Working to Seattle today. When I get back tomorrow night I’m taking you out to celebrate. Happy Birthday!
P.S. Enjoy your day off with Yakov!
P.S.S. I’m evil, I know. Sorry.
I FOUND THE YELLOW Post-it note stuck to the mirror in the bathroom. It was noon. I had just woken up. Based on the deafening silence, I had the house all to myself. Normally I would have been thrilled, but today wasn’t just any day. It was my birthday. I wanted to cry. I’d been doing a lot of reflecting and analyzing in the weeks leading up to the big cake-eating event, and I’d come to the conclusion that life sucked. I had no life. No friends. Not even a steady boyfriend! I was spending my twenty-sixth birthday all alone in Queens, New York, with my cab driver landlord and his border collie who didn’t want anything to do with me regardless of how many of Jane’s organic dog treats I offered her.
By the way, did I mention Yakov had moved in? As in into the house with us. Oh yeah, out of the dungeon and into the front room where Jane used to live before Tricia got engaged and moved out to be with the man she always dreamed of. We were in the process of reshuffling bedrooms so those with the most crash pad seniority could occupy the best rooms when we discovered that Yakov had installed not one, but three deadbolt locks on the bedroom door, not so quietly claiming the tiny space for himself. It happened so quickly Jane didn’t even have time to post the roommate wanted—no drama please! sign up on the bulletin board in flight operations at LaGuardia Airport. If that wasn’t bizarre enough, Yakov then hung white paper over the front window so we couldn’t see in. More disturbing than that was the XL brown terry cloth robe I found hanging in the coat closet right next to my wool work coat.
“Whose is this?” I asked, holding up the ratty thing. Jane covered her mouth with both hands and that’s when I knew. Immediately I dropped it on the floor.
“I’ll get the Lysol,” offered Jane. That’s what friends are for.
So while my ex-roommate Tricia spent her days planning a lavish wedding in the Hamptons to a pint-sized bazillionaire she’d met on a flight, I spent my birthday doing laundry and eating a can of chicken noodle soup. All alone. In a house I shared living space with five other women and a plus-sized Russian Hugh Hefner wannabe in Queens. Why didn’t I pick up a trip? That way I could have been miserable and angry about having to fly on my birthday instead of feeling lonely and depressed while not working on my birthday. Feeling down in the dumps, I did what any other single girl in her midtwenties would do. I called my mother.
“What do you mean you have no life?” my mother exclaimed over the phone from Dallas. I could hear my sister laughing in the background. “Didn’t you just fly in from Paris this morning?!”
She had a point. Which reminded me I had a jar of Nutella chocolate and a day-old flakey croissant from Paris still inside my unpacked bag. As well as a forgotten bottle of El Yucateco hot sauce and six packages of $5 birth control pills I had bought on a whim the week before during a three-hour sit in Mexico City. Happy birthday to me.
People with regular jobs aren’t very understanding when flight attendants complain about their lives. Our bad days automatically sound good if we’re able to toss in words like Paris, Buenos Aires, Rome, and Madrid into random sentences on a regular basis. Even if we don’t fly to those kinds of places, people automatically assume that we do. Sadly the majority of flight attendants get stuck working cities like Dallas, Dulles, and Denver instead. Not that there’s anything wrong with Dallas, Dulles, or Denver. It’s just that when we’re flying to one of the three Ds, we won’t have to advise passengers how to inflate the life vest because those cities, like most domestic cities, aren’t located over or near water.
Seniority is everything at an airline and those who have it take full advantage of it by flying international routes, making the rest of us suffer in their glamorous wake. I don’t blame them. One day I, too, hope to have enough years under my thin blue belt to work all the best trips and make junior flight attendants (and some passengers) cry by not retiring when they think I should. Why retire when all I’ll have to do is work two five-day trips to Narita each month? Gardening is nice, but so is eating sushi with real wasabi and shopping in the Ginza district! Until then you’ll find me laying over in St. Louis with nothing to do except browse the Hustler store or go to Denny’s for the early-bird, super-bird special. Both establishments are located directly across the street from our airport layover hotel, right next to a cemetery that, if I’m desperate enough, doubles as a running path.
