Authors: Heather Poole
Domestic flights rarely start out as nicely as the international ones do. With passengers arguing over where to stow belongings, the first impression of the flight crew is usually negative, and before long, nobody on board is smiling, including the flight attendants. Airline employees will do anything to keep from being cited with a late departure and subsequently fined. Someone has to take the blame and if that person is written up too many times he or she won’t have a job for long. We end up barking orders over the PA about stepping into the rows while stowing bags so others can get by and we can depart on time. The rule is that an agent can’t shut the aircraft door until all bins are closed and all passengers seated, so when the overhead bins seem full, instead of smiling and making small talk, my colleagues and I have to frantically move bags around to magically create more space for the last few passengers. Otherwise the agent is going to try to put the blame on the crew.
“Hey, that’s my bag!” I often hear.
“I’m just going to move your bag right . . . over . . . here,” I’ll say, struggling to get it into a nearby bin without dropping it on another passenger’s head.
“If I wanted my bag in that bin, I would have put it there!” Here’s my question: Would you rather have your bag in a particular overhead bin or get to your destination or connecting flight on time?
“Are you going to bring my bag to me when we land?!” one man spit when I pointed to an empty bin three rows behind his seat after he flagged me down to inform me there was no place to stow his bag. Based on the frequent-flier bag tag attached to the handle of his suitcase, I knew that he knew the answer, but some people just need a punching bag. Unfortunately, that often ends up being me!
“I want your name,” growled a tweenager after I refused to remove another passenger’s bag in order to make room for hers. What I want is to know what happened to respect! If not for me, how ’bout for the passenger who got on board first?
“When are you guys going to make these bins bigger?” shouted a passenger, struggling to basically push a square into a circle.
“We expanded the bins last year,” I informed him, while moving things around so that his suitcase would fit. “So passengers started bringing on bigger bags.”
And that’s the truth! They went from eighteen to twenty-one inches in length.
Based on my limited international experience, I’m pretty sure international flight attendants spend a lot less time saying, “I’m sorry.” After all, beyond the luggage situation, they get the tools they need to make passengers happy—and then some. I’m talking blankets, pillows, headsets, movies, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks—sometimes all on the same flight! Did I happen to mention there’s alcohol? Free alcohol. Doubles! In coach! Well, at least to Europe there is. And it’s the good stuff, real champagne, not sparkling wine. On top of that, first-class and business-class passengers receive newspapers, amenity kits, and, on some airlines, silk pajamas and slippers. Is it any wonder that international passengers seem happier?
Happy people tend to have good flights. That’s a fact. So my theory is that domestic travel isn’t as bad as some people would love to make it out to be—it’s just that they’re starting off on the wrong foot. But for whatever reason, I’ve notice a real uptick in unhappy—and outspoken—passengers in the last few years. And that’s why I am sorry, sorry I have to say sorry all the time for things that don’t even make sense. Like having too many middle seats. I’ve even apologized because we needed to get rid of the last row.
“But then the second to last row would become the last row and then we’d have to get rid of that, too,” I chuckled, trying to make light of the situation. The passenger did not find me the least bit amusing.
In a magazine I read years ago, a bigwig working for an international Asian carrier was quoted stating, “Passengers wouldn’t dare yell at a flight attendant wearing a dress.” It felt like a snide remark directed toward flight attendants in the United States who prefer to wear pants. Instead, it just demonstrated that he hadn’t spent much time with U.S. passengers, who are nondiscriminating. They are happy to yell both at flight attendants wearing dresses and passengers wearing dresses.
Of course, yelling tends to work best when you speak the same language, which is another advantage that international flights have. On domestic routes, we hear any and all complaints loud and clear. On international flights, there’s often a language barrier, which means there are fewer problems on board. Sure, international routes are staffed with flight attendants who speak the destination language, but at my airline, it’s only one per cabin. If you can’t tell the flight attendant who doesn’t speak your language that you’d like to speak to the one who does, the flight will continue on as peacefully as it had been.
