (which skinny people have trouble negotiating with a passenger load of more than 20%), and it broke off the wall right out from under us, we just gaped at each other (on that gross, sticky floor) like What the fuck do we do now? We weren’t full, but the back row was (thanks to the inventor of Economy Plus), and we had to move somebody so at least one of us could sit by the doors. I begged Miller to do it, and I sat next to the purser on the front jumpseat for landing. Without breaking it, I might add. Hmmm; maybe the Tasty Kake incident was Miller’s fault. I’ll ask him about it⎯next time we’re in a room full of people.

Happy Holidays (Again)

2010-12-07T19:08:00.001-07:00

Re-posted from last year.

I bought my Christmas tie at Hong Kong’s Stanley Market for like two dollars, and have worn it to work (in strict accordance with my company’s uniform guidelines, I might add, cuz that’s how I roll) for the whole month of December pretty much ever since. We celebrate Christmas, but I am not a Christian, and my tie, as befits a Christmas tie from China, is very generic; no Jesus, no Santa, just a bunch of snowmen and gold star-topped trees. Mostly I wear a holiday tie because it is my one and only opportunity to vary the uniform that I wear every day. The very same uniform, come to that, that, at my broke-ass company, I’ve been wearing for my entire career. Lots of pilots wear them, too, and it’s fun, for two or three weeks, to start pre-flight briefings with a compliment, even one as bland as “Nice tie.”

When a passenger tells me, “Nice tie,” I used to say “Thank you. Merry Christmas,” figuring that if you were going to take the time to comment on my Christmas tie, then you were probably someone who celebrates Christmas, too. But lately, the Nice Ties have been delivered more and more with a certain sly tone that implies a knowing wink, and I have dropped the M.C., sticking with a bland and pleasant “Thank you.” While I hope the tie is able to impart a small amount of General Cheer on flights at a time of year when travel can be high-stress and hassle-full, I do not wish to be implicated in anyone’s personal, FOX-fueled war on the phrase Happy Holidays.

Not because I think the Annual Merry Christmas vs. Happy Holidays Debate is a pointless one, but rather because, as someone who has himself a Secular Little Christmas, I find the notion that an inclusive holiday greeting is somehow an attack on Christians and the helpless infant Jesus so petulant and ridiculous as to be offensive. Jesus, we are often reminded, is the Reason for the Season. And to the extent that Christmas is his birthday party, the little rhyme is right. But Jesus is not the reason for December. He is not the reason for winter, and he is not the reason that fall steps aside for it around this time each year, a hand-off that many cultures celebrate. Christmas is not the only holiday that comes around at the end of the year, and to millions (shit, possibly billions) of the world’s people, it is unknown, unimportant or unobserved. I work for a very large international airline that serves dozens of countries on five continents, and even on a randomly-selected flight from let’s say Denver to let’s say Boise, a handful of cultures, languages, and traditions are represented every day. And I don’t know you. By wishing an airplane full of people a “Happy Holiday” over the P.A., I am saying, look, I don’t know if you celebrate Christmas or Hannukah or Kwaanza or a holiday I've never heard of or a blended family combination of holidays or no religious or cultural holiday in particular, but I do know that for the next three weeks, the mall is going to be packed, you’re probably going to go to a few parties, and you might even run into a family member or two. This is a season that we try to associate with brotherhood and fellowship and gift-giving and, whatever that means to you, however it shapes up in your life this year, hey, I hope that, whatever makes you happy, you get a little bit of that out of the craziness. We say “Have a nice day” to people all the time⎯a tradition that is prevalent in cultures all over the world. Nobody gets bent out of shape (I hope) that they are not wished a godly or Christ-filled day by the guy at the bank or their bus driver. If your definition of a “nice day” is one that is godly and filled with Christ, then knock yourself out. How you define “Happy Holidays” is up to you, but the fact that I do not use a greeting that singles out your tradition while willfully excluding all others should not be perceived as a slight. How strong and personal is your relationship with Jesus really if the mere recognition of other belief systems is a threat to yours? No one has ever been able (or even tried) to satisfactorily explain how wishing a Christian a Happy Holiday is an insult. I said, “Have a happy holiday.” The holiday you celebrate is Christmas. Another word for “Happy” is “Merry.” Problem solved. When I say Happy Holidays to you, and you are someone who celebrates Christmas, I have wished you a damn Merry Christmas⎯get a dictionary. And maybe a hold of yourself.

I love Christmas. I always have. I still feel the excitement that waiting for Santa generated all those years ago, and I love the feeling of anticipation. There’s gonna be presents, and probably fudge! I love (good) Christmas music, I love putting up decorations and hanging our stockings and drinking peppermint schnapps and hot chocolate and sending cards and giving little gifties to the people I love and the people who love me; I love getting together with my cousins and with my friends and sending my sister something to put under the tree for my niece and nephews; I love shopping for my husband and I love that we get to wake up and sit around our tree and give each other little tokens of our affection and focus on the ways we are blessed, individually and together as a little family. But that doesn’t mean that you have to love it. You might love different things about it. You might celebrate a different holiday or you might celebrate the wonderfulness of your family or your friends or your cat at a different time of year or, hey, if you’re lucky, all year ‘round. And you may very well feel the Magic of Christmas quite literally and observe a deeply religious and profoundly joyful celebration of the birth of your personal lord and savior. Good for you if you do. But if that’s truly the case, then the fact that a flight attendant in a cheap Chinese tie (or a Wal-Mart cashier, or the guy at the bank) wishes everyone a Happy Holiday will diminish your own celebration not at all, and you might even be moved to wish that person the same.

If you’re flying these next couple of weeks, good luck to you. Flight attendants, look out for those crazy passengers. Passengers, tread lightly around those crazed flight attendants⎯especially the guy in the Christmas tie. And no offense, but happy holidays to everybody.

WHATing??

2010-07-14T10:00:00.000-06:00

So here's me in front of a stall at the old outdoor market in Shanghai, now closed (the five dollar North Face backpacks were knock-offs?!? Get outta here...). I would love to know where this shopkeeper came up with this English name for her shop! Shanghai never seemed to me like the kind of place where a whole lot of faggoting went on, at least not in the the neighborhoods I hung out in. Mostly I went across the street where the massage girls gathered 'round and laughed at how hairy I was, and how fat, even when I was only there for a haircut and they probably shouldn't have been gathering 'round me for any reason.

There was a lot of gathering 'round in my Shanghai experiences. I visited this same market with a red-headed friend of mine and Chinese people came running from blocks around to touch her hair and suggest that she try on every red item in sight, the double red of hair and blouse apparently a portent too marvelous to pass up. And people would crowd around to point and laugh at me trying on shirts in the country where XXL apparently = Medium. I forget the name of this market (FAs weigh in?), but a good time was always had by the locals, who yukked it up whenever I visited.

