These days, what with longer duty days for less money and airplanes so full we can’t use our passes even if we can afford a hotel somewhere for a few nights, most airline employees are at a bit of a loss to explain why we stick around. It’s common for non-airline people to interrupt our litany of complaints (don’t get us started) and suggest Another airline, perhaps? And when we clutch at our seniority (12 years here and in the bottom 10%) and say Really, all airlines are the same, people then logically ask Well then what are you thinking of doing instead? At which point we either explain that we already do our “something else” on the side (sell real estate, be a dentist or be on the Young and the Restless, write gripping and hilarious blogs about flying) or, well… we haven’t really thought about doing anything else. The lifestyle is addicting, we say. Flying gets in your blood.
That being the case, I am sure many (if not most) non-airline people wonder why we complain so much and when we are going to shut up. I am in fact quite sure that most non-airline people must wonder this because I often wonder it myself, and there are few flight attendants who complain more vividly or vocally than I. And, viewed through the lens of a half-empty glass, we have plenty to complain about. We get paid less. We are away from home a lot more, in far less interesting places (a topic on which you will remember I expounded in my last entry). When stuff is bad at this gig, it’s pretty bad, and it can interfere with your Real Life pretty drastically, often eventually leading to the It’s Me or the Job conversation responsible for ten times as many flight attendant break-ups as resignations. We rarely have warning when the wheels are about to fall off the wagon; they just fly off, sometimes in mid-air, and we have no control over the outcome. This can be very literally true, of course, although a spectacular mid-air disaster is something very few of us will ever face. But we come to work every day with the knowledge that something⎯with the airplane, with a passenger, with our schedule or the weather⎯could go wrong at any minute, and if ever there was a company that could turn what should be its routine operation into a colossal cluster-fuck at the drop of a hat, it is ours.
Which is how I recently came to the conclusion that what flight attendants really need is to get serious about getting help for our crippling, collective Gambling Problem. Because for everything that goes wrong around here⎯for every sixteen hour duty day endured locked up in an airplane sitting on the runway in Nowheresburg, Nebraska, watching the snow pile up; for every cruise or wedding missed because of a cancellation or reassignment; for every two a.m. wake-up in (god forbid) Orlando⎯there will eventually come the unexpected and completely satisfying windfall of a fabulous layover or a free day off or free money (or, ideally, a combination of all three), whereupon we will look at each other and, not quite believing our own ears, say Some days this is the Best Job Ever. That’s what I have realized we live for, at least now, when we don’t (can’t) do it for the glamour or the prestige of an Airline Career: our favorite thing about this is job is the fact that every day there is the possibility that we might not have to actually do it.
I am writing this at the Denver airport as I sit on airport standby. Personally my most dreaded assignment, Standby can also clearly and quickly illustrate my point. In a nutshell, on Standby we are assigned a four-hour window during which we are required to be at the airport, in uniform with bags packed, in case a late inbound or a sick call requires a last-second assignment to keep a flight from a significant delay or cancellation. If we are called for a trip, we take it. It could be for one day or five, domestic or international, somewhere hot or somewhere cold⎯you don’t have a clue where (if?) you will go when you leave your house, so you pack your parka and your flip flops and the key components of a kitchen sink and go. And if we don’t get called for a trip, we stare at the ceiling for four hours and then schlep all of it home, along with five hours of pay for our trouble. My sister is in town with her kids (who dutifully adore their Tio and are thus adored in return) for only a few days, and I dreaded a trip off of Standby yesterday because of course I would rather spend my time with them. Marveling as my infant nephew slept through the blaring and thoroughly entertaining 8-piece mariachi band when we went to lunch after I was sent home at 11:30 in the morning, I fairly basked in the glow of a job so great that it would pay me almost $200 to read my book, drink coffee, and talk to my friend and then call me up and say Why don’t you run along and go have lunch with those kiddoes? And I promise you⎯if you’ve flown with me on one of these days, you’ll back me up here⎯I guarantee you that, had I been assigned a trip (which I may yet be today in the next hour and fifteen minutes), I would have spent the entire flight, no matter how short or how uneventful, railing against the outrageous indignity that I am expected to actually do work in exchange for a paycheck when there are so many far more important things in my whirling social life which require tending.
OK, that wasn’t that quick, but you see what I mean. It’s a roll of the dice every day, and we’re all in it to win it. We’ve all been dealt the losing hand of not making it to the layover city where Grandma is having her birthday party or where the hot new hookup is waiting for us (in vain) in the lobby, or of going over our duty time and having to lay over in some fleabag overflow hotel, knowing that the wine has already been opened at home and is breathing while the BF puts the finishing touches on the Gourmet Dinner that you will only ever know as Leftovers (unless you have a great big insomniac boyfriend, in which case you may never know the dinner at all now that you couldn’t get your hungry ass home.) But this could also be the trip where the Victory Lap cancels and you will get to go home and go to the Party of the Year after all. Or the one that falls apart and now you get to lay over in San Francisco on Pink Saturday. Or in Hong Kong on New Year’s Eve. Or in Honolulu in February. Or heck, let the whole three-day trip fall apart on Day One because of weather and get yourself sent home, paid for the entire trip. This might not be a white-glove-and-false-eyelashes, carve-a-roast-in-the-aisle-and-then-lay-over-at-the-Waldorf-Astoria job anymore, and please rest assured that it is rare that a trip falls apart in your favor, but let’s be real: when you’re getting paid to watch The Nanny or drink beer in the park, this is the Best Job Ever.
Which probably won’t make very many of my non-airline friends listen with renewed sympathy the next time I roll out the My Airline Sucks barrel, but it might help them understand why I chose⎯and choose to keep⎯my airline career. I love flying; there, I said it. Now with a little bit of luck, I won’t have to do it today.
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