YOU’RE ON A flight trying to get a little rest when the kid who’s been kicking your seat for the last half hour suddenly begins to scream. Your head spins around like Linda Blair from The Exorcist and you give the parents an evil glare. When that doesn’t work you ring your flight attendant call light and ask the attendant if perhaps she can help, all the while counting down the seconds to landing.
The likely culprit? It’s not bad parenting—it’s blocked ears. As the plane lowers, altitude changes increase air pressure, which pushes the eardrum inward. Because children have relatively narrow Eustachian tubes, they’re especially susceptible, particularly if they’re clogged by an inflammation or an ear infection. In the air, blocked ears can cause severe pain and dull hearing, and it can occasionally lead to hearing loss. What can parents do? Don’t allow the child to sleep during descent, find something to suck on—a bottle, pacifier, gum, or hard candy—and postpone air travel if a cold, sinus infection, or allergy attack is present. Oh, and just ignore the jerk seated in front of you.
Blocked ears don’t just affect kids. I’ve seen grown men get teary-eyed in flight. Most people know that chewing gum helps, as does constant swallowing or yawning during descent. This allows the muscles in the Eustachian tube to contract and open, equalizing the pressure. When you hear a clicking sound, you know it’s working. Using a nasal spray or decongestant several hours before a flight is always a good idea when feeling congested. Steam can also help to ease the pain. Many passengers knew this and would ask for wads of hot wet paper towels stuffed inside Styrofoam cups to place over their ears. The steam seeped from the cloth through the cup and into the ear. (Unfortunately, because so many people have been burned using this technique we are no longer allowed to do it. Sorry!) But the best method for clearing ears is to use the Valsalva maneuver as soon as you begin to feel your ears starting to close. Pinch your nose, close your mouth, and gently exhale through your nostrils. Blowing too hard may damage the eardrum. Continue to do this periodically until landing. On the ground, try taking a hot steamy shower and drink plenty of hot tea. If you’re frequently plagued with ear pressurization problems, invest in a pair of disposable ear plugs called EarPlanes. And don’t leave home without them.
Blocked ears can ground a flight attendant for days, even weeks. We may feel okay on the ground, but once up in the air the pain can become excruciating, especially when working a trip that hops from city to city, taking off and landing several times in a day. One flight attendant I knew continued to fly instead of calling in sick, and ended up losing not just her hearing in one ear after her eardrum erupted in flight but also the job she loved. Crews must be able to communicate quickly in dangerous situations. If we can’t hear a passenger calling for help, a coworker screaming for a fire extinguisher, or the captain giving us the secret code over the PA to initiate an evacuation we’re useless. It’s not all about serving drinks—we’re also in charge of saving lives. So, no eardrum, no job.
Despite that risk, and because she was still on probation (with only three months to go), Georgia didn’t want to call in sick for fear of losing her job. So when crew schedule assigned her a turn, a trip that leaves and returns back to base the very same day, she didn’t think twice about accepting it.
“I’ll be fine,” she announced, and then blew her nose. She didn’t sound fine, so I gave her what I had left of a box of extra strength Sudafed and a travel-size packet of Kleenex.
Because Georgia was scheduled to come back to New York later that night, she didn’t bother taking her roll-aboard. She’d been able to pack the essentials inside her tote bag; flight manual, flashlight, makeup, galley gloves, wine opener, wallet, and a pocket mask in case, God forbid, someone needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation in flight. In the air Georgia felt fine, all things considered, but thirty minutes before landing, as soon as the airplane began to make its descent into Chicago, that quickly changed. She chewed not one, but three pieces of Dentyne gum at a frantic pace. When that didn’t work she yawned as wide as her mouth would go, a dozen of times, then swallowing hard over and over. As a last resort she took turns chewing, yawning, and swallowing, sometimes doing two of them at the same time, all the while preparing the cabin for landing. When that didn’t work she pinched her nose and tried blowing, gently at first and then more forcefully, ignoring passengers who held up cups, napkins, and newspapers for her to dispose of. “I’m sorry, I can’t help you!” she yelled at a passenger who had a question about a gate connection as she ran to the back and strapped in, doubling over in pain. Once on the ground things improved a little bit. Although Georgia could barely hear because both ears were closed, she wasn’t about to let that stop her. After years of working the pageant circuit she was used to pushing her body to the limit, so if anyone knew pain, it was Georgia, and this was nothing compared to six months of hard-core dieting in preparation for swimsuit competition! Determined to suffer through it, Georgia took more Sudafed and sipped hot tea while waiting for the next flight to board.
