Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer (7 page)

W
hen I was hired for my first airline job, I didn’t understand the importance of seniority. In the business of in-flight service, seniority is everything. Seniority (your date of hire relative to other flight attendants) determines your bidding preferences for trips, vacations, and number of days off. I had such low seniority in the beginning years at all three of the airlines I worked for that I was on Ready Reserve. Ready Reserve means that you are on call twenty-four hours a day for
several days a month. When I started out I was on call twenty-four hours a day for twelve days a month.

In those days we didn’t have cell phones, so I lived with a beeper. Later, as I got more seniority, I moved to Call-in Reserve, which meant I could make a call in the morning and another one in the afternoon to see if Scheduling had a trip planned for me. Finally, I got to the place where I could Hold-a-Line. Holding-a-Line meant that I knew a full two weeks before any given month which days I would be flying and what trips I would be flying. But every year for the first twenty years of my flight career, I dreamed of becoming a Spud.

The term
Spud
was first brought to my attention by a flight attendant who walked up and warned me to stay out of the flight attendant lounge between the hours of three and four each afternoon.

“Why?”

“Spud sign-in,” she said.

“What?”

“Spud sign-in. It will make you sick when you see the schedules they fly.” She referred to the flight attendants with forty or more years of seniority.

“Look at them,” she said. “They all wear the shapeless gray uniforms with brown spots, and their middles stick out farther than any other part of them. And as they turn on their thin
legs, the thing that comes to mind is spuds. They all look like spuds on a stick.”

Then she pulled out a schedule of one of the Spuds. “Look,” she said. “They work eight days a month, get six weeks vacation a year, and make sixty-thousand dollars a year. That’s just two days a week, working for six months of the year, and the other six months they are using a week of vacation each month, bunching their trips together and getting paid for not working.”

“I’m warning you,” she said. “If you go into the lounge when they are signing in, you’ll just get jealous.”

But all of us held on to the dream that someday, maybe someday, we’d have schedules like Spuds. We all dreamed of becoming a Spud.

In 2004, the year in which I’m writing this book, there have been major cutbacks on all the airlines. No longer are there salaries like the Spuds once made, and none of our flight attendants get six weeks vacation anymore. The good old days are gone, and with them went our dreams of ever becoming a Spud.

Y
ou know what I like about this job?” asked Peaches as she sat next to me on the jump seat. “You do not have to use that side of your brain that is best left for scientists and such.”

“You mean the left side of your brain?” I said, looking over my glasses at her.

“Yes, I prefer to lean to the right. Left thinking is for people who do not have looks.” She paused and looked right at me, as if to make her point, then continued. “For me, it’s just not right. I prefer using the part of my brain that takes care of personality and not particulars.”

Then Peaches leaned in as if to share a secret. “And,” she said, “when I try to use that left part of my brain, I sometimes get mixed up. Did you hear what happened to me in training?”

“No.”

“Can you keep a secret?”

“No.”

“Well, I mean, will it go no further than your closest friends?” She obviously wanted to tell me.

“No further unless I write a book one day.”

“Honey, you are never gonna write a book. Come on, you are a flight attendant. We are not known for typing.”

“I’m taking notes,” I said, “but I won’t use your real name.”

“Or the name of my future husband, Mr. Frank Barnell Jeffreys III. Now, that would be humiliating. How long have you known how to type?” she asked.

“Peaches, just tell me the story.”

“Okay, I was really trying to concentrate in training. But this one day, I had this tiny chip in my nail and it was snagging things, so I had to take care of it during class. I was filing it while the teacher was going on and on about how to save a life or something. She was shouting like some Southern Pentecostal.”

“It was the health and safety drills?” I asked.

“Yes.” Peaches nodded her head. “And—”

I interrupted her. “The teacher was shouting symptoms of a passenger who needed assistance?”

“Yes, and you know I don’t like shouting, and she kept yelling, ‘You’ve got a middle-aged man lying in the aisle, unconscious but breathing. What are you gonna do?’” Well, I was just going to let someone else answer that question. But no one did answer it. Then the teacher yelled again, ‘You’ve got a middle-aged man lying in the aisle
unconscious but breathing!
What are you
gonna do?’”

“Peaches,” I said, “she was shouting because we are supposed to be able to shout back our response. Remember our motto: Maintain life until help arrives?”

“Yeah, well, I was waiting for someone else to answer. But the teacher sees me furiously filing my little nail, behind my book, and points right at me and yells at me. I mean, she yelled each word as if it were a sentence in itself: ‘You! You-have-got-a-middle-aged-man-lying-in-the-aisle-unconscious-but-breathing! What-are-you-going-to-do?’”

Peaches looked up and patted her hair. “I got flustered. I mean, I had studied what to do for an unconscious man, but I didn’t understand this new problem, so I asked her.”

“You asked her?”

“I raised my hand and said, ‘I just have one question.’ The teacher said,
‘What?’
And I said, ‘What is butt-breathing?’ I mean, I had heard of ‘unconscious’ but not ‘unconscious butt-breathing.’”

“I’ve never heard of it either,” I said.

“I know,” Peaches said. “Can you imagine how embarrassing it was? I mean, it took me about an hour to even get the stupid joke. It wasn’t something you use CPR on. It was, you know. He was just unconscious,
but
he was breathing.”

“Sure,” I said. “We had never covered unconscious breathing of that type. It’s virtually unknown.”

“That is my point exactly,” she said. Then she stood, turned, and placed her hand on the side of the galley wall. Striking a pose like something out of
Vanity Fair
, she said, “Honey, I wish you well with your typing project.”