Day of Action

2010-04-06T00:59:00.003-06:00

Tuesday, April 6th, marks one year that my union, the Association of Flight Attendants, has been in contract negotiations with my airline. Our contract, under which we’ve been flying since 1996, became amendable in January, and the airline has refused to meaningfully participate in contract negotiations until they can get our union to agree to certain “cost saving” concessions. Like all front-line employees, we agreed, in 2002, to pay cuts and major work-rule concessions to help the company survive what would become the longest bankruptcy in airline history and, while management pay and benefits snapped back to pre-bankruptcy levels during bankruptcy (and far exceed pre-bankruptcy levels today), we have yet to get anything back. We have now been out of bankruptcy for four years, and the company has benefited from the cost savings negotiated during bankruptcy for eight. Because most of these “cost savings” have gone directly into the pockets and stock portfolios of our (laughably mis-named) “management” team, angry flight attendant are prepared to stand United against the notion that we must make any further concessions. And on April 6th, at airports around the world, flight attendants will be picketing and leafleting to let passengers, management, and anybody else who will listen know that we are prepared to do Whatever It Takes to make improvements to our contract.

Not everybody understands such a militant attitude during “these economic times.” We’re “lucky to have a job,” according to many, including our management team and even many flight attendants. I’ve heard and read similar comments about the British Airways cabin crew and Lufthansa pilots that are striking in Europe to improve their working conditions, too, but what I don’t understand is why only the front-line workers are so lucky to be here. Management continues to swell their ranks and award themselves huge bonuses and incentives, and it sure seems to me like the management team that drove the company into bankruptcy in the first place and then wrangled themselves huge bonuses for getting it out (after a record-setting stay) should consider themselves pretty damn lucky, too.

How lucky are you, really, to have a job that requires you, as our company’s new contract proposal would, to be on duty, in uniform and accountable to the company, for 17 hours a day, but only has to pay you for 8 of those hours at the most? A job in an industry where fatigue is a well-documented problem with fatal consequences that wants to reduce your rest period between 17-hour duty days to 8 hours? Eight hours of quote-unquote rest which, incidentally, would include passenger disembarkation, waiting around for the hotel van, driving up to 30 minutes to a hotel with no restaurant, getting ready in the morning, driving 30 minutes back to the airport, going through security, and boarding the airplane 40 minutes before departure. Where, exactly, is the resting part? Five hours of sleep would be hard to get, and then a passenger’s going to come up to you 13 hours into your next 17-hour day and attack you personally because his carry-on won’t fit in the bin, which you are then supposed to graciously help him stow. Let me know how that goes, and remember (cuz you’re gonna want to): it’s against the law to pop the guy in the mouth.

People expect air travel to be affordable, accessible, and reliable; we want to be able to go where we want to go when we want to go there ⎯ isn’t it my right as an American to be able to go to Orlando every time I can string a three-day weekend together? ⎯ and we want it to be cheap. Passengers, first-timers and frequent fliers alike, shop from website to website for the lowest fare, even if it’s a difference of a couple of dollars; everybody does. But then when it’s boarding time, suddenly $149 entitles everybody to smiling, willing flight attendants, eager to provide snacks that no one wants to pay for and blankets and pillows that no one wants to pay for; flight attendants anxious to lift and stow everyone’s too-large, too-heavy carry-on bag and turn every center seat into an aisle seat and ensure that there are no crying babies or fat people around to irritate or infringe on what amounts, after all, to public transportation. The notion that the passenger is entitled to Pan Am service at People’s Express prices, but the crew is “just lucky to be there,” does not fly with me. At all.

Understand: this is still, on the whole, a good job. We get to work a varied and flexible schedule with a constant variety of new people, we get to travel and see the world (or, at least, Arizona and the Midwest), and we are virtually unsupervised. In some months, we have more days off than you do. But we are at (some would say "past") the limit of what constitutes reasonable compensation. Compare our work days: When I go to work a domestic schedule, my current contract allows me to be scheduled for a 13-hour duty day, and allows me to work as many as 14.5 hours in irregular operations, such as in the event of a weather or mechanical delay. Mind you, our flight time is limited to 8 hours a day, and we don’t get paid for time on the ground. So on a given 14.5 hour duty day, I am lucky to get paid for half of those hours, and am often paid for less. I am in uniform, accountable to the company, and not free to leave the airplane or airport, but I am not getting paid. Last month, a passenger had a seizure on one of my flights and fell on top of another passenger. Shortly after I arrived on the scene, the passenger turned purple, went still, and fell to the floor. Another flight attendant rushed me the AED, I cut off the passenger’s shirt, and was preparing to apply the pads of the defibrillator to his chest when he regained consciousness and, thankfully, started breathing again. As it happened, we were still at the gate in San Francisco, boarding the flight to San Diego, and so, while the crew responded to an emergency as they were expected to and as they are trained to do, not a one of them was paid for doing so. We give a little, we expect to get a little.

We are not asking for more than we deserve. We are standing up for our right to a Piece of the Pie. A pie we helped bake, incidentally, and for whose ingredients we (along with other front-line employees) shouldered the bulk of the cost. We are simply saying that when the money comes in, thanks in much larger part to our efforts than any of management’s, we should get our fair share of it. We made sacrifices during bankruptcy. We gave up work rules. Oh, we cut costs. Our executives took away our pensions (in the largest renunciation of pension obligation in history), but kept their own. Front-line employee pay cuts went almost directly, dollar-for-dollar, to “Key Employee” retention bonuses for the management team that had driven us into bankruptcy. Our CEO took home a bonus that could have given all flight attendants a 10% raise as a reward for his performance during a period when the value of our stock went from $50 a share to $3. Management laughed ⎯ there are reports of actual dancing in the hallways ⎯ in 1996 when our union ratified the industry’s first ten-year contract, and we have been working under that same “ten-year” agreement for fourteen years. Except we’ve taken cuts to our pay, benefits, and work rules in the meantime. They pay me less money to work longer hours and be away from home more often. There’s your cost savings. I don’t need to give up more than that. We are working for 1994 wages. Our executives certainly aren’t taking home what they took home in 1994, and probably neither are you.

We are not trying to squeeze blood from a turnip. But there is always money when it comes time for executive bonuses. The bonus that our management team gave themselves when we exited bankruptcy made even the Wall Street Journal laugh, and since then all we have done is further eliminate front-line jobs vital to the daily operation while adding managerial and executive positions. We have fewer than half the number of employees we had on September 10th, 2001, and eight more executive vice presidents, complete with generous executive compensation packages ⎯ we’re not talking about eight volunteers. We moved our executive offices from a complex out near O’Hare airport that we’ve owned free-and-clear since the 1960’s to a glitzy, new office building in downtown Chicago from which non-executive employees with the temerity to enter are hastily escorted. My position is that if there is money for executive pay, stock, and bonus packages and ritzy new downtown digs, then there is money for improvements to my contract, too. I don’t understand why there’s no money to lay me over in downtown Chicago, but there was money to move our entire executive suite down there. Or, put another way, I do understand, and I reject the notion that their contributions to the company are more valuable than mine. Our CEO told the single passenger who spends more money on our airline each year than any other that if he didn’t like management’s handling of the employee morale situation, he was free to take his business elsewhere. Really? And he is supposedly more “key” to the airline’s success than I am? Doesn’t look good.