At most airlines “speakers” wear the country’s flag of the language they speak on their name tags. If there were a flag for Jive, I’d channel my inner Barbara Billingsley from the movie
Airplane
and wear that. If I could, I’d also attempt Yoda-Speak, just as a way to get the attention of passengers when I’m trying to prepare the cabin for takeoff or landing. Unfortunately (or maybe it’s fortunately) for the passengers stuck on my side of the cabin, my gold-plated name tag is a flagless one. Once, a passenger tried to rip me a new one because I didn’t speak Spanish (I think). I knew just enough “airplane Spanish” to say, “No com-pren-DAY!” as I handed him a glass of
naranja
, no ice (what’s the word for ice?) and smiled real big. It’s easier to keep smiling when you have no idea what they’re yelling.
Even when international passengers do speak English, accents can occasionally lead to an awkward moment or two. One passenger asked my friend Vicki for a “cock,” pointing at his throat. He got exactly what he wanted, a Coke, served with a smile. “Your cock, sir.” But I must have said, “Excuse me?” five times to a passenger who wanted “penis cake” before I realized she was trying to say peanut cake. After I apologized, I informed her we didn’t serve either—just to cover all my bases. There’s an urban legend of sorts about a passenger from India who rang the call light and then, pointing to the button above his head featuring a stick figure, complained about fingering the flight attendant numerous times because his wife was a vegetable and he was a vegetable, too. Turns out he had ordered a vegetarian meal.
And miscommunication isn’t limited to passengers! One time a coworker accidentally skipped a row while we were serving drinks. The passengers started chanting and making weird hand gestures at him—er, us! Because I was on the other side of the cart. A voodoo curse, I presumed. I’d heard stories from other flight attendants who worked the Haiti route about this kind of thing happening. To say I was scared is an understatement. The Haitian speaker working my flight that day wasn’t surprised to hear what had happened, because in Haiti, she said, there were a lot of witch people. She started telling me about witch people who wore witch clothes and lived in witch neighborhoods and sent their kids to witch schools.
It wasn’t until the passengers were deplaning that the Haitian speaker leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Here come some witch people.” That’s when I noticed a well-dressed couple making their way up the aisle. They did not look like witches, unless of course they were good witches. And then it dawned on me: on top of an accent, my colleague had a lisp that made her
r
’s sound like
w
’s. Our thirty-minute conversation about “witch people” had really been about
rich
people! Even so, I was nervous—I had no idea what kind of a curse might have been put on me. All that chanting still gives me nightmares.
What might give you nightmares is a story about the time I sat in the cockpit on a flight from New York to Caracas sometime around 1999. Over the radio, I heard an air traffic controller say something in a thick accent that for the life of me I could not make out. The captain picked up what looked like a CB radio handset, answered back in English, and then adjusted a few knobs before turning his attention back to me and the conversation we were having before the interruption.
“How do you understand what they’re saying?” I asked.
“I don’t.” He smiled genuinely and added, “I’ve been flying this route long enough to know what to do.” Something in the tone of his deep voice and the look in his droopy hound-dog eyes made me believe him. To this day I still have no idea if he was kidding around or not.
The other area of life where communication issues can cause, well, issues is when meeting attractive foreign men. Some may disagree, but I believe it’s important to understand what your partner is saying. Life is hard enough without assuming he’s talking to his Dutch female friends about you while you’re sitting right there at a beachside table with them. When this happens it’s probably not a good idea to drink too much wine and then try to imitate their accents or, worse, pretend you know what they’re saying after they refuse to let you in on the conversation and then tell them off! I beg you, please, learn from my mistakes. Sign up for a foreign-language class ASAP or stick to dating English-speaking men.
The other tricky part about dating internationally is the time difference! Imagine landing in an amazing city you don’t get to visit often if at all, because you’re too junior to hold the trip, and not taking full advantage of it—and your date—has to offer. To be honest, it doesn’t matter where the man lives—California can be just as tough as Europe! One man from Los Angeles was adamant about picking me up the moment I called to tell him I’d arrived. It was nine in the morning when we landed in California and I’d been awake since three o’clock his time. When I suggested meeting later on so I could take a nap before meeting him on his boat, he assumed I wasn’t all that into him and left without me. He never called back. But when I gave in to another man from San Francisco, my lack of enthusiasm for everything but a bed (without him in it) on a Napa Valley wine tour was a turnoff, and our first date quickly became our last. Overseas it’s ten times worse.
