Authors: Heather Poole
“Right!” I said, and I meant it, too. “You’re on a bus wearing a uniform that hasn’t been cleaned for days and your one pair of undies are still damp after being washed out and hung to dry in the shower overnight.” When I heard her giggle, I knew she’d be okay—at least for a little while. Hopefully, until she made it to the next town and could call me back. “Think of it as an adventure. You know this is going to make a great story to tell your grandkids.”
Whenever passengers joke around and order the filet mignon medium in coach, I always laugh. Every. Single. Time. Who am I to spoil their fun? This turned out to be an extremely useful life skill, one that Georgia was able to put to good use on her bus adventure. She didn’t want to upset anyone, particularly the guy wearing the baseball cap and Oakley shades who sat in the rear chewing tobacco and leering at her for hours on end. To make matters worse, each time a new group of passengers walked on board, the moment they saw Georgia’s silver wings they’d laugh hysterically and say something pithy like, “If you ain’t flying, we sure as hell ain’t, either!” Followed by high-fives all around.
“I don’t get it, whenever anyone gets on the bus they plop down right beside me, regardless of how many seats are open,” Georgia complained from the next stop.
“It’s the uniform,” I explained. “Subconsciously they know they can trust you and maybe even count on you in case there’s an emergency.”
This was true. A friend of mine who lived in Manhattan took the subway before connecting to a bus to get to work. During a blackout one summer, the train broke down for two hours and was trapped underground, in total darkness.
“My emergency training just came flooding back,” he confessed to me late one night over a few too many apple martinis. “I grabbed my FAA-required flashlight and began barking orders, mainly instructing everyone to remain calm. At one point I even dumped my lunch into my tote so that the pregnant lady who was hyperventilating could breathe into the brown paper bag. I didn’t want to be the one in charge, but I had no choice. Everyone was looking at me! I blame the damn uniform for that.”
“And they have questions, so many questions!” Georgia exclaimed thirty miles away from her final destination. “What’s your route? Do you stay in five-star hotels? Do you share rooms? Does the airline pay for your food? Do you know so-and-so? Like we know every single flight attendant at every single airline!”
I’d experienced the same thing. Even after just a few months on the job, the main question I’d learned to dread was, “What do you do for a living?” The moment I smile and say I’m a flight attendant, I find myself holding my breath. Without fail, there’s a two-second pause, which is always followed by one of two responses. The good response is full of excitement and ends with an exclamation mark: “I’ve always wanted to be a flight attendant!” or “My sister is a flight attendant!” The good response leads to a very nice conversation about travel, which then leads to other interesting topics related to travel, and maybe even plans to meet up for lunch next time I’m in town. That’s what happens about 10 percent of the time. The rest of the time, it begins with the same four words: “On my last flight . . .” Then I’ll hear a very bad story about a flight from hell. Needless to say, the conversation never goes so well after the bad response. How can it? I’ve just been linked to the worst flight this person has ever had. Flight attendants aren’t alone. A Super 80 copilot once confessed he never wore his uniform outside the house so the neighbors wouldn’t know what he did for a living. He didn’t want to invite unwanted conversation. As soon as he got to the airport he’d change into his uniform. And this was a pilot! No one ever blames the pilot for a bad flight.
“I wonder if anyone blames the bus driver for a bad ride?” I asked Georgia. “They’re like pilots, kind of, in that they’re in charge of getting people to their destination on time. But they’re also like flight attendants because they get trapped with so many people in a confined space for long periods of time.”
Georgia had no clue what it was like to be a bus driver, and she had no desire to find out. The only thing Georgia wanted to do was get off the bus and go home. At her last and final stop, Georgia grabbed her belongings and exited the bus, vowing to never ride another one ever again. “Not even to Newark!” she added, just in case she hadn’t made herself clear. I didn’t believe that. At the time Olympia Trails charged $14 to get from Manhattan to Newark Airport, a steal of a deal compared to what a yellow cab charged: over $30. From our crash pad it was $60 minus tip and tolls.