Paying workers less for working more is not the answer in a hard economy. When people can barely pay their bills, they don’t eat out, they don’t wander around malls, and they don’t buy cars, homes, or washing machines. The ripple effect across the economy can be devastating, and yet when the executive who makes the decision to just slash everybody’s pay and take the difference home as a bonus gets on the airplane and isn’t served dinner and isn’t offered a pillow and a blanket and is told yes, of course he can have a gin and tonic, you just can’t offer him any ice because there isn’t any, he’s affronted, and scoffs at “cost cutting measures” as a lame excuse. At a certain point ⎯ and most of us are there ⎯ you can’t afford to give up any more. I am prepared to fight for improvements to our contract, and you’d better believe I am chomping at the bit to strike. If a strike brings down the airline, then it brings down the airline. The necessity for, and the length and impact of, a strike is a decision entirely within management’s control, but I will not be intimidated by talk of biting the hand that feeds me. A job that takes me away from home more than 20 days a month and is going to work me 17 hours a day with no rest between shifts for, if I’m off-the-charts lucky, a 10% raise (on 16-year old wages) is no longer a job that I am lucky to have. You expect the service, you expect the professionalism, you expect the expertise, and more people than you would believe expect us to smile and kiss their ass throughout their travel experience. Why are we expected to do it for nothing? If we really believe as a culture that only executives are worth rewarding and the rest of us are just lucky to get what we get, then let the airline crumble. If you’re going to erode the quality of my work life to the point that I would be better off working at the McDonalds up on Colfax and Krameria, then that might actually be what I’d rather do. Bring it on: I have a college degree, I speak three languages, and I have 15 years of the most intensive customer service experience on the planet; You were an executive whose personal level of avarice led to the complete failure of your company ⎯ let’s see which one of us gets hired first.

There are now 15,000 flight attendants at my airline (where once there were 23,000, see how we cut costs?); we make up a third of the workforce and less than 7% of the operating budget. We are not the problem. But, as front-line employees and, for the vast majority of our passengers, the “face of the airline,” we are in a unique position to be a huge part of the solution. And if we are expected to be instrumental in a return of our company to a position of profitability and prestige, then we deserve to share in the rewards. Only in the airline industry is this considered selfish and petulant behavior. You expect to be compensated at your job, and when you perform above expectations and bring profit, stability, and glad tidings to your company, you expect to be rewarded for it. If our executives can be rewarded for my performance (and they are, consistently), then so can I. I am scheduled to fly on April 6th and may not be able to stand physically alongside my coworkers and wave a sign to publicize our cause, but I am proud to be among the flight attendants who are ready to stand up and do Whatever It Takes to get the recognition ⎯ and the improvements ⎯ we deserve.

Wow, That's a Great Wall.

2010-02-12T10:22:00.008-07:00

Welcome back, fans! You will have noticed that it's been a bit since I've posted anything on here. My Year of Writing Dangerously is off to kind of a slow start, although my Year of Photographing Everything I See is going swimmingly, as my other blog is happy to show you. Nothing particularly interesting has happened to me on the airplane lately -- which is a good thing from a non-blogging standpoint and suits me fine -- and I have thus far put off a post about, for example, the relationship between management and flight attendants during contract negotiations, because I am trying not to bring an I Hate My Airline vibe to this space, and any conversation about our (mis)management's attitude towards their employees and their rights to a fair contract can engender nothing but. Besides, Sunday is Valentine's Day; better to spread a little love.
In which vein I am combining two of this blog's Primary Themes, and telling a flying story using an excerpt from my first novel, whose publication is one of my stated writing goals for this year (and which is hopefully currently breezing through the first stages of the Fabulous New Novel contest to which it was recently submitted). In the Fall of 2001, in the immediate aftermath of September 11th, my then-young flying career teetered on the brink. There were going to be furloughs, and plenty of 'em, and when I was assigned a five-day Narita/Beijing trip in my last-ever month of International Reserve, I was morosely convinced that it would be the last time I ever set foot in Asia, and thus my one-and-only shot to cross the Great Wall of China off my List. After a short flight NRT - PEK, we had a very short layover in Beijing. It was dark when we landed at 7pm and still dark for our pick-up early the next morning; there was nothing for it but to visit the Wall in the middle of the night. The other flight attendants (whose careers were in less immediate danger, after all, barring a total implosion of the airline) had all either visited the Wall before, like in the daytime when you could actually see it, or weren't interested enough in visiting it to stay up all night, and so I set out alone in the backseat of the car driven by the husband of the woman who sold bootleg DVDs out of the back room of her bar. The only real difference between my real-life experience and the story that follows, of course, is the kissing bit, since I stood on top of the Wall -- and the World, it seemed -- alone. As the photo above implies, I returned to the Wall years later with a friend, but my Night Atop the Great Wall of China remains one of the most singular and spectacular experiences of my life to date.

From Kiss Me, Straight:

“Only one problem with our Moonlight Visit to the Wall, I guess," I said to Josh as we finally stepped out of the car in the parking lot at the base of the Mutianyu section
"No moon?"
I mimicked Katie's finger-on-nose gesture for "You got it."
We had gone back to the hotel after DVD shopping and retired to our respective rooms for a quick snooze and a shower, then met in the deserted lobby at 1:45, each of us carrying a cup of the reprehensible in-room coffee. Susan's husband had been very smiley and friendly, but he spoke no English, so he popped a surprisingly hip lounge CD in the player and drove us through the night in silence.
"If you get the chance," I had told Josh during the ride, "you should still go to the Wall during the day. Here, where I think we're going, there's a gondola that you can ride up to the top, you can run around, take pictures, all that, then there's this toboggan that you ride to the bottom. It's awesome! There's no safety rails or anything, just you on this little metal sled flying down this rickety metal track at the Great Wall of China. Honestly, some days I love this job."
Now, standing in the otherwise empty car park, the Wall felt deserted. We were the only three people detectable, which made the Wall feel ancient and undiscovered. Actually, I knew the Wall ran atop the hill of which we were at the bottom, but with no moon, there was no visual indication of the Wall whatsoever. From down here, it was impossible to tell where the mountainside ended and the Wall began. The “gee, it runs on forever” aspect of the Wall would be largely lost, if we were able to see it at all.
"Um, where is it?" Josh asked.
"Up there." I pointed into the darkness. There were no lights on in the parking lot; the stalls that lined the road for the first hundred meters or so, usually packed with vendors hawking souvenirs and ice cream, were empty and black. Having spent almost my entire adult life in cities, either living in one or visiting them on my layovers, I'm not sure I've ever seen it quite so dark. In the complete absence of light pollution, the moonless sky sparkled like one of Benji's costumes; it was positively dripping with stars.
Susan's husband gave us his toothless grin and a thumbs-up, then reclined his seat and settled in to wait for us.
"Well, OK, I can kind of see where the path cuts between those stalls," I started hesitantly, taking somewhat confident steps across what I knew to be flat, smooth parking lot. "I guess let's start over there."
Josh fell in behind me. "Dang, it's dark. We won't be able to see shit."
"Well," I joked, "you won't be able to say you saw the Great Wall, but at least you'll be able to say you've been to it."
From the edge of the parking lot, I saw a single light over a sign about fifty feet up the path to our left. We approached the sign, which was posted at a fork in the path. An arrow pointed off to the left, indicating the bathrooms. Another pointed back where we had come from to the parking lot, and a third pointed up the path to our right, apparently towards the Wall. The path was lit for our first few steps by the sign, but after only a few yards, I was only barely able to see my feet and had to feel along the ground with the edge of my shoe every few feet to make sure we didn't stray from the path, which quickly led uphill. It was pitch black, and the only sounds were our breathing and our feet crunching on the gravel path. Josh reached for my hand, because if he fell behind by more than about two steps, he wouldn't be able to see where I was going. What I remembered to be about a fifteen-minute walk in broad daylight stretched out over forty-five minutes in the dark, partly because I was concentrating as hard on the happy feeling in the hand Josh was holding as I was on not going over the side of the mountain.
"At least if we fall into a ravine or something, Cee Cee knows where we are," I said, when, after about forty minutes, I wasn't sure I was going to be able to find the Wall or the parking lot before sunup.
Josh laughed. "At least we'll get a longer layover in Beijing."
I knew that as long as we kept following the path uphill we'd reach the Wall eventually, but I couldn't see my hand in front of my face, and kept expecting to get smacked upside the head by a tree just around the next bend. Then Josh tugged at my hand and I stopped.
"Do you notice that?" he asked me.
"What?"
"Straight ahead. It gets even darker. Is that it?"
Seeing as how we were standing plunged into the blackest darkness ever, I was about to tell him he was imagining things, but I looked up the path and saw that he was right. The blackness had more black to it; it seemed almost palpable.
I took about three short, tentative steps forward, then put my free hand out in front of me to avoid contacting the Great Wall face-first. Which I would have done in one more step—I’d planned to raise my hand to chest level, but smacked into stone about halfway up.
"Ow, fuck!" I hissed. In the thick blackness and equally thick silence, it might as well have been a blood-curdling scream.
"Is that it?" Josh asked, coming alongside me, still holding my other hand.
We craned our necks and watched the darkness in front of us rise up towards the sky. This close to it, we could discern the top of the Wall as the place where the stars began.
"Wow." Josh murmured. Not being able to see the Wall made it seem massive, an ancient presence too large for our modern spirits to measure. We stood, awed, for a minute, then I felt a tug on my hand. "C'mon."
Josh put a hand on the wall and felt his way along further up the hillside, apparently looking for a way up onto the Wall itself. After about twenty feet, we came to an archway cut into the Wall, and we felt our way up about ten uneven, crumbling steps until we emerged on top of the Great Wall, beneath a star-drenched sky. I couldn't see anything—the Wall could stretch five feet in front of us, or hundreds of miles over the surrounding hills; we had no way of knowing.
"Amazing," Josh muttered.
"Yeah." And it was. It felt like we were standing alone on top of the world, the darkness infinite and humbling. The sky was endless, and I felt tiny.
"Dude," Josh whispered, "it's like being in the center of the universe and the middle of nowhere at the same time. Really makes you realize what a speck of dust we live on, doesn't it?"
Not that he could see me, but all I could do was nod agreement. I was entranced by the sky and by the sense of my whole life, the whole world, just being a blink in the eye of whoever was watching over the universe. Josh was right, I felt at once supremely important and laughably insignificant. We could see nothing in any direction, and yet it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen in my life. We stood, touching, in silence for several minutes.
"You know," I finally said, "If there are astronauts up there tonight, they can see us. The Wall is supposed to be visible from space.”
"Well, I hope they won't be offended if I do this," he said, and finally, deliciously, at fucking last, he kissed me.