Whenever I tell anyone where I’m going or where I’ve been, I can see the disappointment in their eyes. There’s no respect flying domestic! It’s like comparing Walmart to Barneys. My friend Melanie can tell international flight attendants from domestic ones based on the shopping bag hanging off the back of their roll-aboard alone—Harrods versus Trader Joe’s. No one wants to hear about my layover in Orange County spent eating fish tacos and wandering around a high-end mall when my roommate Dee Dee is talking about lying on a beach that has its own Barry Manilow song.
Hey, I get it, because I feel the same way about foreign-based flight attendants. Their lives can’t be all that much different from mine, yet they seem so much more exciting and glamorous, even when they end up on the opposite side of the same hotel pool. Perhaps it’s the accent that makes the grass seem so much greener. Maybe it’s the uniform. Because something tells me the Air France flight attendants aren’t wearing skirts made in China or pants made in Poland with blazers made in Guatemala, which explains why my navy blues don’t always match up and why I look like one of the Bad News Bears whenever I’m surrounded by my stylish foreign counterparts. For a while I wondered if the airline I work for, an equal-opportunity employer, wanted our uniform pieces designed by every country we flew to.
The first time I came into contact with a foreign-based crew was at the Milford Plaza Hotel in New York City. Located in the heart of Times Square, it’s the kind of place tourists stay when they’re on a budget. Today the going rate is $109 a night, but something tells me it wasn’t all that much more than that when I first started flying and my airline housed crews with layovers more than twelve hours there. Crews with less time stayed closer to the airport on the wrong side of town. The Milford had tiny rooms, dark hallways, and a restaurant located on the street level that served up a very questionable pastrami on rye. Basically, it wasn’t the kind of hotel I would have ever imagined an overseas airline would choose to house its beautiful flight attendants, who wear gorgeous silk saris in soft shades of orange, yellow, and pink. But they did. And I could not stop staring at them! I was sitting in the lobby waiting on a pilot I can barely remember to take me out on a date I wish I could forget when I spotted a group of women huddled off to the side of the check-in counter giggling. I had no idea they were flight attendants until a lanky, brown-skinned guy with an overgrown mustache and wearing a pilot’s uniform two sizes too big walked over to the group and handed each woman a room key. Immediately questions began to fill my head. How long are they here for? Are they allowed to go out alone? How long are they allowed to work? What will life be like once they go back to their normal lives after having seen the world?
The women took turns whispering a three-digit number as the others scribbled it down on the back of paper-covered key cards. As I watched them waiting for the elevator, another crew walked in, an army of matching flight attendants, all with sleek black hair pulled back to expose luminous pale skin and blood red lips. Thirty sensible low heels clickity-clacked single-file to the desk. Each woman pulled a black roll-aboard exactly like mine at home, along with a gigantic hard-case Samsonite on wheels. More questions filled my head. I could have sat there all day watching the parade of different crews from around the world, but unfortunately my date didn’t show up late and he had no desire to stick around the lobby. Not when there was a sports bar serving cold beer on tap with spicy chicken wings and greasy potato skins within walking distance.
Not every pilot is so quick to turn away from the international allure. Jane’s latest boyfriend, an Airbus captain based out of Miami, proved to be one of them. I ran into him at our layover hotel in São Paulo as I was on my way out to grab a quick lunch before pick-up. He walked through the revolving doors trailing behind a crew of ten tired-looking flight attendants and two pilots with tennis rackets strapped to their backs. Immediately I recognized Jane’s future fiancé from a framed photograph she kept in her room on the bedside table: the two of them arm-in-arm, helmets in hand, on top of a mountain with dirt bikes on the ground behind them. He had to be a good two feet taller than her.
“What do you have planned for your layover?” I asked, just to be nice, after officially introducing myself for the first time.
One of the other pilots, the youngest-looking one, spun around and slapped him hard on the back, a thin gold wedding band wrapped around his ring finger. “He’s coming with me to check out the Finn Air flight attendants! I hear they lay out topless.”
“Oh really,” I said, and that’s all I said. The future father of Jane’s children blushed.
Thirty minutes later I was peering through the glass doors leading out to the sun deck, under strict orders from New York to go up to the rooftop deck and check out the situation now! I was happy to report back to Jane over the phone that there were only four attractive blondes lounging around the pool in string bikinis, all eight nipples barely covered, but hidden nonetheless. As I stood in the doorway, I couldn’t help but wonder if the buff, bronzed dude getting out of the pool might be a Finn Air pilot dreaming about a soon-to-be bikini-clad American me!
