and waited for an answer.
Smugly he smiled. “It pays five thousand dollars for a week’s worth of work.”
“That’s it?” I asked. Not that it mattered.
Dangling what must have been the golden carrot, he added, “We’re shooting it in Jamaica. Room and board is covered.”
I’ve heard rumors of flight attendants getting involved in this sort of thing on the side, but rest assured, they do not remain employed for long. As you may have noticed, flight attendants talk, and as soon as an airline catches wind of something like a burgeoning adult film career, that flight attendant will be fired. And none of us is willing to risk losing our travel benefits! That’s why most of us became flight attendants in the first place. Obviously Mr. Porn Producer had no idea that airline employees fly for free and get huge discounts on hotels and car rentals around the world—Jamaica included. And that’s not all. Besides deals on airport food, cell phone service, luggage, amusement parks, and SkyMall gifts, we also get discounts on all kinds of crazy things like pet sitters, noise cancellation headsets, trucks, kitchen appliances, flowers, and memberships at gyms and superstores. There are even doctors who give special rates to crew, particularly dentists, dermatologists, and plastic surgeons—and I’m not talking about the ones in Brazil. All because we’re free advertising and come into contact with a lot of people. Best of all, FedEx offers employees at my airline 75 percent off all our shipping needs, which comes in handy when we’re overseas and need to ship something like a piece of furniture back to the States. Betcha a porn star working in Jamaica can’t do that! Not to mention there’s that little thing called longevity, as well as medical and retirement benefits. So while we may not make the big bucks for a week’s worth of work, being a flight attendant does have its perks. And these perks certainly attract men.
Which brings me to the passes. I can always tell a man I’m dating is more interested in my travel perks than in me when he starts planning an extravagant trip on our first date to a place he’s been dreaming about for years. This is equivalent to women talking marriage and babies with men they’ve just met. Talk about a great way to run someone off. What’s worse is when a man tries to barter a room in his apartment for free flights. I’ve even had a woman jokingly ask if I’d be interested in polygamy just to get her hands on my passes. After we both stopped laughing, she inquired again. When people who are after my passes realize they’ve entered the point of no return and it’s not looking good, they might come clean with their intentions. One guy informed me that his college roommate’s mother had been a flight attendant, so he knew how the whole non-rev thing worked (wink wink). So as not to lose me, he then brought up how little I made as a flight attendant and said, “I can make it worth your while.” I’m not selling passes, I’m looking for love! This is my cue to down my drink and walk out, never to look back again. Sometimes I’ll even get the woe-is-me routine. One guy needed my passes because his sister was sick and she needed to see a doctor out of state. It’s not hard to tell when a man wants me for me or if he’s just looking to fly for free.
There’s a popular phrase, MARRY ME, FLY FREE! I bought a T-shirt with that written across its back when I was working with Sun Jet. The phrase has since been changed to MARRY ME, FLY STANDBY! but I’m thinking MARRY ME, GET 20% OFF AT THE APPLE STORE might be a better promise. Let me put it to you this way, Bob, the stylish pilot, actually saves his standby passes for people he hates. Then he can gleefully relish when they get stranded in Senegal for ten days.
Buddy passes bring out the worst in strangers. I’ve had all kinds of people I didn’t know hit me up for one: a mailman, a dental assistant, a lady working at a hardware store, a cabby with a wife still living in Pakistan, even a priest. Most people are surprised to learn that our buddy passes aren’t free. In fact, nowadays a buddy pass costs almost as much as a full-fare ticket, because we have to pay taxes and fees on them. If I were to fly a friend on a buddy pass across the country in economy class, it would cost me nearly $200! And the money is automatically docked from my paycheck. That might not sound like a lot to some, but that’s a new pair of work shoes for me. Anyway, would you trust a stranger to pay you back the money you need for the month’s rent, food, and gas? Well, I’m no different, even if the stranger is a rabbi.