Our Town

2009-10-14T15:49:00.005-06:00

I am frequently asked by my co-workers if my husband is a flight attendant, too. A horrifying question, and one that I always answer with an emphatic NO, shaking my head and rolling my eyes and generally making clear the unacceptability of a Flying Mate. Never mind that my particular husband hates this job, is no fan of flying, and is about as ill-suited to the schedule as can be; in general I find the idea of a partner in this same job most distasteful. Job security is tenuous, pay is low and advancement limited, and the idea of a whole family unit depending solely on my company to put food on the table seems at best ill-advised, at worst a financial disaster waiting to happen. Depending on what type of Airline Couple you are, you either never see each other -- such as those who use The Flight Attendant Day Care Plan, leveraging the flexibility inherent in this gig to work opposite schedules so that the kids are always with a parent (and one parent forgets what the other looks like) -- or are on top of each other at all times because you live together, drive to work together, fly together, work on the beverage cart together, lay over together -- I'm sick of you already.

Besides, I have learned through experience that even a very large airline (and mine was once the World's Largest) is no larger than a very small town, and anybody who cares to can know your business. Stories abound of the two girls together on the jumpseat rhapsodizing about their wonderful new boyfriends, everything sunshine and lollipops until the identical photos are busted out and yet another pilot is found out for the dog he is. On a Maui trip many years ago, I worked in First Class with the captain's ex-wife while his new wife slung trays in Coach, and I don't mind saying, a more uncomfortable hotel van ride I have yet to endure.

Stories have a way of getting around. When I was still based in San Francisco, I flew a month of Chicago all-nighters with a fun, junior crew. Mostly we stood around the back galley of a 767 playing cards, and one night the Purser busts out with one of her favorite stories. Seems her friend, whom we'll call Edgar, worked a trip to Kauai a while back with these two knucklehead guys. After buying huge beers at the ABC Store, the trio ends up late that night in one of the hotel's myriad hot tubs, where Edgar's flying partners soon decide they would be more comfortable without their trunks on. So comfortable are they naked in the water, it turns out, that they soon decide that the Pacific Ocean, only steps away, presents a much better skinny-dipping opportunity. In no time they put their trunks back on, scoot down to the beach, ditch their trunks again and run headlong into the Ocean and begin at once to cavort. Rascally Edgar stays on the beach, and once the goobers are frolicking sufficiently far from shore, he scoops up their trunks and makes off with them. The boys espy him and -- several beers into the proceedings, remember -- they give pursuit. Naked as jaybirds, they dash across the sand after their shorts, eventually tackling Edgar near a tree under which, needless to say, two more flight attendants are spectating. Our flying partners were rolling as the Purser drew her retelling to a close, but I merely smirked. "Has Edgar told you that story before?" she asked me.

"No," I told her, truthfully. "I'm hearing the story for the first time. But I was one of those guys."

I am a well-behaved and faithful partner, and have no reason to be ashamed of an innocent bit of Hawaiian streaking. Jared has heard this story more than once. But it's made the rounds -- I've heard it from other flight attendants since, and it has evolved over the years, even briefly calling into question the commitment of my straight cohort to his sexuality, even though he behaved like a perfect (if naked) gentleman. I have nothing in particular to hide from my co-workers, and certainly nothing to keep from my husband, but I have nevertheless learned to play my cards close to my vest on the airplane and be stingy with the personal details that I hand out. About myself, anyway -- I have hilarious stories to tell about my friends!

The Cameroon Airlines Incident

2009-08-30T10:53:00.004-06:00

Alright, so my dear friend of many years Jeff died earlier this month, quite unexpectedly, all of 37 years old. I have found writing about him to be a very helpful part of my grieving process, and posted a long and touching "Note" about our friendship on my Facebook page. Jeff had a passionate interest in All Things Airline, and so I wanted to mention him here on this blog, too, but somehow don't feel like this is the right forum for another tear-jerking eulogy. Of our many travels together, though, I have a particularly vivid and flying-related memory that I often share with other flight attendants and world-traveling types when we break out our Other Airline stories.