While Georgia continued to wait for her ears to clear at yet another airport hotel located near an airline medical facility in Chicago, I dealt with passengers, angry passengers, in the air. It didn’t take long to learn that some people just can’t be pleased, no matter how hard you try. The strange thing was, for every group of passengers who deplaned raving about the flight, there’d be another swearing to never fly my airline again. On a flight from New York to Los Angeles, one of those very passengers glared at me when I placed a meal tray on her table.
“How dare you. This is garbage, nothing but garbage!” the woman said, practically spitting. (Actually it was grilled chicken with green beans and a potato.)
I didn’t know what to say, other than “I’m sorry.” But that can sometimes make things worse if a passenger doesn’t believe I’m sorry enough, which in turn could cause them to write a letter explaining exactly why they felt that way. Still on probation, I didn’t want that. So I stood in the aisle wide-eyed behind the meal cart, looking across the aisle at my coworker, praying she’d step in and take control of the situation. My colleague just shook her head and kept on serving meals. I followed her lead.
Later on in the flight, as we passed through the aisles collecting service items and refilling drinks, I couldn’t help but notice as I picked up the unhappy passenger’s tray that, in the end, she must have enjoyed her garbage. It was all gone. How else do you explain the empty tray?
Garbage Lady was just the beginning of my experience with bad passengers. Enter the jackass. On a flight to Atlanta he sat in first class with his massive legs spread wide, gigantic feet in the aisle, muscular arms folded behind his head, while I, entrée in hand, struggled to get his tray table out of the armrest. He didn’t budge. Not even when I bumped into his knee, causing a side of tomato sauce to fall into his lap. Immediately I began apologizing.
“Clean it!” he barked.
I ran to the galley and grabbed a handful of napkins, towels, and a can of club soda. Back at his seat I apologized again as I held it all out for him to take. He didn’t move.
“Sir,” I started, because I wasn’t about to start rubbing his crotch.
His eyes were the only thing that moved. “Didn’t I tell you to clean it?!”
Other passengers turned around.
“I . . . I . . .” I turned and ran to the galley in tears. We had not been trained for this particular situation. My coworker took one look at me and demanded to know what the hell was going on. After I told him what had happened, he grabbed my silver tray and swished down the aisle, lips pursed.
“Excuse me, sir. I’d be more than happy to help you with that.” The jackass stood up, snatched the towel and club soda, and headed straight for the lavatory.
Helping passengers is a huge part of our job. But some passengers take advantage of our kindness. It took a long time to learn that going above and beyond can actually make these types of passengers even worse. On a flight to Los Angeles one elderly woman had me running in circles all through the flight. I didn’t complain. She reminded me of my grandma, only she was my grandma’s difficult twin with an addiction to plastic surgery. When she told me to carry her bag to her seat—an order, not a question—I complied. No biggie. I placed it inside the overhead bin. She asked me to fold her sweater just so, complaining about the first two ways I folded the oh-so-delicate garment, and then I placed that right next to the bag—sorry, on top of the bag. As instructed, I placed her pocketbook under the seat, but not too far underneath. I even opened the window shade, closed the window shade, and opened it again as per her request during boarding. Whatever she needed I took care of, and I did so quickly, “no dillydallying.” And near the end of the flight, when she asked for a piece of paper so she could write a letter, I obliged by ripping off the catering papers taped to the carts and gave them to her. When she asked to borrow a pen, I handed her my last one from the Marriott. And I thought nothing of it when she handed me a folded piece of paper and instructed me to give it to the one in charge.
Silently the lead flight attendant read the letter, looked at me, and folded it in half.
“So what does it say?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure it had to be a raving review of the wonderful service I’d provided her. Honestly, I couldn’t do any better than that.
“She’s not happy. The help isn’t wearing a hairnet.”
What? I was in shock. After all I’d done for her! And anyway, my hair was in a regulation ponytail; tied below the ear, hanging no longer than six inches from the neck.
A few of the crew members who were standing around the galley started to laugh, which led me to believe this had to be a joke, like some kind of trick-the-new-hire-on-probation initiation. It had happened before. On my last flight the captain asked me to walk through the cabin and collect air samples with a plastic bag. I probably would have done it if one of my roommates hadn’t fallen for the same gag a few weeks ago and then come home to tell us all about it. Another roommate had been asked to jump up and down as hard as she could to get the breaks to lock into place. “On the count of three,” the captain called from the cockpit. And soon all the new hires were up in the air.
