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: (
YOU: (
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.
I had just sat down with my birthday Nutella and croissant for a solo pity party when Yakov walked in to the room to announce that he was getting married. But first he had to travel to Russia to find a wife. How’s that gonna work out with all of us here? I wondered. It turned out to be something I didn’t have to worry about, because Yakov gave us five days to move out. What he forgot to mention was that on day 3, a family from Russia would be moving in.
That week I saw thirteen real estate agents before I found a guy willing to work with a flight attendant. They’re all afraid we’re going to move into a place and sublet it to a million different people. That’s because we do. This explains why no one cared that I had $3,000 in cash to throw down on the first decent place I found. At least not until I let it slip that the person I’d be sharing the apartment with was not just another flight attendant but my mother. “She’s married to my father, who makes really good money,” I assured him, so he wouldn’t think we couldn’t afford the place based on our crappy salaries. I guess that did the trick because he agreed to show me a one-bedroom apartment in Forest Hills that had a “cute little balcony.” In Texas we call it a fire escape. Not that it even matters. What mattered is that now I had to work high time—or international trips—to afford it!
Chapter 15
I’LL NEVER QUIT!
IT’S ONE THING to get down on your hands and knees to crawl inside a dirty food cart in an attempt to find something, anything—half a cashew!—to eat after the captain announces a two-hour air traffic control hold in flight due to bad weather on the ground after you’ve already flown five and a half hours across country. True story. It’s quite another thing to collect a mountain of leftover Saran-wrapped sandwiches piled so high in your arms that you can actually rest your chin on top. Simply because you
“Hey, guys, look what I saved for us!” I exclaimed in front of the cockpit door. In my arms I held two hundred gourmet sandwiches.
After a very long pause, one of the pilots, the more handsome of the two, asked, “Why?”
Why? He had to be joking. Now it was I who looked at him strangely. “In case we get hungry on the layover.” Duh. For the life of me I could not figure out why they weren’t more excited about the sandwiches! Most of the pilots I had encountered up to this point were just as bad as the flight attendants, if not worse, when it came to leftover airplane food.
The problem with these two ungrateful pilots was this. They were employed by bazillionaire Mark Cuban, owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team. We were on board Mark’s GV, a fourteen-passenger Gulfstream jet. To put it in perspective, at the time Oprah also owned a private Gulfstream jet. Because of this plane he bought online, Mark made it into the
The pilot sitting in the right seat, the nicer of the two, with five kids at home and a tendency to wish people a blessed day, finally spoke up. “You know you get a per diem, right?”
Per diem? What did that have to do with anything? At my airline, the per diem was about $1.50 an hour. It wasn’t enough to buy airport food, let alone room service, much less pay the monthly rent after purchasing a few pairs of DKNY opaque tights. Sure, designer hose are a little pricey for a girl on a budget, but they were the only ones I knew of that didn’t snag each time my leg rubbed against an aisle seat, so by spending money I was actually saving money. At least that’s what I kept telling myself.
“Seventy-five dollars a day,” he said, snapping me back to reality.
“Wait… what? Oh my God—oops, sorry!—say that again!” I wanted to make sure I heard that right.
At that moment, the clouds parted, light came streaming down into the cockpit upon his bald head, and I could have sworn I heard angels singing in the background as he spoke. I almost dropped all two hundred sandwiches on the floor. Holy moly, hallelujah, it truly was a blessed day!
At my airline, it would have taken half a month to make what the Mark Cuban gig paid for two days of work. At my airline, I never would have dreamed of laying over anywhere for longer than thirty-six hours. Now I had three days off between two easy workdays. At $75 a pop, that totaled to a tremendous amount of food I could eat, and would eat, just because I could. All I had to do was keep track of my receipts.
That night, I agreed to meet the pilots for dinner at the hotel restaurant. As luck would have it the restaurant turned out to be a Benihana steakhouse. Things were looking up. I went a little crazy and ordered the shrimp and chicken combo, as well as a spicy tuna roll appetizer. Why not? For the first time in my flight attendant life, I could afford it. I even paid the extra fee for fried rice instead of white rice. Talk about living it up! To top it off I asked the waitress to bring me a Japanese beer, Sapporo. The big one.
Afterward, when the pilots made a beeline back to their rooms to call the wives and kids, I took a quick stroll across the street to a health food store I’d spotted earlier in the day. I placed a case of protein bars on the counter. Name a flight attendant who couldn’t use twenty-four grams of protein covered in yogurt? I’d need one in the morning. Back in the hotel room, I spotted a bottle of Evian water provided by the hotel in my room sitting on the dresser next to the television. After staring at it longingly for a good five minutes, I realized I didn’t have to lean