After we graduated from college, I ran off to San Francisco and fell into an airline job, and Jeff joined the Peace Corps and was posted to Cameroon, where he spent nearly two and a half years. I had always wanted to visit Africa and could fly on most of the world's airlines for next to nothing, and so a trip was planned. I flew first class on my own airline to Paris, and the crew spent much of the trip pouring champagne and caviar into me (if you can believe, now that you have to pay $6 for chips and salsa, there were ever days when we served champagne and caviar on the airplane), so I was rather hung-over when Air France deposited me in Yaounde, the capital city. Jeff met me at the airport according to plan, and we spent a few days in Yae-dae at the apartment of his friend. Jeff was posted in the north of Cameroon, and we meandered through the country; to Ngaoundere by train, to Garoua by crowded community mini-van, and around his post on foot or by motor scooter taxi. After a longer-than-scheduled stay at his home in Pitoa, where I spent days in the bathroom praying for deliverance from dysentery, we decided to fly from Garoua (just up the road) to Douala, the bustling port city from which I would shortly depart for France. Jeff immediately vetoed my plan to ask about an airline-rate standby ticket and insisted that I buy a full fare ticket which, in any event, was not particularly expensive. He spent the next couple of days preparing me for our trip, telling me stories of his and other Peace Corps volunteers' experiences with Cameroon Airlines. Our flight to Douala was scheduled to stop in Yaounde en route, and he warned me that Cam Air had a reputation for either skipping intermediate stops, or for making them without carrying on. The airline was apparently known for the fluidity of their schedule, and he made sure that I understood that just having tickets for our flight was no guarantee that it would operate as planned. The airplane might not make it to Garoua, he told me, and if it did it might not take off again for Yaounde, or we could luck into an unscheduled non-stop to Douala. There seemed to be a consensus among locals and foreigners alike that you just never knew with Cam Air, and so, once it was safe for me to take more than two steps away from a toilet, we packed our bags and cabbed it to the Garoua airport, fingers crossed.

The airport, which had the linoleum-floor look and feel of a small-town community center, was crowded with travelers and well-wishers and extended family welcoming committees anxiously awaiting arrivals on the inbound airplane. The departure "gate" was just a large expanse of floor separated from the tarmac by floor-to-ceiling windows with a set of double doors that more closely resembled the entrance to a local bank than an airport gate room. Shortly, two small trucks drove into view, each with a row of lights on its roof like you'd see on a police car. They took up positions at either end of the runway, lights dutifully flashing as if to tell the pilot of the 737 just beginning to materialize in the evening sky, "You want to land after this truck but before this one." He did so, and the rickety, dirty airplane bounced across the rugged tarmac until it taxied to a stop some distance from the terminal. Air stairs were wheeled up to the front door and passengers soon disembarked. When the Cam Air official who had organized the disembarkation approached the glass doors that would allow us access to the airplane, Jeff grabbed me by the arm and firmly instructed me, "Stay with me. We're going to run, and don't let anyone past you." A tad melodramatic, I thought, until the doors were opened and the prospective passengers raced to crush through them. There was no checking of boarding passes, no orderly procession one-at-a-time through the doors and across the tarmac, but rather a mad dash for the airplane, because everyone else knew what Jeff knew but I did not: flights are routinely over-sold, and everyone with a ticket is checked in and allowed a crack at any open seat. So 120 people, including children and infirm nuns, were shoving their way up the air stairs and onto the plane to madly musical chair over 100 seats. The twenty least assertive in the pack were simply out of luck and would have to wait days for the next flight (it wasn't exactly the Boston to Washington shuttle, leaving every twenty minutes throughout the day; I think Cameroon Airlines had something like 6 airplanes in those days, including a 747 combi that flew to Paris a couple of times a week, eventually crashing there.). We elbowed our way to seats together towards the back, and when the man sitting on the aisle next to us stood up to put something in the overhead bin, another man dove into his seat, very nearly sparking a fist fight. Eventually all seats were filled, and the hapless slowpokes were ushered off the airplane and wished better luck next time. Before they closed the boarding door, though, the flight attendants determined that too much luggage was piled up in front of their jumpseats for them to able to sit in them, and so four more unlucky passengers were booted out of their aisle seats so the crew could sit. And thus we taxied out for take-off in what would become our Boeing-built coffin in even a minor crash, with three of four exit doors blocked by piles of luggage and no flight attendant sitting anywhere near an exit.

And off we went. It was a short flight, but we were offered guava juice and butter sandwiches from a tray by flight attendants bedecked in long, wrap-around dresses of the kind we saw on most women in town, the typically splashy African pattern peppered with the Cameroon Airlines logo and depictions of the pride of their fleet, the 747. Most passengers were bound for Yaounde, and the continuation to Douala was empty, departing on time with no reprise of the boarding battle we had fought in Garoua. I have no specific memory of our uneventful arrival in Douala, we stayed in a cute hotel down a tree-lined lane in an older, un-bustling part of town for a few days and I eventually boarded an Air France flight for Paris in a more traditional and less free-for-all manner.

Jeff's death was sudden and shocking, made more saddening by the fact that we had been conspiring on when, where, and how to visit each other next mere days before he died. Like Jeff, I am not religious, and I am not sure what I believe about where we go when we die or what it's like there. I know I hope he wasn't in pain or afraid when he died, and I guess I just hope that he was able to get himself a good seat and maybe a nice guava juice on his way to whatever's next.

Daddy Needs a New Pair of Shoes

2009-08-10T14:36:00.003-06:00

These days, what with longer duty days for less money and airplanes so full we can’t use our passes even if we can afford a hotel somewhere for a few nights, most airline employees are at a bit of a loss to explain why we stick around. It’s common for non-airline people to interrupt our litany of complaints (don’t get us started) and suggest Another airline, perhaps? And when we clutch at our seniority (12 years here and in the bottom 10%) and say Really, all airlines are the same, people then logically ask Well then what are you thinking of doing instead? At which point we either explain that we already do our “something else” on the side (sell real estate, be a dentist or be on the Young and the Restless, write gripping and hilarious blogs about flying) or, well… we haven’t really thought about doing anything else. The lifestyle is addicting, we say. Flying gets in your blood.

That being the case, I am sure many (if not most) non-airline people wonder why we complain so much and when we are going to shut up. I am in fact quite sure that most non-airline people must wonder this because I often wonder it myself, and there are few flight attendants who complain more vividly or vocally than I. And, viewed through the lens of a half-empty glass, we have plenty to complain about. We get paid less. We are away from home a lot more, in far less interesting places (a topic on which you will remember I expounded in my last entry). When stuff is bad at this gig, it’s pretty bad, and it can interfere with your Real Life pretty drastically, often eventually leading to the It’s Me or the Job conversation responsible for ten times as many flight attendant break-ups as resignations. We rarely have warning when the wheels are about to fall off the wagon; they just fly off, sometimes in mid-air, and we have no control over the outcome. This can be very literally true, of course, although a spectacular mid-air disaster is something very few of us will ever face. But we come to work every day with the knowledge that something⎯with the airplane, with a passenger, with our schedule or the weather⎯could go wrong at any minute, and if ever there was a company that could turn what should be its routine operation into a colossal cluster-fuck at the drop of a hat, it is ours.

Which is how I recently came to the conclusion that what flight attendants really need is to get serious about getting help for our crippling, collective Gambling Problem. Because for everything that goes wrong around here⎯for every sixteen hour duty day endured locked up in an airplane sitting on the runway in Nowheresburg, Nebraska, watching the snow pile up; for every cruise or wedding missed because of a cancellation or reassignment; for every two a.m. wake-up in (god forbid) Orlando⎯there will eventually come the unexpected and completely satisfying windfall of a fabulous layover or a free day off or free money (or, ideally, a combination of all three), whereupon we will look at each other and, not quite believing our own ears, say Some days this is the Best Job Ever. That’s what I have realized we live for, at least now, when we don’t (can’t) do it for the glamour or the prestige of an Airline Career: our favorite thing about this is job is the fact that every day there is the possibility that we might not have to actually do it.