This is not an unusual scenario. Flight attendants are reluctant to call in sick for many reasons, the most important being that no one wants to get stuck on a layover far away from home, especially when there are kids involved. Many of us will push it until we get where we need to be before putting our name on the sick list. But once on the list, an employee is not allowed to travel, not even as a passenger on another airline. An employee who does, and gets caught, is no longer employed. Trip trades, drops, and pickups also go on hold when a flight attendant is on the sick list. In trip-trade world, if ya snooze, ya lose. If you’re not able to manipulate your schedule within the first five days after bids have finalized, you can forget about getting time off for all those baby showers, graduations, weddings, vacations, holidays, or whatever important days you need off the following month.
At my airline if we call in sick three times we’re issued a written warning. The only way around the warning, and a trip to the airport on a day off to speak with a manager about why we were sick and what we could have done to avoid it, is to see a doctor, even for a cold that can be managed with over-the-counter medication. With a doctor’s note, a sick call will go from two points to one point. If we apply for a family leave, that point will disappear altogether. If we do not have enough working hours in a rolling twelve-month period to apply for a family leave (420 hours), the point stays. Three points and it’s back to the written warning. Three warnings and it’s buh-bye, airline. But, as a flight attendant, seeing a doctor isn’t simple at all. For one, it’s expensive when you make as little as many of us do. And we have to have the doctor fill out a packet of family leave paperwork so thick you’d think we were asking for a discharge from the military! One doctor, a family practitioner, actually dropped me as a patient when he tired of filling out these tedious forms. Another doctor, an ob-gyn, refused to fill out the forms when I, many years later, became pregnant. She couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just do another job for the airline, like one on the ground.
“Because I’m a flight attendant,” I told her. “We don’t have other jobs. I can’t just work as a ticket agent while I’m sick. They go through weeks of training too!” No matter how hard I tried to explain, the paperwork remained unsigned and I had to find another doctor.
It’s important that flight attendants find doctors who understand what the job really entails. For instance, we don’t just roll our bags gate to gate—we lift eighty pounds plus into the overhead bin each and every flight. We don’t just serve drinks—we push and pull two-hundred-pound carts on an incline. We can’t just handle the sniffles with a box of tissues—we have to worry about our eardrums exploding. Once I pleaded with a podiatrist not to release me back to work too soon after breaking my pinky toe. “You’ll be fine,” he assured me. I wasn’t fine. Not fine working a ten-hour day at 35,000 feet inside a pressurized cabin. Not fine running gate-to-gate as quickly as possible in order to avoid a delay in some of the biggest and busiest airports in the world. When I went back in to his office to have him fill out a few more forms on top of the ones he’d already signed, because the airline had more questions about the nature of my injury, I told him my toe didn’t just hurt, it throbbed. He suggested I take six Advil and relieve the pressure by cutting a hole in the side of my shoe. I just stared at him.
As per the flight attendant uniform guidebook, footwear may not have holes cut in the sides. Shoes must be conservative in style, plain black or navy blue, and have a covered toe, enclosed heel and enclosed sides. And there’s more. Heels must be a minimum of one inch in height, width of heel should not exceed width of sole, heel and sole should be identical in color. Shoes must be polished and in good repair, and buckles, colored trims, lace-ups, loose straps, ties, bows, or other adornments are not permitted. Heels or flats (loafer style with one-inch heel) may be worn with pants, but heels must always be worn with a dress or skirt while in public view. Obviously the podiatrist had no idea what it was like, really like, to work for an airline. Imagine a first-class flight attendant’s panty-hosed toes hanging out of a shoe with a hole cut in the side! There was no point in telling the doctor any of this, since the initial paperwork had already been signed, faxed, and approved by airline medical. I was already back on the line, practically OD’ing on Advil, while hobbling up and down the aisle.
If we choose not to see a doctor for something as minor as a cold, a manager will lecture us about what we’re eating and whether or not we’re taking our vitamins and working out. As if that’s going to help when a passenger comes running up to first class from coach and, like a rotating sprinkler, barfs in a semicircle from the jump seat, all over a couple of commuting flight attendants, across the cockpit door and galley ovens and all over the galley floor. Think that’s bad? Try watching a colleague bend over to clean it up with a shovel and a gel-like substance that turns vomit into a big foamy goop, his crew ID and cell phone falling out of his shirt pocket smack-dab into the mess. Seriously, what can one really do to avoid getting sick when a very large man traveling from an international destination walks out of the lav, looks at you funny, pats you on the head, and then yaks all over your tote bag on day one of a three-day trip and all you have to clean it up with is a wad of stiff paper towels and harsh generic soap from the bathroom?