“If I made as much money as passengers thought I made, worked as little as my neighbors thought I did, or had as much fun on layovers as my friends think I do, I’d have one helluva of a job!” exclaimed one of my friends after he heard me trying to explain what it’s like, really like, to work for an airline without enough seniority to hold the good trips.
If you meet a flight attendant and you’re wondering if he or she works international routes, don’t bother asking. Those who do will make it known ten minutes into a conversation. Or the moment they walk into flight operations and find themselves surrounded by lowly junior flight attendants like me. It starts out innocently enough, I’ll give them that, but very quickly it becomes quite unbearable. It goes something like this:
“Anyone working to Paris?”
“Nope. Tokyo. Again.”
“I thought you did the Caribbean?”
“Thought I’d try something new. Have you been to the new layover hotel in Delhi?”
“No, but I hear the one in Frankfurt is wonderful!”
The rest of us will silently print out our itineraries, and then, sooner rather than later, make our way down to a gate where a small jet is departing to a city like Jacksonville, which now sounds even less glamorous than it did before sign-in. If I sound jealous it’s probably because I am. How could I not be?!
What most international flight attendants don’t realize is we know who they are—they don’t have to rub it in. Their age and uniform size is the first thing that gives it away. So do the number of bags they’re carrying. All that shopping requires extra luggage, making them look more like glamorous homeless people than flight attendants. One senior mama travels to London with a lunch bag, a computer bag, a tote bag, and two roll-aboards: one for clothes and the other for a full-size espresso machine. All for just a twenty-four-hour layover! In the morning she likes to make coffee in her room for the entire crew because the hotel only provides electric teapots for their guests. At the airport, the pilots have to help her up the metal stairs after the van drops us off on the tarmac underneath the belly of the plane at London’s Heathrow Airport.
Junior flight attendants normally get stuck with the short hops on single-aisle aircraft. An aircraft with two aisles means your crew is either on reserve or has quite a bit of seniority with the airline. The size of the aircraft is the second clue you might be on an international flight (the first and most obvious being the flight’s listed destination). Longer flights require bigger planes and, in many cases, an extra pilot, so when one takes a break there are always two in the cockpit. Bigger planes equate to nicer flights for a flight attendant. Not just because they’re more comfortable for passengers, which makes for far less complaining and a lot more snoring, but because flight attendants have extra places to hide out if someone does become difficult. Because longer flights almost always result in longer trips for passengers, there’s a lot more overpacking taking place. This means their luggage will get checked. After all, if they have to wait around baggage claim for one suitcase, they might as well wait around for all their bags, which is why they walk on board empty-handed and looking, dare I say it, happy! A stress-free boarding will do that. Trust me, there’s nothing more worrisome for passengers (and flight attendants) than overhead bin space—or lack thereof. But when passengers check their luggage, as most international passengers do, flights get off to a good start. Flights that start off well usually go well. Passengers will actually thank us for a great trip as they deplane.
Domestic flights rarely start out as nicely as the international ones do. With passengers arguing over where to stow belongings, the first impression of the flight crew is usually negative, and before long, nobody on board is smiling, including the flight attendants. Airline employees will do anything to keep from being cited with a late departure and subsequently fined. Someone has to take the blame and if that person is written up too many times he or she won’t have a job for long. We end up barking orders over the PA about stepping into the rows while stowing bags so others can get by and we can depart on time. The rule is that an agent can’t shut the aircraft door until all bins are closed and all passengers seated, so when the overhead bins seem full, instead of smiling and making small talk, my colleagues and I have to frantically move bags around to magically create more space for the last few passengers. Otherwise the agent is going to try to put the blame on the crew.
“Hey, that’s my bag!” I often hear.
“I’m just going to move your bag right… over… here,” I’ll say, struggling to get it into a nearby bin without dropping it on another passenger’s head.
“If I wanted my bag in that bin, I would have put it there!” Here’s my question: Would you rather have your bag in a particular overhead bin or get to your destination or connecting flight on time?
“Are you going to bring my bag to me when we land?!” one man spit when I pointed to an empty bin three rows behind his seat after he flagged me down to inform me there was no place to stow his bag. Based on the frequent-flier bag tag attached to the handle of his suitcase, I knew that he knew the answer, but some people just need a punching bag. Unfortunately, that often ends up being me!