Pilots go through the same type of thing. One victim fell for the advances of a sexy first-class flight attendant. While checking into a hotel, she slipped him her room key and told him to stop by at a certain time. When he opened the door to her room, he could hear the shower running. Come in and join me, she instructed from behind the bathroom door. Unable to believe his good luck, he quickly got undressed and did as he was told. Bare naked, he walked into the bathroom. That’s when the entire crew whipped back the curtain and yelled “Surprise!”
But something about this joke didn’t feel so funny, because the purser didn’t toss the note into the trash. Instead, he stashed it in the outermost pocket of his bag.
“You’re not going to turn that in, are you?” I asked. No way. Flight attendants don’t rat each other out.
The purser shrugged. “I haven’t decided.”
“Dude, she’s on probation,” a coworker exclaimed.
“I’m on probation!” I agreed quickly.
That didn’t matter to the one in charge. Thankfully, I never heard anything from the company about the hairnet letter, but not too long after I did find myself sitting across from my supervisors at a big wooden desk to address a different letter, this one from another passenger I couldn’t actually remember.
Passenger letters, good and bad, take months before they’re passed along to those involved in whatever incident made the flight wonderful or horrible enough for someone to take time out of their busy day to write about it. This is why when we find a copy of one in our mailbox at work it’s always such a surprise. Many times I’ve received good letters only to wonder if I’d really done what the passenger raved about. I’ve even suspected that perhaps passengers have gotten me confused with someone else. That’s how old these letters are. There have even been emergency situations that passengers have written about, congratulating the crew on a job well done, and I’ve just stood in Ops holding the letter and trying to remember anything about it. Maybe it just goes to show how much drama we deal with on a daily basis.
As my supervisor read the letter out loud, I kept my mouth shut, as all good flight attendants learn to do when it comes to management. Better a slap on the wrist than having someone on the other side out to get you for a bad attitude. Mine came from a passenger who was upset that I didn’t do anything to help a crying baby, and not just any passenger’s crying baby, but the crying baby belonging to the passenger who had written the letter. Perhaps I could have been a little more helpful if they’d asked me for assistance at the time, rather than writing a letter after the fact. Flight attendants can’t read minds! This after one passenger had barked at me for touching her infant son’s tiny bare foot without asking and washing my hands first. Another passenger became annoyed when I handed his crying child plastic cups for stacking and a puppet barf bag. Hearing my supervisor rehashing the details of a flight I couldn’t remember about a baby I didn’t take care of, reminded me of a totally different passenger situation: this passenger had come to the back galley with a baby cradled in her arms and asked in a thick accent where she could put it.
In the overhead bin, I’d wanted to say, but I was too new to joke around like that, so I politely asked, “What do you mean?”
“How you say . . . child care?” she said.
You don’t. But I didn’t say that. Instead I explained to her that she’d have to hold the baby throughout the eight-hour flight from New York to London. She looked shocked. But not as much as I did when she told me she didn’t have any diapers or baby food with her. I wondered if my manager could blame it on me as well.
“Do you have anything to add?” my supervisor asked after he finished reading the letter, dropping the red folder marked Poole back into the metal filing cabinet behind his desk. I sure did! But instead I just smiled and kept my mouth shut. Sometimes it’s best to have zero opinion about something, kind of like a Stepford wife at 35,000 feet.
Not every flight attendant keeps her mouth shut. Some of us actually do break. These flight attendants become folklore heroes to crew, nightmares to passengers, and their stories live longer than most of their careers. One of these flight attendants went by the name of Susan. In her midforties, quick-witted, kindhearted, and extremely attractive, she made pilots drop their kit bags in the terminal just to take a look. After six months of faking a smile while putting up with too many unruly passengers on probation, Susan finally hit a wall and dropped the good-girl act when a passenger walked on board complaining about something, dropping a few F-bombs along the way.