No longer able to pretend she felt fine, tears streamed down Georgia’s face as the plane descended into Detroit. It was the second leg of the day. There were two more to go. As the airplane taxied to the gate, Georgia noticed a little girl in the last row of coach peeking between the seats at her, giving her parents the play-by-play of what the sad flight attendant was doing.
“I didn’t even try to hide it. I thought my head was going to explode. That’s how bad it was!” Georgia would later cry to me over the phone.
After everyone deplaned, the flight attendant working with Georgia in coach told the first-class flight attendant what was going on. She in turn relayed the information to the captain. Without a word he went into action, sidestepping around cabin cleaners busy discarding trash from the seat back pockets, fluffing pillows, straightening seat belts, and lowering armrests. Georgia stood in the back folding a pile of wadded-up blue blankets she would stack neatly inside a bin for the next flight when the pilot called out from midcabin, “You’re calling in sick!”
Wide-eyed, Georgia sat down on the armrest and nodded. Afraid to abandon her sequence, which would leave the crew in need of another flight attendant in a city that didn’t have a crew base to pool from, she was just as nervous about disobeying the captain’s orders. It’s his plane. Everyone must do as he’s told. Either that or walk off and suffer the consequences later.
One look into Georgia’s big blue watery eyes and the captain added, “If the company gives you any grief, tell them I made you do it. Better yet, tell them to call me!” He handed her his business card. On thin white card stock a phone number was printed underneath his name. A cartoon drawing of an airplane decorated the bottom right-hand corner.
“Thank you, Captain,” Georgia mumbled, tucking the card inside her pocket. Reluctantly she collected her things and walked off the plane, never to see or hear from the pilot again, even though he was cute and she would have been interested if she hadn’t already sworn off all men. Georgia wasn’t just down on men, she was down on love, down on life, and stuck on the ground in Detroit. Little did she know life was about to get even more stressful.
Never in her wildest dreams did Georgia think she’d ever spend a week in a hotel room with only a single pair of underwear and a hotel bathrobe and not be on her honeymoon. But an hour later that’s exactly where she was, washing out undies in the bathroom sink and at the mercy of overpriced room service. The hotel did offer free shuttle bus rides to and from the airport, but that’s it, so unless she wanted to fork over even more cash she didn’t have in order to take a cab somewhere in her uniform, she was stuck. Oh, to be young, broke, and pantyless for seven days. She spent her time catching up on favorite soaps and racking up a phone bill so high it would make her teary-eyed come checkout time. Initially, Georgia and I spent our daily calls laughing about her predicament. How naïve we were.
“I don’t know about this job,” said Georgia over a pay phone late one night at a bus stop in a strange town neither one of us had ever heard of. Georgia was bound for Chicago in six-inch heels. When her ears still hadn’t cleared up after a few days, she’d been instructed, as per company orders, to get to the nearest airline medical center located at a major airport to have her ears checked ASAP. “Things are gonna get better, right?”
“Right!” I said, and I meant it, too. “You’re on a bus wearing a uniform that hasn’t been cleaned for days and your one pair of undies are still damp after being washed out and hung to dry in the shower overnight.” When I heard her giggle, I knew she’d be okay—at least for a little while. Hopefully, until she made it to the next town and could call me back. “Think of it as an adventure. You know this is going to make a great story to tell your grandkids.”
Whenever passengers joke around and order the filet mignon medium in coach, I always laugh. Every. Single. Time. Who am I to spoil their fun? This turned out to be an extremely useful life skill, one that Georgia was able to put to good use on her bus adventure. She didn’t want to upset anyone, particularly the guy wearing the baseball cap and Oakley shades who sat in the rear chewing tobacco and leering at her for hours on end. To make matters worse, each time a new group of passengers walked on board, the moment they saw Georgia’s silver wings they’d laugh hysterically and say something pithy like, “If you ain’t flying, we sure as hell ain’t, either!” Followed by high-fives all around.
“I don’t get it, whenever anyone gets on the bus they plop down right beside me, regardless of how many seats are open,” Georgia complained from the next stop.
“It’s the uniform,” I explained. “Subconsciously they know they can trust you and maybe even count on you in case there’s an emergency.”
This was true. A friend of mine who lived in Manhattan took the subway before connecting to a bus to get to work. During a blackout one summer, the train broke down for two hours and was trapped underground, in total darkness.
