a shot of vodka after just
I make it a point to avoid the route altogether, but if I do get the city pairing on reserve, I try my best not to smile during boarding. It’s essential to set the tone for the flight. I don’t want anyone to come to the (correct) conclusion that I’m the one they can walk all over. These passengers seem to come with the mind-set of whoever yells the loudest wins. They think the nice one is the weak link, as well as the ticket to free booze, and depending on how badly they’ve abused the crew, sometimes they’re right. One New York–based crew fought back by refusing to work after passengers booed them in the terminal for arriving late to the gate. It wasn’t the crew’s fault their inbound flight had been delayed taking off from wherever they had flown in from, causing a domino effect for flights using the same equipment (and crew) later on in the day. Passengers sometimes mistakenly think there are extra airplanes lying around the airport waiting to be had when a situation like this occurs, but there aren’t, and the best you can do is just go with the flow and try to relax. Instead, this particular group of obnoxious passengers caused the crew to deem the environment too hostile to work. They walked off the airplane and refused to go back to work, forcing the airline to call out reserves to staff the trip, delaying the flight even longer. And that’s just one New York–Miami flight.
Still, New York and Florida aren’t the only states with a reputation. Thanks to Eagle County Airport, the gateway to Vail, Colorado, has a bad rap, too. In fact the New York–Vail route is so bad a friend of mine will take Miami any day and every day over that crowd, “the worst bunch of selfish A-holes in the world,” she says. This from a girl I’d never before heard curse! But I know how she feels. It’s a route where every single person sitting in coach truly believes she (or he) should be in first class. And they’re irked about it, too, from the moment they step on board wearing Chewbacca boots and carrying Louis Vuitton luggage to the time the plane touches ground and they’re calling their drivers and ordering the nannies to gather their belongings. PETA would have a field day if they took one of these flights. The full-length furs are out of control! I’ll never forget the lady who called me over and then silently turned her back to me. It took a few seconds before I realized she expected me to help her take off her mink coat. Because the tiny closet in first class isn’t big enough to house more than a handful of these furry monstrosities, and because nobody is willing to stow them inside an overhead bin, they wind up on laps of sulking owners who are upset about the inconvenience. They take it out on me by
The thing about problem passengers that bothers me the most is they always seem to have problems (thus, the name). When problem passengers are on board they’ll take up all our time, as if they’re the only passengers on board. Usually they make themselves known right away, either by having to be told several times to turn off an electronic device before takeoff or by complaining about a passenger who has reclined his seat right after takeoff.
A quick aside here on reclining: anti-recliners need to understand that all passengers are allowed to recline their seats, even during the meal service. (Although I’ve heard there are some foreign carriers that do require the seats to be put back up during the meal service.) Of course, recliners should be mindful of the way in which they recline. We see laptops get damaged all the time by speedy recliners who whip back and break the computer screen leaning against their chair. And if you’re an anti-recliner, do not block the recliner with your knees or threaten to punch him in the face if he reclines one more time. This is not acceptable behavior on or off an airplane. As for those seat-blocking devices that attach to the tray table and keep the seat in front from leaning back, leave them at home. We will confiscate them. Flight attendants hear more complaints about recliners from anti-recliners than anything else. A woman wearing Coke-bottle glasses called me over to show me she could not put down her tray table because of the seat in front of her. I suggested that perhaps if she removed the very large fanny pack from around her waist it might go down. By the way she looked at me, you’d think I was the crazy one. And don’t even get me started on the big guy who had the nerve to complain about a recliner even though his own seat was reclined!
As far as bad passengers go, Tony Last-Name-Starts-with-a-D (not Danza) is by far the worst I’ve ever encountered in my fifteen years of flying. I should have known he’d be a problem the moment he stepped on board, considering he was the first person to walk on the plane and he wasn’t even sitting in first class. Even though all the overhead bins were empty, he wanted to stow his rolling bag in the first-class closet and became angry when I wouldn’t allow him to do so. It’s against FAA rules to stack bags in the closet and it was already filled with my crew bag and a passenger’s wheelchair the agent had brought down earlier. I tried to explain this to him but he wasn’t having it. He stormed off and threw his bag inside a first-class bin. I asked him to take it down and find another bin in coach closer to his seat. Even though it’s first come, first served when it comes to overhead space, first-class bins are only for first-class passengers, who, incidentally, get boarded first. He knew that, but he got pissed off about it anyway. We were off to a great start. For the rest of the flight it was one thing after another, starting with my insufficient explanation about our twenty-minute weather delay on the ground to the alcoholic drink he wasn’t allowed to finish because we were on descent and about to land. As I passed him on my way to my jump seat, he reached out and grabbed my wrist roughly.
“I want your name!”
I gave it to him. I even spelled it out for him. Then I went up to the front to grab the list of passenger names, which comes in handy during times like this. All I’d done was what the airlines hired me to do, so I wasn’t worried. But it was his word against mine, and because I didn’t trust him I wanted to write my own letter to explain how it really went down.
Well, life happens and sometimes we just forget to write those letters we had every intention of writing. What doesn’t usually happen is that we run into the very person we had planned on writing about a week later in a totally different city, just as he is cutting the line to talk to the gate agent. I wasn’t on the clock, so I wasn’t wearing anything navy, flammable, or polyester. That day I was just a regular (standby) passenger trying to get home, which is probably why Lance didn’t recognize me when we first locked eyes. But I must have looked familiar because he actually smiled at me. Too stunned to do anything else I smiled back, but just barely.
I don’t know how to explain what happened next. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I’m not a confrontational person—I’m not! But something weird happened to me that day. My feet suddenly began to move my body toward Lance. As if in a movie, he shifted to face me, and if you didn’t know us you might mistake us for long lost-friends, or even worse, lovers. Before I knew it I was almost upon him and that’s when I heard the dreaded words come out of my mouth.
“Ya write that letter yet, Lance?” And my feet kept walking, while my heart pounded double-time and my brain wondered what the heck my mouth had done! I regretted it as soon as I had said it. I really did.
He sounded more like a volcanic eruption than a human being, “FUUUUUUUUUUUCK YOOOOUUUUUU— YOU—YOU—YOU—YOU!”
The agent pulled me off the flight. Three managers were called to the gate to take care of the disturbance —me! At least that’s how the agent had made it seem. Lance wanted my job, and every single person traveling through the terminal that day knew it. I probably would have gotten into pretty big trouble if Lance had been able to calm down at some point, but I had pushed him over the edge and there was no coming back. Even the managers seemed a little taken back by his behavior. Eager to put an end to it, one of them assured him they’d take care of me and then sent him on his miserable way. As for me, my punishment was having to fly back to New York via Newark because the last flights to LaGuardia and JFK had just departed with Lance and without me. Flying into Newark Airport is pure torture for flight attendants living in Queens because of the amount of time and cash it takes to get home, which means in the end Lance kind of won.
Or maybe I won, because the lesson learned by far outweighed the two and a half hours lost and the sixty bucks spent making the trek back home. Problem passengers are problem passengers and nothing is going to change that. We can’t take nasty passenger behavior personally and truly, for every jerk there’s a plane full of wonderful passengers. So when a similar situation occurred the following week, I considered it a test of my newfound knowledge.
It was my last leg of the day and I had been assigned to deadhead to New York out of Miami in first class. No sooner had I taken my seat when the agent came down to tell me a first-class passenger had checked in at the last minute so she had to switch my seat to one in coach, an aisle in the bulkhead row. I collected my things and moved a few rows back.