I am writing this at the Denver airport as I sit on airport standby. Personally my most dreaded assignment, Standby can also clearly and quickly illustrate my point. In a nutshell, on Standby we are assigned a four-hour window during which we are required to be at the airport, in uniform with bags packed, in case a late inbound or a sick call requires a last-second assignment to keep a flight from a significant delay or cancellation. If we are called for a trip, we take it. It could be for one day or five, domestic or international, somewhere hot or somewhere cold⎯you don’t have a clue where (if?) you will go when you leave your house, so you pack your parka and your flip flops and the key components of a kitchen sink and go. And if we don’t get called for a trip, we stare at the ceiling for four hours and then schlep all of it home, along with five hours of pay for our trouble. My sister is in town with her kids (who dutifully adore their Tio and are thus adored in return) for only a few days, and I dreaded a trip off of Standby yesterday because of course I would rather spend my time with them. Marveling as my infant nephew slept through the blaring and thoroughly entertaining 8-piece mariachi band when we went to lunch after I was sent home at 11:30 in the morning, I fairly basked in the glow of a job so great that it would pay me almost $200 to read my book, drink coffee, and talk to my friend and then call me up and say Why don’t you run along and go have lunch with those kiddoes? And I promise you⎯if you’ve flown with me on one of these days, you’ll back me up here⎯I guarantee you that, had I been assigned a trip (which I may yet be today in the next hour and fifteen minutes), I would have spent the entire flight, no matter how short or how uneventful, railing against the outrageous indignity that I am expected to actually do work in exchange for a paycheck when there are so many far more important things in my whirling social life which require tending.

OK, that wasn’t that quick, but you see what I mean. It’s a roll of the dice every day, and we’re all in it to win it. We’ve all been dealt the losing hand of not making it to the layover city where Grandma is having her birthday party or where the hot new hookup is waiting for us (in vain) in the lobby, or of going over our duty time and having to lay over in some fleabag overflow hotel, knowing that the wine has already been opened at home and is breathing while the BF puts the finishing touches on the Gourmet Dinner that you will only ever know as Leftovers (unless you have a great big insomniac boyfriend, in which case you may never know the dinner at all now that you couldn’t get your hungry ass home.) But this could also be the trip where the Victory Lap cancels and you will get to go home and go to the Party of the Year after all. Or the one that falls apart and now you get to lay over in San Francisco on Pink Saturday. Or in Hong Kong on New Year’s Eve. Or in Honolulu in February. Or heck, let the whole three-day trip fall apart on Day One because of weather and get yourself sent home, paid for the entire trip. This might not be a white-glove-and-false-eyelashes, carve-a-roast-in-the-aisle-and-then-lay-over-at-the-Waldorf-Astoria job anymore, and please rest assured that it is rare that a trip falls apart in your favor, but let’s be real: when you’re getting paid to watch The Nanny or drink beer in the park, this is the Best Job Ever.

Which probably won’t make very many of my non-airline friends listen with renewed sympathy the next time I roll out the My Airline Sucks barrel, but it might help them understand why I chose⎯and choose to keep⎯my airline career. I love flying; there, I said it. Now with a little bit of luck, I won’t have to do it today.

Things'll be Great When You're Downtown

2009-08-02T13:44:00.002-06:00

Easy and unfettered access to hot guys roaming the streets at lunch hour is not necessarily a requirement for an enjoyable layover, but it never hurts, and is definitely one of the major benefits of staying downtown vs. at some airport Hilton. Fine guys in the street are the only reason that anybody goes to Sydney (deny it, flight attendants, if you dare), but domestically, where the flight time (if not always the duty day) is much shorter, a Downtown Layover is a rare and coveted thing and one of the few things for which every flight attendant is willing to fight.

See, when our airline was in bankruptcy, they slashed and burned many of our favorite sections of our contract in the name of Cost Savings (figuring that calling it Executive Bonus Enhancement would be harder for the court to publicly endorse, although that is precisely where the “savings” went). Before that, we went downtown on any layover over 13 hours, where shops, restaurants, museums, and yeah, even the hot locals were just steps from the hotel lobby. Now we have to be in town at least 20 hours before the company is required to put us downtown (or in a “downtown-like location”). For a layover shorter than 20 hours (up to, and often exasperatingly including, those of 19 hours and 59 minutes), the company can put us up in an airport hotel, where nothing is steps from the hotel lobby and you usually have a direct view from your room of the terminal, including a very literal view of The Horse You Rode In On, lest the company’s Screw You inherent in a long airport layover be lost.

To be sure, there are times when everybody wants an airport layover. At the end of a 4-leg, 14-hour duty day where you’ve had a mechanical delay and an in-flight medical emergency and you only have nine hours to try and rest up before you do three legs home via Orange “can I have a sparkling water and a coffee and a tomato juice with a lemon and a red wine and a blanket and a manicure and what do you mean you don’t have a blanket do you know who I am?” County, you want your shower, your bed, and your Nick at Nite as close as possible. For a short night, we love to lay over in Pittsburgh and Hartford and Houston, where the hotel is inside the airport and we can sleep until a half hour before departure and still be on time. But when you roll up in town at 1:00 in the afternoon and you don’t leave until morning, or if you have the entire day to kill before your 7 PM departure, airport hotels feel more like the prisons that many of them are next to. There’s a limit to how many hotel bar quesadillas a guy can eat, not to mention the number of seventeen-dollar Chicken Caesar Salads he’s prepared to shell out for, but most of these hotels are isolated in acres of parking lot, situated along the side of the freeway in such a way that even if there is a Tim Horton’s or a Whattaburger within five miles, you’re taking your life in your hands to walk to it. It would be one thing if these hotels were bursting with style and amenities, but few hotel chains splurge on decorating their airport locations. Most have a few chairs and maybe a stack of USA Todays in the lobby, but it’s not until you get downtown that you get the glittering atriums, the sweeping mahogany staircases, and the trickling fountains; the hotels that are near millions of things to do are also the ones with such nice rooms that you can barely bring yourself to leave them.

But if you do leave your downtown room, this is a whole new job. Closer to the job we all interviewed for and the one of which we try so hard to hang on to our fuzzy, pre-2001 memories. It’s on your downtown layovers that you can get half price tickets to a show or go see Chris Isaak in concert in Central Park; that you can eat crab cakes at Lexington Market or have coffee brought to your room with your wake-up call. On the old downtown Baltimore layover I could meet my sister for lunch or walk to her house for a dinner party. I’ve brought Jared with me for the downtown San Diego layover, where you can wander the waterfront until it’s time to go to the train station and pick up your friend who came down from L.A. to shop for tea and soap and drink margaritas. The Smithsonian in Washington, Powell’s Books in Portland, roulette in Reno; BBQ in Kansas City, seafood in Seattle, a big ol’ cheesesteak in Philly; not to mention DuPont Circle, Boystown, and Hillcrest⎯all at your feet on a downtown layover and all quite out of the question if you’re at the airport unless you’re gonna get up early and figure out how to ride the train or pay a twenty dollar cab fare to run into the CVS pharmacy or grab a cup of coffee. And on a sunny Friday such as this last one I spent in Chicago, if there’s nothing else going on, you can always wander through town window shopping and along the lakefront watching the shirtless boys go by. Not to make it about this, but of the (very) few hook-ups I’ve had at this job, I haven’t had one of ‘em at an airport hotel.