“I want your name,” growled a tweenager after I refused to remove another passenger’s bag in order to make room for hers. What I want is to know what happened to respect! If not for me, how ’bout for the passenger who got on board first?
“When are you guys going to make these bins bigger?” shouted a passenger, struggling to basically push a square into a circle.
“We expanded the bins last year,” I informed him, while moving things around so that his suitcase would fit. “So passengers started bringing on bigger bags.”
And that’s the truth! They went from eighteen to twenty-one inches in length.
Based on my limited international experience, I’m pretty sure international flight attendants spend a lot less time saying, “I’m sorry.” After all, beyond the luggage situation, they get the tools they need to make passengers happy—and then some. I’m talking blankets, pillows, headsets, movies, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks—sometimes all on the same flight! Did I happen to mention there’s alcohol? Free alcohol. Doubles! In coach! Well, at least to Europe there is. And it’s the good stuff, real champagne, not sparkling wine. On top of that, first-class and business-class passengers receive newspapers, amenity kits, and, on some airlines, silk pajamas and slippers. Is it any wonder that international passengers seem happier?
Happy people tend to have good flights. That’s a fact. So my theory is that domestic travel isn’t as bad as some people would love to make it out to be—it’s just that they’re starting off on the wrong foot. But for whatever reason, I’ve notice a real uptick in unhappy—and outspoken—passengers in the last few years. And that’s why I am sorry, sorry I have to say sorry all the time for things that don’t even make sense. Like having too many middle seats. I’ve even apologized because we needed to get rid of the last row.
“But then the second to last row would become the last row and then we’d have to get rid of that, too,” I chuckled, trying to make light of the situation. The passenger did not find me the least bit amusing.
In a magazine I read years ago, a bigwig working for an international Asian carrier was quoted stating, “Passengers wouldn’t dare yell at a flight attendant wearing a dress.” It felt like a snide remark directed toward flight attendants in the United States who prefer to wear pants. Instead, it just demonstrated that he hadn’t spent much time with U.S. passengers, who are nondiscriminating. They are happy to yell both at flight attendants wearing dresses and passengers wearing dresses.
Of course, yelling tends to work best when you speak the same language, which is another advantage that international flights have. On domestic routes, we hear any and all complaints loud and clear. On international flights, there’s often a language barrier, which means there are fewer problems on board. Sure, international routes are staffed with flight attendants who speak the destination language, but at my airline, it’s only one per cabin. If you can’t tell the flight attendant who doesn’t speak your language that you’d like to speak to the one who does, the flight will continue on as peacefully as it had been.
At most airlines “speakers” wear the country’s flag of the language they speak on their name tags. If there were a flag for Jive, I’d channel my inner Barbara Billingsley from the movie Airplane and wear that. If I could, I’d also attempt Yoda-Speak, just as a way to get the attention of passengers when I’m trying to prepare the cabin for takeoff or landing. Unfortunately (or maybe it’s fortunately) for the passengers stuck on my side of the cabin, my gold-plated name tag is a flagless one. Once, a passenger tried to rip me a new one because I didn’t speak Spanish (I think). I knew just enough “airplane Spanish” to say, “No com-pren-DAY!” as I handed him a glass of naranja, no ice (what’s the word for ice?) and smiled real big. It’s easier to keep smiling when you have no idea what they’re yelling.
Even when international passengers do speak English, accents can occasionally lead to an awkward moment or two. One passenger asked my friend Vicki for a “cock,” pointing at his throat. He got exactly what he wanted, a Coke, served with a smile. “Your cock, sir.” But I must have said, “Excuse me?” five times to a passenger who wanted “penis cake” before I realized she was trying to say peanut cake. After I apologized, I informed her we didn’t serve either—just to cover all my bases. There’s an urban legend of sorts about a passenger from India who rang the call light and then, pointing to the button above his head featuring a stick figure, complained about fingering the flight attendant numerous times because his wife was a vegetable and he was a vegetable, too. Turns out he had ordered a vegetarian meal.
And miscommunication isn’t limited to passengers! One time a coworker accidentally skipped a row while we were serving drinks. The passengers started chanting and making weird hand gestures at him—er, us! Because I was on the other side of the cart. A voodoo curse, I presumed. I’d heard stories from other flight attendants who worked the Haiti route about this kind of thing happening. To say I was scared is an understatement. The Haitian speaker working my flight that day wasn’t surprised to hear what had happened, because in Haiti, she said, there were a lot of witch people. She started telling me about witch people who wore witch clothes and lived in witch neighborhoods and sent their kids to witch schools.