“My emergency training just came flooding back,” he confessed to me late one night over a few too many apple martinis. “I grabbed my FAA-required flashlight and began barking orders, mainly instructing everyone to remain calm. At one point I even dumped my lunch into my tote so that the pregnant lady who was hyperventilating could breathe into the brown paper bag. I didn’t want to be the one in charge, but I had no choice. Everyone was looking at me! I blame the damn uniform for that.”
“And they have questions, so many questions!” Georgia exclaimed thirty miles away from her final destination. “What’s your route? Do you stay in five-star hotels? Do you share rooms? Does the airline pay for your food? Do you know so-and-so? Like we know every single flight attendant at every single airline!”
I’d experienced the same thing. Even after just a few months on the job, the main question I’d learned to dread was, “What do you do for a living?” The moment I smile and say I’m a flight attendant, I find myself holding my breath. Without fail, there’s a two-second pause, which is always followed by one of two responses. The good response is full of excitement and ends with an exclamation mark: “I’ve always wanted to be a flight attendant!” or “My sister is a flight attendant!” The good response leads to a very nice conversation about travel, which then leads to other interesting topics related to travel, and maybe even plans to meet up for lunch next time I’m in town. That’s what happens about 10 percent of the time. The rest of the time, it begins with the same four words: “On my last flight…” Then I’ll hear a very bad story about a flight from hell. Needless to say, the conversation never goes so well after the bad response. How can it? I’ve just been linked to the worst flight this person has ever had. Flight attendants aren’t alone. A Super 80 copilot once confessed he never wore his uniform outside the house so the neighbors wouldn’t know what he did for a living. He didn’t want to invite unwanted conversation. As soon as he got to the airport he’d change into his uniform. And this was a pilot! No one ever blames the pilot for a bad flight.
“I wonder if anyone blames the bus driver for a bad ride?” I asked Georgia. “They’re like pilots, kind of, in that they’re in charge of getting people to their destination on time. But they’re also like flight attendants because they get trapped with so many people in a confined space for long periods of time.”
Georgia had no clue what it was like to be a bus driver, and she had no desire to find out. The only thing Georgia wanted to do was get off the bus and go home. At her last and final stop, Georgia grabbed her belongings and exited the bus, vowing to never ride another one ever again. “Not even to Newark!” she added, just in case she hadn’t made herself clear. I didn’t believe that. At the time Olympia Trails charged $14 to get from Manhattan to Newark Airport, a steal of a deal compared to what a yellow cab charged: over $30. From our crash pad it was $60 minus tip and tolls.
While Georgia continued to wait for her ears to clear at yet another airport hotel located near an airline medical facility in Chicago, I dealt with passengers, angry passengers, in the air. It didn’t take long to learn that some people just can’t be pleased, no matter how hard you try. The strange thing was, for every group of passengers who deplaned raving about the flight, there’d be another swearing to never fly my airline again. On a flight from New York to Los Angeles, one of those very passengers glared at me when I placed a meal tray on her table.
“How dare you. This is garbage, nothing but garbage!” the woman said, practically spitting. (Actually it was grilled chicken with green beans and a potato.)
I didn’t know what to say, other than “I’m sorry.” But that can sometimes make things worse if a passenger doesn’t believe I’m sorry enough, which in turn could cause them to write a letter explaining exactly why they felt that way. Still on probation, I didn’t want that. So I stood in the aisle wide-eyed behind the meal cart, looking across the aisle at my coworker, praying she’d step in and take control of the situation. My colleague just shook her head and kept on serving meals. I followed her lead.
Later on in the flight, as we passed through the aisles collecting service items and refilling drinks, I couldn’t help but notice as I picked up the unhappy passenger’s tray that, in the end, she must have enjoyed her garbage. It was all gone. How else do you explain the empty tray?
Garbage Lady was just the beginning of my experience with bad passengers. Enter the jackass. On a flight to Atlanta he sat in first class with his massive legs spread wide, gigantic feet in the aisle, muscular arms folded behind his head, while I, entrée in hand, struggled to get his tray table out of the armrest. He didn’t budge. Not even when I bumped into his knee, causing a side of tomato sauce to fall into his lap. Immediately I began apologizing.
“Clean it!” he barked.
I ran to the galley and grabbed a handful of napkins, towels, and a can of club soda. Back at his seat I apologized again as I held it all out for him to take. He didn’t move.
“Sir,” I started, because I wasn’t about to start rubbing his crotch.
His eyes were the only thing that moved. “Didn’t I tell you to clean it?!”
Other passengers turned around.