What you get at an airport hotel is crummy in-room coffee, scratchy towels and cheap soap and all the Yes, Dear you can watch. You get a hotel in Rosemount, IL that used to be an insane asylum where you only have from 7 AM (after the all-nighter) to 3 (before the 5 PM back to SFO) to try and get some sleep in your poolside room. A pool, I should mention, that is hosting the Largest Polka Convention in the Midwest, and where they fire up the tubas at about 9:00. Or, if you’re really lucky, you get a hotel in Newark, NJ that’s hosting a New Year’s Eve party on December 31st of 1998 and a 6 AM departure back to San Francisco on the First. That the DJ should blast Prince’s 1999 at midnight comes as no surprise. That he should blast it a second time seems slightly unimaginative but not unreasonable. When the bedazzled Jersey crowd that has paid fifty bucks a pop to ring in the New Year at a hotel across the freeway from an airport that backs up against a state prison is still partying like it's 1999 at four o’clock in the morning (it was 1999, for the love, and had been for hours!), it's gone from tedious, well past infuriating, to simply absurd. When Sartre said Hell is Other People, he could have been more specific: Hell is a DJ who plays 1999 on a loop for four hours and ends almost exactly when your comically unnecessary alarm begins to blare. Come to that, it is entirely possible that Flight Attendant Hell is nothing more fiery or torturous than a never-ending stay at an airport hotel, Paradise in view across the freeway but way too far to walk to.

Hong Kong August 2008: A Vignette

2009-07-27T07:00:00.000-06:00

This was originally posted on my Facebook page last August.

You know you’re in Asia when an overfed brown-haired white guy in a pair of jeans stands out in a lunchtime crowd. OK, I can admit to having a slight tendency towards overfed brown-haired white guys in jeans, but they’re hardly rare and exotic on the streets of any English-speaking country. And not just the U.S., despite our reputation. (Yes, Australia, I’m talking to you.)

And Hong Kong is packed with Westerners, so it isn’t merely the tender pink patch on the soft underside of his arms or the Western set of his laughing eyes. But he is the only pasty guy I’ve seen all day out of Hot-English-Guy-in-Hong-Kong regulation uniform: the slightly too-thin white dress shirt with the light stripe or checked pattern; the charcoal grey, no-butt trousers; the square black shoes. That’s how all his buddies are dressed, all of them sandy-haired and awkwardly tall for Asia, immediately marked as giant foreigners where at home they’d be lucky to pass for average.

Is it this thicky’s day off? Is he someone’s visiting brother or old school chum? Or⎯more excitingly if less probably⎯one of the skinny guys’ boyfriend, in from London on holiday? Perhaps he works at the same bank but has just arrived in Hong Kong, and because of the extra four inches around his waist, he’s having to wait for Her Majesty’s issued pants to arrive special order. Surely QEII must know a good Hong Kong tailor?

All I know is this: Hong Kong is a frickin’ furnace in August, and my hair, shirt, and crack are all uncomfortably damp. At high noon there’s precious little shade in the concrete kiln they call Central, and my feet, also hot, are killing me. Auntie needs to sit somewhere under a fan and have a giant, sweaty bottle of cold Asian lager and eat about three days’ worth of chicken tikka masala. I’d been scouting for Indian food since the Kowloon side, but with no luck. Plenty of plump Indian tailors to make me a good shirt (“Shazam: you’re a good shirt!”), plenty of lean young Indian men hawking “copy watches,” but no Indian restaurants. So I hopped the Star Ferry to Central, and since then all I’ve seen is a KFC and a coffee shop about every hundred feet. I am ordinarily happy to know there’s a cup of coffee every ten steps in a given layover city, but come on, people, it’s a hundred degrees out here. I’m wilting, and I need someone to point me in the right direction. Soon.

So the light turns, the double-decker trams clatter to a stop, and the pride of cubs – working professionals far from home, but just boys, really – starts to gambol across the street. On impulse, I reach for the thick one; the cute one. He must know that compared to the tangerines in his buddies’ pants, especially on a hot summer day, what he’s got packed into them jeans jiggles like a pair of juicy, sweet, drip-down-yer-chin melons. He’s lucky I grabbed his shoulder.

He turns to me, startled, his coffee-colored eyes not exactly hostile, but wary of this sweat-dripping, shoulder-grabbing maniac. “Excuse me,” I say. It just sort of tumbles out, before I lose my nerve. “But I can tell two things about you by the way you are fillin’ out those jeans: One, you speak English, and two, you know a good lunch special when you see one. Dude, you have got to tell me where I can get a hold of some good Indian food around here.”

Practice Makes Perfect

2009-07-12T18:28:00.005-06:00

This weekend, I heard the funniest thing I've heard on an airplane in a while. As I've already mentioned in an earlier post, I have chosen this year to embrace summer flying and find joy and inspiration rather than horror and ennui in airplanes full of never-flying knuckleheads (not to mention airplanes full of hot, barely-legal jocks in their hella baggy shorts who never fly but are being dragged along by their folks for one last Forced Family Fun Vacation before they leave for school in the Fall) and this little Unaccompanied Minor yesterday gave me a firm shove in the right direction.

The woman who requested that I move her to a wider seat in coach, as if we have a variety of seat sizes from which to pick and choose (not saying that we shouldn't, but have you ever been on an airplane before?), does not warrant a special mention, nor does the family of the woman that was fretting about their connection to Buffalo as she was being wheeled off the airplane by paramedics. But this morning I was loitering around the boarding door at the start of an early Chicago to Denver departure when the Customer Service Representative, who had already gone to lengths to establish herself as something of a comedienne, brings this little blond-headed kid, maybe 8 years old, onto the airplane. It's Ryan (or whatever his name was)'s first time on an airplane! she announced. We all oohed and aahed and kicked off the requisite fuss, but the kid stopped us short. We have an airplane seat at my house, he announced with a never-fear tone, and I've been practicing. Practicing? How have you been practicing, the CSR wanted to know. By going like this? Here she launched into what I'm sure was meant to be her least-demeaning impression of a combination flight attendant/Price is Right model pointing out exits and dishwashers. No, the kid tells her. He's dead serious: I've just been sitting still in it for two hours at a time.

He got good at it, too; we never heard a peep out of him. I, on the other hand, laughed the whole way home.

Fly, Baby, Fly!

2009-07-05T09:30:00.000-06:00

Let me start by assuring you that this is not a rant about babies crying on airplanes⎯to most flight attendants, a fussing baby is far less annoying than a fussing Premier, and I’ve told more than one whiny frequent flier as much to his face. And I don’t think that just because you have a baby it means you shouldn’t be allowed on an airplane until the kid’s 8. Everyone back home in Kansas City or wherever is dying to see your kids, I understand. Heck, I did it myself when I helped my friend bring her 1-year-old son home from Guatemala, and I wouldn’t even know my niece and nephews if my sister didn’t fly with toddlers with some frequency. Well before my sister and my friends even started having kids, I had a dad approach me in the galley and make a point of thanking me for being, as he put it, “family friendly.” I just told him You’re Welcome, as if I had forced a bunch of passengers through hoops to get him and his kids seated together because I gave a shit, and not because the dad was meathead-football-player hot and I was pretty sure I could take the wife. I tell this story not to belabor the point that I spend much of my work day wandering the aisles winking at the cute guys, but rather to establish my credentials as someone who is, at the end of the day, pro-baby.

