Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (5 page)

W
hen the airline I worked for on the West Coast merged with an airline in Atlanta, those of us who weren’t familiar with a Southern accent found ourselves in new territory.

For example, I was on the first flight where my California coworkers came into contact with a genuine Southern belle complete with a thick Georgia accent. During the flight, we had to ask her to repeat almost everything she said so we could understand her.

When we landed in Atlanta, she stood up with us to say good-bye to all the passengers.

As the passengers deplaned, the Southern belle kept saying the same sentence over and over: “We’re all in Georgia now. We’re all in Georgia now.”

Finally, the Californian lead flight attendant said to her, “I think they know they are in Georgia.”

“What?” said the Southern belle, making the word “what” into three syllables.

“I think they know we are in Georgia now. You keep saying, ‘We’re all in Georgia,’ and I think they know that.”

The flight attendant from the South looked hurt as she explained, “I’m saying, ‘We all enjoyed ya, now!’”

“Oh,” said my West Coast coworker. “Oh. Well, that’s okay then.”

Another friend, Laurie, tells a story from her initial days working for an airline based in the Deep South.

“It was back in the seventies, and I had to go from a small town an hour north of Seattle, Washington, to Raleigh, North Carolina, for training. I was twenty-one years old, born and raised in the Pacific Northwest, and had never traveled east of I-5, nor had I ever met anyone who was from the Deep South.

“The first thing I remember about flight attendant training was how everyone was so into the way they looked and the
designer clothes they wore or wanted to wear. Here I was in my grunge—before grunge became popular—and I definitely did not fit in.

“As we got settled into our dorms, I saw that I was the only trainee with just one bag and three pairs of shoes. Some girls had literally a different outfit for every day of the six weeks of training. I was further intimidated on the first day of class, before the teacher came into the room, when one Southern belle tugged on the sleeve of my dress and asked me if it was European.

“I had no idea if JCPenney was European, so I said, I don’t know.’

“She tugged harder and, after looking around the classroom, asked again, as if I should know these things, ‘Is that European?’

“‘I don’t know,’ I said, really loud this time.

“‘Well, kin I borrow it?’ Even though she said this with a thick accent, it was clear what she was saying.

And I said a firm, ‘No.’

“I didn’t find out until lunch that she had been asking, ‘Is that your pen?’ She wanted to borrow the extra pen on my desk. The tugging on my dress was just a way to get my attention. ‘Your pen’ in Southern sounded just like ‘European.’”

One more Southern speak experience occurred when we flew to Mobile, Alabama. It seems Mobile, Alabama, is one place where the residents feel compelled to let you know that the town name is pronounced not as it is spelled but as Moe Beal.

I saw an example of this fervor for pronunciation when we landed following a long flight. A passenger in the back of the aircraft stood up and rubbed his aching back. As he exited his row and grabbed his belongings, he said, “It feels so good to be mobile at last.” Suddenly every passenger within ten feet turned to him and spoke in one voice: “It’s
Moe Beal.”

So the next time you land in Mobile, Alabama—whatever you do—do not suggest anything about being mobile.

T
he airport in Fresno, California, is a small airport where stairs are pushed to the boarding door and passengers must climb up the steep stairs to enter our aircraft.

One day as I stood at the plane’s boarding door watching our first passengers walk across the tarmac, I noticed that one woman, the first person coming toward our plane, appeared to be furious. She was an ample woman, and her entire body shook as she took each step, as if she were attacking the tarmac. She stomped up the stairs, appeared before me, and said, “I want to see the captain now!
Now!”

“Can I help you?” I said, hoping I could at least diffuse a situation that must have occurred inside the terminal. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes
, and I only want to discuss it with
the captain!”

When the captain heard the ruckus, he stopped his pre-flight and came out of the cockpit. The angry passenger wasted no time. “I’d like to report that gate agent,” she stated, pointing to the terminal. “He was extremely rude. The rudest man I’ve ever met!”

“What did he do?” asked the captain, grabbing a pen and paper to take notes.

The passenger held up her ticket jacket and exclaimed, “Look at what he wrote on my ticket!”

