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.
“Sir, I understand you’re upset, but you can’t talk like that on the airplane.”
“Fuck you,” he said under his breath.
Enough was enough. She crouched down on one knee in the aisle beside his seat, and whispered very quietly, “Fuck you.”
He flew out of his seat. “What the hell did you just say!”
“I told you—you can’t talk like that, sir!” Susan ran to the cockpit. “Captain, we have a belligerent passenger on board, and I refuse to work this flight as long as he’s here.”
The captain placed a large map in his lap, turned around in his seat, and squinted behind thick glasses at a man now stomping up the aisle ranting and raving about the bitchy flight attendant. “Call the agent. Have him taken off.”
A large and nervous-looking gate agent came on board to escort the angry passenger off the aircraft and onto another one leaving an hour later. That’s how things like this usually go. Susan stood in the entry doorway. When the passenger glared at her, she smiled and said, “Buh-bye!”
That set him off. “She said ‘fuck you’ to me! That bitch said ‘fuck you’ to me!” Unfazed the agent kept on walking him up the jet bridge. The jerk looked over his shoulder at Susan one last time before entering the terminal. Not one to miss a beat, she mouthed two little words: Fuck. You.
Nine days after Georgia left the crash pad to work the turn that led to blocked ears, a nurse employed at the airline medical facility in Chicago released her back to work. Her ears were clear. She could finally board a flight. When the agent handed her a first-class ticket bound for New York, Georgia couldn’t contain the tears. She’d never been so happy to get on a plane in her life.
“Are you okay?” I cried when she walked through the crash pad door. Her eyes were red and her face was puffy.
“There’s just nothin’ like bein’ home after bein’ gone for so long.”
Even though Georgia seemed happy about bein’ “home,” I couldn’t help but wonder if that bus ride had done a number on her. I could see it by the way she now wore her unbrushed hair in a messy ponytail on top of her head, and by her preferred choice of outfit on days off, pink sweatpants paired with an oversized T-shirt. But her makeup still looked flawless, even when we were just hanging around doing laundry across the street, so I didn’t worry too much.
While Georgia and I soldiered on, our classmates began dropping like flies. It seemed like almost every day we heard about someone else who couldn’t hack the lifestyle. One classmate quit because passengers didn’t respect her, she said. She went back to being a dental hygienist. Another left because she couldn’t get off reserve for her own wedding. A third actually had plans from the very beginning to quit after she got her passes and could take that round-the-world trip she’d been dreaming about with her husband for years. Most of the time we had no idea someone had left until we noticed their names were missing on the reserve page of the bid sheet. We’d ask around to see if anyone had heard anything about them until we learned what exactly went wrong. It wasn’t unusual to find out no one knew anything, not even their roommates. Just as in training, one day they were here and the next they were gone. Thankfully, Linda, my old roommate from training, wasn’t one of them. We never talked or ran into each other, but I’d heard through the grapevine that she was still on the line, not always picking up all the meal trays before landing, but doing the best she could, and passengers loved her for it.
It’s funny, isn’t it, what will actually break a person. I would’ve thought for sure that the dead body might have just been the very thing to push Georgia over the edge after the naked woman in the closet incident, but I was wrong. Just the opposite happened. It’s like it almost gave her life.
“I knew that man was dead the moment I saw him all gray and slumped over in the wheelchair,” she whispered to me late one night in the dark while our roommates slept in twin beds that lined the walls. “His wife said he’d been sick with the flu all week, and then when his daughter piped in and said they just wanted to get him home I thought to myself, if he’s not dead now he certainly will be soon. The captain agreed. We diverted an hour after we took off.” Before I could ask why in the world someone would try and smuggle a dead body on board, Georgia added, “Do you know how much it costs to transport a dead body the proper way? It’s insane! No wonder that passenger out of Miami tried to get away with packing his mother in a garment bag!” Honestly, I wouldn’t