It wasn’t until the passengers were deplaning that the Haitian speaker leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Here come some witch people.” That’s when I noticed a well-dressed couple making their way up the aisle. They did not look like witches, unless of course they were good witches. And then it dawned on me: on top of an accent, my colleague had a lisp that made her r’s sound like w’s. Our thirty-minute conversation about “witch people” had really been about rich people! Even so, I was nervous—I had no idea what kind of a curse might have been put on me. All that chanting still gives me nightmares.
What might give you nightmares is a story about the time I sat in the cockpit on a flight from New York to Caracas sometime around 1999. Over the radio, I heard an air traffic controller say something in a thick accent that for the life of me I could not make out. The captain picked up what looked like a CB radio handset, answered back in English, and then adjusted a few knobs before turning his attention back to me and the conversation we were having before the interruption.
“How do you understand what they’re saying?” I asked.
“I don’t.” He smiled genuinely and added, “I’ve been flying this route long enough to know what to do.” Something in the tone of his deep voice and the look in his droopy hound-dog eyes made me believe him. To this day I still have no idea if he was kidding around or not.
The other area of life where communication issues can cause, well, issues is when meeting attractive foreign men. Some may disagree, but I believe it’s important to understand what your partner is saying. Life is hard enough without assuming he’s talking to his Dutch female friends about you while you’re sitting right there at a beachside table with them. When this happens it’s probably not a good idea to drink too much wine and then try to imitate their accents or, worse, pretend you know what they’re saying after they refuse to let you in on the conversation and then tell them off! I beg you, please, learn from my mistakes. Sign up for a foreign-language class ASAP or stick to dating English-speaking men.
The other tricky part about dating internationally is the time difference! Imagine landing in an amazing city you don’t get to visit often if at all, because you’re too junior to hold the trip, and not taking full advantage of it—and your date—has to offer. To be honest, it doesn’t matter where the man lives—California can be just as tough as Europe! One man from Los Angeles was adamant about picking me up the moment I called to tell him I’d arrived. It was nine in the morning when we landed in California and I’d been awake since three o’clock his time. When I suggested meeting later on so I could take a nap before meeting him on his boat, he assumed I wasn’t all that into him and left without me. He never called back. But when I gave in to another man from San Francisco, my lack of enthusiasm for everything but a bed (without him in it) on a Napa Valley wine tour was a turnoff, and our first date quickly became our last. Overseas it’s ten times worse.
The real advantage that domestic flight attendants have, in my opinion, is sleep. Can you imagine working an eleven-hour flight to Brazil, laying over for eleven hours, and then working the trip back, not once seeing the light of day for thirty-three hours? That’s what it’s like for a lot of flight attendants these days. Personally, I think it should be illegal to have layovers shorter than our duty days. As far as I know, this does not happen with overseas carriers. It’s one reason why foreign-based flight attendants look so much better than us! They get more sleep. Still, I know U.S.-based flight attendants who actually enjoy working these horrendous trips because of all the days off. I have no idea how they cross several time zones in a single day, several times a week, without feeling like they were hit by a Mack truck. But there are a lot of flight attendants who can do it, and not all of them turn to the wine-Ambien-caffeine cycle in order to accomplish it.
Not everyone loves to fly international trips. Some flight attendants don’t do jet lag well. I’m talking about me, of course. Even if I’d get more days off each month, what’s the point if I end up spending those extra days off recuperating from the last trip? It doesn’t matter how much water or coffee I drink, the kinds of food I eat, the amount of melatonin I take, or how long I nap, I’m dragging after a long-haul, red-eye flight. When you work flights like that, a lot of time is spent on the ground adjusting sleep patterns. Some flight attendants will wake up early the day their trip departs so they can take a nap before they have to stay awake all night. For me it’s easier to become a vampire by staying up all night so I can sleep all day, but what kind of life is that?
Those of us on reserve can’t prepare for an international trip the way line holders do, because we have no idea what time our next trip will depart. I’ve been brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed when crew schedule called me out for an 11:45 p.m. departure to London. That’s a tough one to stay awake for, especially working in a 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: (blink, blink, swallow) Sure.
YOU: (whispering to seatmate) What a bitch!
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!