The view from my (office) window, June 20, 2020. Photo: Trey Graham
I promised, back in the Before Times, that I’d share some of the more colorful stories from my adventures as a flight attendant. And then I mostly didn’t.
It’s not that there weren’t any stories. (Remind me to tell you about the pantsless snowboarder.)
It’s that between my airline’s social-media policy (at first) and then the way the Covid pandemic poleaxed my life, I couldn’t find ways to tell many of them.
Tell the truth, I lost the urge to write. Or I lost the appetite for hearing myself talk. Somewhere between the end of Trump and the beginning of Biden, I started feeling like I wasn’t worth listening to. Looking back now, in the fall of 2023, I can see the curves of a depressive spiral that would eventually bring me to where I am now. (More on that later, I think.)
But in early 2020, as the pandemic started to unmake us all, it felt less like depression than like simple disorientation. The airline training I’d just put myself through had been a grind — evacuation drills, inflatable-slide jumps, mock water landings; memorizing the safety ballet and the cockpit-access procedure and the details of cabin layouts and emergency-equipment locations on three different aircraft models — but it hadn’t given me useful tools for dealing with a traveling public that seemed scared out of its collective mind.
People were boarding in hazmat suits, scrubbing down entire seat-rows with alcohol wipes, freaking out over whether anyone would be seated near them. I was too damn tired at the end of most flying days to tell stories about the crazy.
(Even if the crazy involved a box of scorching-hot Popeyes chicken deployed as a weapon. Again, remind me.)
So I didn’t write much. But I did keep a journal. And recently I’ve realized that I’ve started to feel the must-write itch again.
I want to start not with a story of airborne chicken-missiles, though, but with a memory that makes me sad.
On one of my earliest flights, at the very outset of the pandemic, I worked a run from Orlando up to Newark. Masking protocols hadn’t been thoroughly worked out yet, but one thing we had been told is that those big plastic face shields people were sporting weren’t airplane-safe — no seal to stop the spread of aerosols, and so on.
Sure enough, an older lady boarded wearing one, and sure enough, she was seated in my section. I asked if she had a mask, or if I could get her one, but she immediately got agitated. She was scared to wear one; she’d recently gotten over shingles and had been told that wearing a mask could cause a recurrence; she’d worn the same shield on her flight down to Orlando without being hassled.
(Not the way shingles work, as far as I’m aware, but I know that only because I’ve had the damn things myself. And I promise you I’d do anything to avoid a repeat. So I absolutely knew why she was anxious.)
As a newbie, I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, so I asked the senior FA, who told me to talk to the gate supervisor — the guy in charge of running my airline’s boarding areas at the Orlando airport.
Now the thing about the gate staff at that airline — at most airlines, I expect — is that they were under a ton of pressure to make sure the aircraft door is closed on time, or if possible a few minutes early. Late pushbacks meant paperwork, maybe disciplinary action.
The dynamic was fraught enough that it contributed to an absolutely poisonous atmosphere between gate staff and flight attendants: Gate agents often tried to shift blame for late pushes onto the FAs working the flight (“They were slow securing the cabin!”) and vice-versa. (“She came onboard twice during boarding to correct seating mistakes!”)
Even adjusting for that reality, though, the gate supervisor that day in early March 2020 was a genuine tool. Barked at me and the senior FA about its being our job to get passengers to wear their masks; ignored the fact that it was his job and that of his agents to keep passengers from getting past the gate without being properly masked.
(And properly dressed, for that matter. Remind me to tell you about some of the outfits that flew with me.)
Finally, he pushed his way past the two of us and marched back to the lady’s seat. Without the slightest acknowledgement that she was an anxious elderly person trying to get home in a month of tremendous uncertainty about what Covid even was, he waved a mask at her and told her she had to put it on or get off the plane. She burst into tears.
At that, the gate supervisor told her time was up — the flight had to leave, she had to get off, she’d have to figure out another way home if she didn’t want to wear a mask on the next flight. (“There’s always a rental car” is one of the things he said, brusquely, to a senior citizen trying to get from central Florida to the New York City metroplex.)
It was the first time I saw the wheels starting to come off my airline’s Covid-era cart. I’d picked that company — over JetBlue — in part because their recruiters had talked an earnest, enthusiastic game about how the corporate culture had been overhauled in the previous few years to foster a better flying experience. Passengers were “Guests,” always uppercase, and in-flight division managers had been sent off to the Disney Institute to learn the ins and outs of exceptional service. Kindness and hospitality were meant to be the watchwords.
But all that supposed commitment to finding success by “taking care of our Guests and each other” (an actual line from our training materials) turned out to be a pretty thin veneer — and it was the first thing to peel away under the early-pandemic pressure.
I’d see it over and over again during the next 18 months, in large ways and in small. I admit got a little jaded myself, eventually, as that awful year wore on and passengers grew more and more fractious about … well, everything. (Remember the Southwest FA who lost her teeth?)
But not that day. That day, as I helped a teary-eyed traveler gather her bags and make her way back up the aisle, I was as mortified as I’ve ever been.
We didn’t treat that lady like a guest. We treated her like a damn inconvenience, and I’m still ashamed that I had a part in it.
Next time: When moms attack.
Previously:
Great to read your words again, even if this story triggered my empathetic anxiety.
What a sad story. As someone with a deep and personal connection to Popeyes (think local children’s show), I’m dying to hear that story.