“I… I…” I turned and ran to the galley in tears. We had not been trained for this particular situation. My coworker took one look at me and demanded to know what the hell was going on. After I told him what had happened, he grabbed my silver tray and swished down the aisle, lips pursed.
“Excuse me, sir. I’d be more than happy to help you with that.” The jackass stood up, snatched the towel and club soda, and headed straight for the lavatory.
Helping passengers is a huge part of our job. But some passengers take advantage of our kindness. It took a long time to learn that going above and beyond can actually make these types of passengers even worse. On a flight to Los Angeles one elderly woman had me running in circles all through the flight. I didn’t complain. She reminded me of my grandma, only she was my grandma’s difficult twin with an addiction to plastic surgery. When she told me to carry her bag to her seat—an order, not a question—I complied. No biggie. I placed it inside the overhead bin. She asked me to fold her sweater just so, complaining about the first two ways I folded the oh-so-delicate garment, and then I placed that right next to the bag—sorry, on top of the bag. As instructed, I placed her pocketbook under the seat, but not too far underneath. I even opened the window shade, closed the window shade, and opened it again as per her request during boarding. Whatever she needed I took care of, and I did so quickly, “no dillydallying.” And near the end of the flight, when she asked for a piece of paper so she could write a letter, I obliged by ripping off the catering papers taped to the carts and gave them to her. When she asked to borrow a pen, I handed her my last one from the Marriott. And I thought nothing of it when she handed me a folded piece of paper and instructed me to give it to the one in charge.
Silently the lead flight attendant read the letter, looked at me, and folded it in half.
“So what does it say?” I asked, even though I was pretty sure it had to be a raving review of the wonderful service I’d provided her. Honestly, I couldn’t do any better than that.
“She’s not happy. The help isn’t wearing a hairnet.”
What? I was in shock. After all I’d done for her! And anyway, my hair was in a regulation ponytail; tied below the ear, hanging no longer than six inches from the neck.
A few of the crew members who were standing around the galley started to laugh, which led me to believe this had to be a joke, like some kind of trick-the-new-hire-on-probation initiation. It had happened before. On my last flight the captain asked me to walk through the cabin and collect air samples with a plastic bag. I probably would have done it if one of my roommates hadn’t fallen for the same gag a few weeks ago and then come home to tell us all about it. Another roommate had been asked to jump up and down as hard as she could to get the breaks to lock into place. “On the count of three,” the captain called from the cockpit. And soon all the new hires were up in the air.
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 believe it either if I hadn’t read the company email discussing the incident myself.
Before long, the beauty queen I’d met on day 1 of training reappeared, better than ever.
“When a gay man calls you fierce, you know you’ve got it goin’ on!” she confessed over a container of sweet and sour pork after returning from a trip. I had to agree.
The only thing that made me nervous was that, even though Georgia and The Cheater had broken up, she continued to stay in touch. Whenever something weird happened on a flight, Georgia would call him right away. Most of these calls also ended with her hanging up on him or slamming down the phone and, on at least one occasion, ripping his letters to shreds. But despite everything, Georgia still wanted to make it work. I couldn’t figure out why. Before long she started questioning herself, wondering if maybe he was right, maybe if she hadn’t taken the job to begin with, none of this would have happened.
“I can’t blame him. He’s a man. Men get lonely,” she sighed.
Nothing annoyed me more than the lonely-man card. “Don’t take the blame for his stupidity. You didn’t do anything wrong! He’s the one who—”
Georgia held up her left hand and there on her ring finger I saw a simple silver band.
“He proposed?”
She blushed. “Actually he promised to propose when the bar starts doing better. It’s a promise ring.”
Thank God I still had time to make her come to her senses and see the light.
Well, the light never came. Two days later the airline canceled service to the city in North Carolina where Georgia’s soon-to-be fiancé lived. While I figured this was bad news, I didn’t realize just how bad until I came home from a trip and spotted Georgia sitting outside on the stoop in the freezing cold smiling ear to ear. I hadn’t seen Georgia smile like that since, well, ever. As much as I hated to admit it, the girl was glowing with happiness. I knew my worst fear was about to come true. I could feel it. In fact I didn’t even want to get out of the cab, but when the driver who always seemed overly appreciative of his $2 tip—“Oh thank you, miss, thank you! That is very kind of you!”—got another call I quickly grabbed my belongings and began walking up the sidewalk very slowly.
Four months after graduation, two months shy of getting off probation, I sighed the longest sigh known to humanity. “Please tell me you didn’t do it.”
“I did. I quit. I turned in my manual and cockpit keys today.”