Sure enough, there in big, bold letters, in indelible ink, the agent had written the word
FAT
across the face of her ticket jacket.

“I am so sorry,” I said. “It stands for Fresno Air Terminal.” I grabbed the ticket from the passenger behind her. “See? He wrote it on everyone’s ticket.”

“Oh,” said the woman, as she glanced at the other tickets with the word
FAT
across them. “Oh.”

Then she turned and walked to her seat and never mentioned the incident again.

E
very day passengers bring bags on board that they are not able to lift into the overhead bins. So they turn to me, and say, “Will you lift this for me? I don’t want to hurt my back.” I am tempted to say, “Oh, I
do
want to hurt my back! Here, let me.”

Sometimes I think,
I can’t lift fifty pounds over my head any better than you can
. Other times I simply ask a male passenger to assist me. Most times, though, especially if the person asking
is a little old lady, I feel sorry for her and offer to carry her bags. That is how I got myself into carrying the heaviest bag I have ever lifted.

It was a shoulder bag. A woman who told me she was seventy years old came to the airplane in a wheelchair with her bag hooked on the back of the chair. I met her at the door and helped her to her seat. Then I went back for her bag. When I tried to lift it, I realized it must weigh close to a hundred pounds—more than twice our luggage limit.

I work out with weights. Even so, I was barely able to carry her bag to her seat and get it stowed. After the flight, she wanted me to carry the bag off the plane. I knew I couldn’t ask anyone to help me, so I just went for it, huffing all the way up to the exit door.

“What do you have in here?” I could barely speak for the strain of carrying her bag. “Gold bullion?”

“No,” she said sweetly. “Rocks. Lots of rocks. My daughter’s house is next to a rock quarry. I just went over there and filled my bag with some big ones. For my garden and all, you know.”

I set the bag down. And made a mental note:
Ask passenger if she has rocks in bag before offering to lift
.

W
e were doing trips from Seattle, Washington, to Juneau, Alaska. Juneau is a rugged place. And sometimes people who live in Juneau are there to get away from other people—especially those of us who live in the Lower 48.

It was not unusual for us to have “back-country residents” among our passengers on these flights from Juneau to Seattle. One day we boarded a guy who looked like he hadn’t been out of the back country in years. In fact he told us that this was his first trip in thirty years to the Lower 48. He had to go settle a financial dispute in his family.

Not only had the man been away from the Lower 48 for thirty years, he also appeared to have been away from all showers, combs, or toothbrushes. But our job is not to judge, just to serve. So as soon as everyone was seated, the other flight attendant, whom I’ll call Gini, and I prepared to serve lunch. We noticed Back-Country Juneau Man was sitting right across from our galley. We also noticed he was loudly hawking “loogies.” A loogie, for anyone who isn’t familiar with the term, is excess mucus that people cough up from deep within their lungs. They hack and cough and then spit. This man was using his beverage cup as his loogie container.

Gini (who was the sweetest flight attendant I’ve ever flown with) was the galley person setting up the trays. She had the oven doors open and alternated between kneeling to the bins below the ovens to get out set-up trays and standing to complete the trays with hot entrées. Then I would pick up the trays and run them out to the passengers. This was in the days of not only hot meals but a choice of entrée. We actually asked Coach passengers if they wanted “chicken or beef.”

We were busy, so it’s understandable that neither of us saw Back-Country Juneau Man get up from his seat and set his loogie beverage cup right next to Gini’s cup on the back counter of the galley.

Gini was too busy to look behind her as she reached for her beverage. She took a big swig and realized something was very
wrong. She looked down at the cup in her hand and realized she was not holding her own beverage. Just then Back-Country Juneau Man walked up looking for what he had left on the counter.

The service was detained for a moment while Gini ran into the bathroom and tried to vomit. She wasn’t successful and asked me if I had any antiseptic mouthwash. I didn’t.

We monitored Gini’s health for weeks after that, but she never got sick. Some flight attendants even suggested the loogie drink was a sort of vaccine. Gini was not amused.

After that experience, we never let our beverage cups out of our sight.