Flight attendants at my airline only get so many passes a year to distribute to family and friends. We don’t just hand out tickets to anyone we want. We have to enter their names and Social Security numbers in a database. At my airline once a name is on the list it cannot be removed to make room for another name for twelve months. The only people who fly for free on a pass (or almost free, depending on the cabin they’re sitting in and where they’re going) are parents, spouses, and children under the age of eighteen, unless they’re in college and then they can fly until they’re twenty-one. Not even Grandma gets a break! And free applies only to coach seats on domestic flights, which are usually full, unless it’s January, February, September, or October. Don’t even think about traveling during a holiday or summer month. Even weekends are tough. If coach is full, even as an airline employee I have to pay to sit in first class. That’s about eighty bucks on a cross-country flight, which, while really inexpensive in comparison to what a first-class ticket costs, adds up. Keep in mind most airline employees’ midmonth check is about $500. We need that money to pay bills, not sip champagne.
Whether you’re a flight attendant or one of our friends, there are rules to be followed when traveling standby. The biggest rule is not to bother the gate agents. They are there to help paying passengers, not standby passengers. Take a seat and patiently wait until your name is called—
Crazily enough, I’ve heard many times of spouses attempting to lay claim to the passes in a divorce settlement. In some cases courts have awarded it, but most airline policies won’t allow it, regardless of court rulings. I heard a story about a flight attendant who requested her husband meet her in another country owing to a medical emergency. Because she had been living and working out of the country she used her flight benefits to get him there. When he landed, instead of finding an ailing wife, he was served with notice that she was filing for divorce. As soon as he flew back home she yanked his flying benefits. He couldn’t fly back to South America on her passes to defend his property rights—or fight for the passes—because he couldn’t afford the full-fare ticket.
When it became apparent I wasn’t going to find what I was looking for in the cockpit or at a bar, I took my search for love online. Going by the name Skydoll, tag line “destination unknown,” I quickly found my inbox swamped with emails from would-be suitors. It didn’t take long to realize my profile—more specifically, my job— wasn’t just attracting Mr. Wrong, but also Mr. Never-in-a-Million-Years. This doesn’t seem to happen to pilots or male flight attendants. Or maybe it does and they just don’t care, which is why you’ll find so many of them posing in uniform in at least one of their profile pictures. One pilot turned out to be so successful at dating online he wound up getting hitched to a nurse and then starred in a nationwide Match.com television commercial with her. Female flight attendants, on the other hand, are a little less inclined to advertise the job because it turns out that a whole lot of guys have kinky ideas about the uniform. Don’t believe me? Go to eBay and plug in two words: “flight attendant.” There you’ll find all kinds of airline paraphernalia, including used undergarments and work shoes worn by “a real flight attendant.”
Genuine uniforms are not easy to come by. We are not allowed to give them away or even donate them to charity without first destroying any airline insignia on them. This way no one can impersonate us and do something crazy like, say, carry out a terrorist act! If a uniform item is stolen or goes missing, flight attendants are to file a police report, which is exactly what I did after I heard the door to my layover hotel room in Miami quietly shut and I awoke to find my closet door open and a uniform belt and vest missing. I’m not sure which disturbed me more; the fact that someone had come into my room while I slept or that someone wanted to wear my clothes.
A “full set” Japan Airlines vintage uniform (blouse, jacket, skirt, pumps, apron, nameplate, and stockings) can fetch as much as 280,000 yen (about $3,500), with well-worn items garnering premium prices. Female flight attendants from JAL are actually warned not to sell their outfits online to uniform fetish fans, and JAL requires flight attendants to return their uniforms at the end of their career. They even affix each one with a registration number inside, and it’s been rumored that they might take it a step further and follow All Nippon Airways’s footsteps by sewing microchips into uniform pieces. This all came about after some uniforms made their way into sex fetish clubs in Japan where people are willing to pay top dollar to live out a fantasy with an “entertainer” clad in an authentic airline uniform. Other than nurses, it’s tough to think of another profession with as much dedicated