But really, why do so many knuckleheads travel with small children? OK, some are actual crazy people, such as the woman who shrieked “WHERE’S MY BABY?!?” every time her baby was removed from her direct sight line (when her husband set the car seat down, when he turned his back on her to change the baby, when she her damn self looked away, etc.). And some people mean well but clearly aren’t participating members of the parenting team, such as the middle-aged dad who boarded the airplane a while back by himself with a suitcase, a car seat, and a baby who might have been six months old. He clearly had his hands full, so I stepped up and offered to help. “Can I help you get the car seat situated?” I asked. “Oh, no thanks.” he told me. “I’ve got it covered.” And then he stood there. And stood there. And stood there. Doing nothing but holding the baby. He was in First class on a 757, so he wasn’t clogging up the boarding process, as coach typically boards behind the First class cabin, but I did begin to wonder how he expected the car seat to magically install itself. And then the answer, blonde and about fifteen years younger, presented itself; what he meant by “I’ve got it covered,” apparently, was that he had a wife, and that she would have it covered when she arrived. He saw my jaw drop, and had the sense to act sheepish. He said to his wife, “Maybe I should watch you do that,” and I walked right up to her and said “See that he does, cuz he told me he ‘had it covered.’” Without even pausing in her work, she looked up at me and rolled her eyes.

Like everything else on the airplane, it’s usually about a sense of entitlement. You see these young moms get on the airplane in places like Oakland and Eugene, Oregon, nineteen years old in a pink Baby Phat sweat suit or the black concert t-shirt of a country star or heavy metal band. Pregnant and juggling a toddler and a baby, she’s got one collapsible umbrella stroller and one diaper bag, so loaded with Cheerios and coloring books and bottles and diapers that she looks like H.I. McDunnough robbed a convenience store for her on the way to the airport. She’s always squeezed into the last row with the baby on her lap, and you don’t hear a peep out of any of the three of them until she says Goodbye and Thank You at the end of the trip. Compared to the forty-something millionaire parents who get on the airplane in San Francisco and Orange County. Parents who don’t know how to collapse the $1300 stroller with cup holders and overhead bins and a GPS on it because the Nanny usually does it, and who sit in the first row of First class as if they are waiting for the other passengers to come up and congratulate them for putting a sperm and an egg together and coming up with a kid. One who spends much of the flight squawking away on the floor or jumping up and down on the seat, it has to be said, while mom and dad stare at it and rue leaving the nanny at home, ringing the call light every two minutes, meanwhile, as if they hadn’t.

A mom came to the back of an Airbus a while back, we were going from Chicago to San Francisco, which can take about four hours. She opens with, “Now before you say anything, I want you to know, I brought four diapers for this flight, and he had a fresh one on when we got on the plane.” So of course the little slugger is beset this particular afternoon with the worst case of explosive diarrhea of his young career, and she’s out of diapers with two hours to go. I took the time to look in the stew kit, cuz we sometimes end up with an international kit even on a domestic flight, and those do sometimes have diapers in them, but I found nothing. Mostly joking, I held up a small stack of the narrow white paper strips we use to line the top of the beverage cart and told her, “We call these diapers.” She thought on it for a second, and when I could see she was considering it, I added, “and we have plastic bags…” And so he toddled off the airplane when we arrived in San Francisco, his little butt wrapped in paper, his little legs sticking through the holes torn in the trash bag, the yellow drawstring pulled tight. Mom had tried to plan, and so I tried to help her.

Unlike this jackass: I was working aft (economy) purser on a 747 from London to San Francisco, which mostly entails a huge amount of galley set-up, without which your service is doomed to fail (not to mention take four hours, which cramps everybody’s crew rest style). So we’re still at the gate, we’re boarding, and I’m frantically cracking ice and setting up coffee makers and scrounging tonic waters (the G&Ts were free to London in those days and we served more of those than we did glasses of water) and this dad keeps coming back to my galley asking for stuff. First he wants food for the baby, which they had ordered and I did have, so I gave it to him. Then he comes back wanting something in the way of baby entertainment. So part of me is like Really? For a twelve-hour flight you couldn’t stick a ring of plastic keys in your bag? And another part of me is kind of like Dude, there are like five other flight attendants back here, could you ask one who isn’t looking frazzled and wielding a plastic hammer? So I give him a stack of plastic cups, like here, babies can’t get enough of these. So now I’ve established myself as Mister Resourceful, right? So he comes to the back again⎯we’re still at the gate, mind you, about to set out on a twelve-hour transatlantic flight⎯and asks me for a diaper. I’m like, Really? So he finally gets his wish, I stop what I’m doing and, still holding the ice mallet, I turn to face him and I ask him, “Did you have this baby with you when you left the house this morning?” He’s like, Excuse me?, so I elaborate. “Because if you picked this baby up on the side of the road, I will help you figure something out. But if you really came to the airport for a twelve-hour flight without even a diaper, you’re on your own.”

I never heard from him again, maybe it was the hammer, but come on. You might wish you were taking a vacation from being a parent, but when the kid’s with you, you’re not; you can’t! If you plan ahead and board the airplane prepared at a minimum for normal circumstances (nobody is going to hold you responsible for a six-hour weather delay or a mechanical diversion), you’ll at least get some sympathy from your flight attendants, and probably a helping hand with the diaper bag, but you should be warned that we don’t have much else to offer you. You can order baby food in advance of most international flights, but not on a domestic flight. We don’t have diapers, we don’t have crayons⎯we used to have all that stuff, but not anymore. And it’s not because flight attendants are lazy or out to get you, and it’s not because we don’t care. But executive bonuses are expensive and the CEO’s driver won’t work for free: that money has to come from somewhere, and if you don’t bring it, you ain’t getting it until we get where we’re going, and that means food and entertainment for yourself as much as for your kids. I hang out with moms⎯I know you don’t go to the Children’s Museum or even to the dang Target with your kids without preparing for every possible contingency. Do the same when you fly⎯I’ll get you an apple juice if we don’t run out before we get to your row⎯and the only person we’ll need to worry about crying on the flight will be the Big Shot in First who doesn’t get his meal choice.

The Bare Essentials of Safety

2009-07-01T18:40:00.000-06:00

I wish I worked for an airline that had some personality. Well, I guess swindling passengers out of money shows certain personality traits, but we could never get away with a Safety Demo like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-Mq9HAE62Y
(One that people might actually watch, I might add.) Not even just cuz of Ooooh, they're naked (which would never fly here), but we couldn't even have giggling people or jokes in ours.

The blonde guy's kind of cute (What's up, Thicky?), and I can count on about one finger the number of our pilots that look like that First Officer (which wouldn't even include, alas, the only pilot I ever fooled around with), but I've been to New Zealand, and all the really hot Kiwis (no offense, Chris) were Maori. I'm pretty surprised that NZ couldn't find any flight attendants or pilots of color willing to strip their way to Safety Demo fame. Perhaps in future vids for their international fleet...