Before I could respond, she was gone down the aisle returning to her fans.

D
uring my career as a flight attendant, I have never gotten the packing thing down pat. I am always packing and repacking, in a panic, before every trip. I always forget something and take too much of something. For example, I’ll pack five different hair products and forget an extra pair of shoes. Or I’ll have three pairs of casual jeans but have to wear my work sweater with them because I forgot a casual shirt.

In recent years, we have not been allowed to bring as much luggage as we want. Now we bring one rolling bag and one
small personal bag. We have to pack our uniforms and our change of shoes—we have concourse shoes and in-flight shoes.

We pack our manual, which is huge—the size of a three-inch thick text book—and our demo equipment, which includes an oxygen mask and a demo seat belt. We need casual clothes for when we land, and entertainment for the hotel room, which for me, includes at least six books to read. For others it’s a CD player and CDs. I also bring my laptop computer to write the great American novel. Sometimes, I’ll bring a paper copy of a new manuscript. And I can’t forget my passport…and my airline ID…and my parking pass, credit cards, and cell phone.

This year a family built a new home next door to ours, and unfortunately, its front door faces our driveway. Here is an example of what that family might see when I’m leaving on a trip: woman wearing flight attendant uniform—me—carries luggage to car, gets in car, starts it up, and puts it in reverse; slams on brakes, scurries back into house, and gets ID; runs back to car, starts it up again, and backs carefully out of driveway; slams on brakes, runs back into house, and grabs manual that was forgotten; drives down street, turns car around, and races back to house; slams on brakes, runs in, and retrieves cell phone; scurries back to car and dials cell phone to list self on later flight because now she is too late for scheduled flight.

A psychotic packer is what they would see, and they probably think—like anyone would—that after twenty years as a flight attendant, I’d have this whole thing down to a science. But I don’t.

O
ne thing about being a flight attendant that is crucial: uniforms. The company (at least my company) pays for our uniforms. The company even pays to have them cleaned. So, our employer expects us to adhere to the rule of not showing up for work without them.

Uniforms are to airlines what uniforms are to the military. The uniform is how people identify the brand and what branch of a large organization we work for. Hours of training are spent on the fact that we, as flight attendants, are on the front line of
brand recognition. I mean, next to the paint schemes on our fleet of planes, our uniformed personnel are it. We don’t show up for work without our uniforms. Except…I did.

May I just say something here in my favor? It was a short trip—an unusual trip. From Seattle to Los Angeles, and back, with the first leg of the trip a “deadhead.” This means that all I had to do was ride as a passenger to Los Angeles. And on a deadhead we can wear street clothes. Then I had a three-hour sit in Los Angeles before working the flight back home.

I loved trips like this. Read a book on the flight down, get paid flight time, work a short flight home, and be done. Due to the fact that I was so excited about this trip—allowed to dress in street clothes on the way down and packing extra beach clothes in case we were delayed in L.A.—I was bound to forget something. I always forget
something
. It’s just that this time it was my…uniform. Oops.

Now, not wanting to get fired or even to draw any attention to my gaffe, I looked for a way to cover up my mistake. The problem was that I didn’t realize the mistake until a few minutes before I had to report to my flight back to Seattle.

I’d waited until the last possible minute to change.

“Oh dear God!” was my prayer when I discovered I had nothing to change into. My next prayer was “Yikes!” “Oh man!” was my last utterance before it occurred to me to run to the lost-and-found closet. Usually that closet contains things
left in the flight attendant lounge, things nobody bothered to claim. Things like old shoes, tattered aprons, sweaters with rips in the arms. But fortunately for me that day, the closet included two uniforms. Actually, one uniform and one apron.

I grabbed the uniform dress and noticed right away that it was tall enough for my size 12 tall figure. Then I saw the size and was unbelievably thrilled to realize that the uniform was also a size 12. I couldn’t believe it…except something seemed not quite right. As I stepped into the bottom half of the dress and couldn’t get it over my hips, I checked the tag again. That’s when I noticed there was no 1 beside the 2. It was a 2. A size 2 tall.

I don’t know if there are any readers who wear a size 12 and have tried to fit into a size 2, I mean seriously fit, but it doesn’t work. I was finally able to wiggle my behind into this dress, but only because it had a pleat in the front and another in the back, both of which were now completely stretched out, making the former A-line skirt into something straight and tight.

I had one minute left to dress before checking into my flight. I grabbed the edges of the dress and shoved my arms into the half-length sleeves, which now barely covered the corners of my shoulders. They appeared to be what my mother called cap sleeves.

When I tried to close the bodice, I couldn’t even get it within six inches of closing. I grabbed the spare apron and a bag
of safety pins. I always keep safety pins. I pinned that apron securely to the front of the dress, because being a flasher would be worse than forgetting my uniform.

There are some things you just make the best of, I thought, as I casually walked up to the gate. I tried to act as if nothing was wrong. The flight attendants on board were from the Seattle base, and they all knew me.

As I came to the front entrance, the lead flight attendant looked at me and said, with her eyes as big as I have ever seen them, “What…do you have on?”

I tried to tell her what happened, but she wouldn’t listen to my explanation.

She picked up the intercom to alert all the other crew members.

“You guys have to get up here and look at what the cat drug in. You will never believe it!”

The laughter eventually died down. Weeks later. Not, unfortunately, during that entire flight. Every time my fellow crew members looked at me, they started laughing.

But one flight attendant had mercy on me and gave me her sweater to wear. “Button it up all the way,” she said, “because a size 2 dress on a size 12 body—well, that ain’t gonna fly.”

I was never happier than when that flight was over. And I’ve never forgotten my uniform again.