The real advantage that domestic flight attendants have, in my opinion, is sleep. Can you imagine working an eleven-hour flight to Brazil, laying over for eleven hours, and then working the trip back, not once seeing the light of day for thirty-three hours? That’s what it’s like for a lot of flight attendants these days. Personally, I think it should be illegal to have layovers shorter than our duty days. As far as I know, this does not happen with overseas carriers. It’s one reason why foreign-based flight attendants look so much better than us! They get more sleep. Still, I know U.S.-based flight attendants who actually enjoy working these horrendous trips because of all the days off. I have no idea how they cross several time zones in a single day, several times a week, without feeling like they were hit by a Mack truck. But there are a lot of flight attendants who can do it, and not all of them turn to the wine-Ambien-caffeine cycle in order to accomplish it.
Not everyone loves to fly international trips. Some flight attendants don’t do jet lag well. I’m talking about me, of course. Even if I’d get more days off each month, what’s the point if I end up spending those extra days off recuperating from the last trip? It doesn’t matter how much water or coffee I drink, the kinds of food I eat, the amount of melatonin I take, or how long I nap, I’m dragging after a long-haul, red-eye flight. When you work flights like that, a lot of time is spent on the ground adjusting sleep patterns. Some flight attendants will wake up early the day their trip departs so they can take a nap before they have to stay awake all night. For me it’s easier to become a vampire by staying up all night so I can sleep all day, but what kind of life is that?
Those of us on reserve can’t prepare for an international trip the way line holders do, because we have no idea what time our next trip will depart. I’ve been brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed when crew schedule called me out for an 11:45 p.m. departure to London. That’s a tough one to stay awake for, especially working in a dark cabin for eight hours straight! “Resting” one eye at a time during flight helps, as long as the other eye doesn’t accidentally decide to join in. Before I became a flight attendant, I never drank coffee. Now, depending on my trip, I drink it by the gallon. One of my biggest pet peeves is when passengers get angry with flight attendants talking too loudly in the galley during a night flight. First of all, the galley is my work space. There’s nowhere else for me to go! Second, how else am I supposed to stay awake? Sipping weak coffee and whispering in the dark sure ain’t gonna do it.
On flights longer than eight hours, flight attendants get what is called a “crew rest,” a nap that is scheduled based on crew seniority. Junior flight attendants almost always get stuck with the first shift. I don’t know about you, but right after takeoff is when I’m the least tired. It doesn’t help matters that most of our airplanes don’t have crew bunks like the foreign carriers do. A lot of times we sleep in passenger seats that have been blocked off for crew in the last row of coach. I’ve never felt comfortable sleeping in front of passengers while wearing my uniform, even when I’m allowed to do so. I imagine they’re staring at me and thinking, look at that lazy flight attendant with her mouth wide open! While it might look like I’m sleeping on the job sitting upright and leaning into the window in a passenger seat, I’m probably just lying there with my eyes closed counting the number of times the toilet flushes. This explains the dark circles around my eyes and the delayed reactions to passenger requests when my nap is over.
YOU
:
Can I get something to drink, please?
ME:
(
blink, blink, swallow
) Sure.
YOU:
(
whispering to seatmate
) What a bitch!
I’m not a bitch, I swear! I’m just tired.
It also can be expensive to fly international routes! True, the flight attendants may make more money per hour, but it’s impossible not to spend that extra cash on layovers that are longer, with more expensive things to do. This isn’t so much a concern for senior flight attendants making the big bucks. In Lima, Peru, my crew invited me to go to lunch with them, but not without first making it clear that they liked to enjoy their layovers and did so by first ordering a $60 ceviche appetizer. If I wasn’t up for it (i.e., couldn’t afford it), they didn’t want me to go. Well, I went anyway. And I’m glad I did, because the ceviche turned out to be the best I’ve ever had. But I couldn’t afford to order anything else and wound up hitting a bodega for cheap rotisserie chicken on my way back to the hotel. In Paris, the crews like to drink French wine. Expensive French wine. Before meeting my crew in the lobby, I went to find an ATM machine so I could take out some money. I figured $50 would do. I almost had a nervous breakdown when I accidentally extracted my entire life savings! Here’s a tip: know the local currency rate before you enter your PIN and press enter. A thousand dollars might not sound like much to some, but that’s all I had, and now I was walking around with it in my purse! At night! In a foreign city! A few glasses of red wine later, I calmed down, but not before the wine had convinced me to put a pretty good dent in it. Now I had to pick up another trip just so I could afford to pay the rent. A domestic layover with nothing to do didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all.