Cruising Attitude

for the next flight to board.

This is not an unusual scenario. Flight attendants are reluctant to call in sick for many reasons, the most important being that no one wants to get stuck on a layover far away from home, especially when there are kids involved. Many of us will push it until we get where we need to be before putting our name on the sick list. But once on the list, an employee is not allowed to travel, not even as a passenger on another airline. An employee who does, and gets caught, is no longer employed. Trip trades, drops, and pickups also go on hold when a flight attendant is on the sick list. In trip-trade world, if ya snooze, ya lose. If you’re not able to manipulate your schedule within the first five days after bids have finalized, you can forget about getting time off for all those baby showers, graduations, weddings, vacations, holidays, or whatever important days you need off the following month.

At my airline if we call in sick three times we’re issued a written warning. The only way around the warning, and a trip to the airport on a day off to speak with a manager about why we were sick and what we could have done to avoid it, is to see a doctor, even for a cold that can be managed with over-the-counter medication. With a doctor’s note, a sick call will go from two points to one point. If we apply for a family leave, that point will disappear altogether. If we do not have enough working hours in a rolling twelve-month period to apply for a family leave (420 hours), the point stays. Three points and it’s back to the written warning. Three warnings and it’s buh-bye, airline. But, as a flight attendant, seeing a doctor isn’t simple at all. For one, it’s expensive when you make as little as many of us do. And we have to have the doctor fill out a packet of family leave paperwork so thick you’d think we were asking for a discharge from the military! One doctor, a family practitioner, actually dropped me as a patient when he tired of filling out these tedious forms. Another doctor, an ob-gyn, refused to fill out the forms when I, many years later, became pregnant. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just do another job for the airline, like one on the ground.

“Because I’m a flight attendant,” I told her. “We don’t have other jobs. I can’t just work as a ticket agent while I’m sick. They go through weeks of training too!” No matter how hard I tried to explain, the paperwork remained unsigned and I had to find another doctor.

It’s important that flight attendants find doctors who understand what the job really entails. For instance, we don’t just roll our bags gate to gate—we lift eighty pounds plus into the overhead bin each and every flight. We don’t just serve drinks—we push and pull two-hundred-pound carts on an incline. We can’t just handle the sniffles with a box of tissues—we have to worry about our eardrums exploding. Once I pleaded with a podiatrist not to release me back to work too soon after breaking my pinky toe. “You’ll be fine,” he assured me. I wasn’t fine. Not fine working a ten-hour day at 35,000 feet inside a pressurized cabin. Not fine running gate-to-gate as quickly as possible in order to avoid a delay in some of the biggest and busiest airports in the world. When I went back in to his office to have him fill out a few more forms on top of the ones he’d already signed, because the airline had more questions about the nature of my injury, I told him my toe didn’t just hurt, it throbbed. He suggested I take six Advil and relieve the pressure by cutting a hole in the side of my shoe. I just stared at him.

As per the flight attendant uniform guidebook, footwear may not have holes cut in the sides. Shoes must be conservative in style, plain black or navy blue, and have a covered toe, enclosed heel and enclosed sides. And there’s more. Heels must be a minimum of one inch in height, width of heel should not exceed width of sole, heel and sole should be identical in color. Shoes must be polished and in good repair, and buckles, colored trims, lace- ups, loose straps, ties, bows, or other adornments are not permitted. Heels or flats (loafer style with one-inch heel) may be worn with pants, but heels must always be worn with a dress or skirt while in public view. Obviously the podiatrist had no idea what it was like, really like, to work for an airline. Imagine a first- class flight attendant’s panty-hosed toes hanging out of a shoe with a hole cut in the side! There was no point in telling the doctor any of this, since the initial paperwork had already been signed, faxed, and approved by airline medical. I was already back on the line, practically OD’ing on Advil, while hobbling up and down the aisle.

If we choose not to see a doctor for something as minor as a cold, a manager will lecture us about what we’re eating and whether or not we’re taking our vitamins and working out. As if that’s going to help when a passenger comes running up to first class from coach and, like a rotating sprinkler, barfs in a semicircle from the jump seat, all over a couple of commuting flight attendants, across the cockpit door and galley ovens and all over the galley floor. Think that’s bad? Try watching a colleague bend over to clean it up with a shovel and a gel-like substance that turns vomit into a big foamy goop, his crew ID and cell phone falling out of his shirt pocket smack- dab into the mess. Seriously, what can one really do to avoid getting sick when a very large man traveling from an international destination walks out of the lav, looks at you funny, pats you on the head, and then yaks all over your tote bag on day one of a three-day trip and all you have to clean it up with is a wad of stiff paper towels and harsh generic soap from the bathroom?

No longer able to pretend she felt fine, tears streamed down Georgia’s face as the plane descended into Detroit. It was the second leg of the day. There were two more to go. As the airplane taxied to the gate, Georgia noticed a little girl in the last row of coach peeking between the seats at her, giving her parents the play-by-play of what the sad flight attendant was doing.

“I didn’t even try to hide it. I thought my head was going to explode. That’s how bad it was!” Georgia would later cry to me over the phone.

After everyone deplaned, the flight attendant working with Georgia in coach told the first-class flight attendant what was going on. She in turn relayed the information to the captain. Without a word he went into action, sidestepping around cabin cleaners busy discarding trash from the seat back pockets, fluffing pillows, straightening seat belts, and lowering armrests. Georgia stood in the back folding a pile of wadded-up blue blankets she would stack neatly inside a bin for the next flight when the pilot called out from midcabin, “You’re calling in sick!”

Wide-eyed, Georgia sat down on the armrest and nodded. Afraid to abandon her sequence, which would leave the crew in need of another flight attendant in a city that didn’t have a crew base to pool from, she was just as nervous about disobeying the captain’s orders. It’s his plane. Everyone must do as he’s told. Either that or walk off and suffer the consequences later.

One look into Georgia’s big blue watery eyes and the captain added, “If the company gives you any grief, tell them I made you do it. Better yet, tell them to call me!” He handed her his business card. On thin white card stock a phone number was printed underneath his name. A cartoon drawing of an airplane decorated the bottom right- hand corner.

“Thank you, Captain,” Georgia mumbled, tucking the card inside her pocket. Reluctantly she collected her things and walked off the plane, never to see or hear from the pilot again, even though he was cute and she would have been interested if she hadn’t already sworn off all men. Georgia wasn’t just down on men, she was down on love, down on life, and stuck on the ground in Detroit. Little did she know life was about to get even more stressful.

Never in her wildest dreams did Georgia think she’d ever spend a week in a hotel room with only a single pair of underwear and a hotel bathrobe and not be on her honeymoon. But an hour later that’s exactly where she was, washing out undies in the bathroom sink and at the mercy of overpriced room service. The hotel did offer free shuttle bus rides to and from the airport, but that’s it, so unless she wanted to fork over even more cash she didn’t have in order to take a cab somewhere in her uniform, she was stuck. Oh, to be young, broke, and pantyless for seven days. She spent her time catching up on favorite soaps and racking up a phone bill so high it would make her teary-eyed come checkout time. Initially, Georgia and I spent our daily calls laughing about her predicament. How naive we were.

“I don’t know about this job,” said Georgia over a pay phone late one night at a bus stop in a strange town neither one of us had ever heard of. Georgia was bound for Chicago in six-inch heels. When her ears still hadn’t cleared up after a few days, she’d been instructed, as per company orders, to get to the nearest airline medical center located at a major airport to have her ears checked ASAP. “Things are gonna get better, right?”

“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