My Journey as a Flight Attendant
God that it is such a good question and one that I've been thinking about a lot lately. There are so many answers. So here's my story. My life as a flight attendant.
I�ve always loved to travel. I've always been fascinated by airplanes and air travel. As a child I could point out the difference between a 727 and a 757. When I was young it always freaked me out a little that I could start out in the morning in my house and in hours I could be on a whole different coast. I thought it was exciting. In some ways I still do but I�ve lost a lot of that. I can remember all the times walking onto the airplane and it had a distinctive smell. I know now the smell is coffee and food. About a year ago I smelled it again and it made me feel good.
The first spark of interest came when I was about 8 or 9 years old. My older cousin was/is a flight attendant. We now work for the same airline. My parents and I were living in Denver at the time and my cousin came to visit us. She had a layover in Denver. My mother and I went to the airport to pick her up. I was so impressed with her uniform. Now keep in mind that it was the 70�s, Her uniform was brown. Polyester brown but it looked so impressive to me. She arrived in Denver at around 4pm and left at about midnight. We had the best time. She was new at the job. Back then the job was glamorous. So glamorous in fact that she was featured in the paper announcing the new �stewardess� out of training. She had great stories. Stories about places that I�d never been and I was pretty well traveled at the time. I remember asking her if they had men stewardess since I�d never seen them and she said yes. That started me on the secret dream of being a flight attendant.
While in college I had to really start thinking about what I was going to do. I doubled majored in Communications and English hoping that it would open some career doors for me but it didn�t. My parents were asking me what I wanted to do and I didn�t really know. I knew that I wanted to leave my state because at the time it wasn�t hip like it is now. But most importantly I wanted to live away from my parents so I could truly live or at least research this Gay thing that was going on in my life at the time. That�s when it hit me. If I could work for an airline then I could move. Even move a state away but it would be moving. The last quarter of my senior year I applied to four airlines, United, Delta, Alaska, and Horizon. Alaska Airlines was having a hiring freeze but my Dad knew the human resource guy who pretty much told him that I was in as soon as they started hiring again which was going to be in six months. I couldn�t wait six months. Previously I had a horrible break up with my room mate/first boyfriend and I needed to leave town ASAP. Luckily for me one of the airlines, (it shouldn�t be too hard to figure it out) sent me to Los Angeles for an interview and 2 weeks later I was in Atlanta training to be a flight attendant.
Now in hindsight. That�s where the trouble really began. Training was four weeks long and pretty intensive. All the crap I had to learn was interesting but honestly boring. I didn�t want to evacuate an airplane or fight a fire or put together a big yellow raft in 70 degree water, I wanted to travel. But I stuck with it even though there were tinges of doubt going on in my mind.
The first twinge was when we were told that we couldn�t have people of the opposite sex in our hotel room (where we stayed during training) after 9pm. Coming from a fraternity environment where people of the opposite sex had slept on my couch and in my bed, this was a little controlling for me. I just assumed that it was just one of those rules that they had to have to save themselves from those pesky lawsuits. But after a male trainee was kicked out of training and sent back home for having his girlfriend spend the night, I realized that it was true.
The second twinge was the weight check. Yes we had weight check once a week. This was for all of you who wanted to see those �hot and sexy� stewardess/steward. The problem with the weight restriction was pretty restrictive for me. At 5-9 I had to weigh no more than 152 pounds. Back in the day. I was pretty hard. I worked out 4 times a week. I weighed about 160 but in was pretty much pure muscle. Most of you know that muscle weighs more than fat but my airline didn�t care. So for those four weeks I stopped doing my weight regimen and started just doing cardio and I started taking water pills on Sunday night so I would weigh less when we weighed in on Monday morning. Breakfast at the training center was a quiet place on Monday. I know for a fact that a couple of girls were purging the night before and that morning of our weekly weight checks. This whole idea seemed very barbaric to me and my airline could never explain the reason for it. It bothered me greatly. In fact a couple of guys in my class wanted to speak with the head of training to possible explain to her that muscle weighed more than fat but we were talked out of it.
The last twinge happened on my 4th and last training flight. We had training flights once a week. We had to wear these big badges that said Flight Attendant Trainee. Now note that I am not a name tag person. I've had a job before then that I had a name tag. I've never had a job before where I had to wear a uniform. Since we couldn�t wear the uniforms yet we had to wear our own clothes. Suites for men/ dresses or pants suits for women. They told us that we we're to be serving food on this last training flight and that we may get soiled so we should wear one of our "cheaper" suits. I don�t have cheap suits. I never have. I may not have a lot of suits but the suits I have always were pretty expensive. So here I am wearing my Nordstrom�s suit on the plane picking up dirty meal trays. I had on the stupid apron but it didn�t help. I had chicken all on my pants and my shoes. There was something wrong with this picture but I couldn�t figure it out. One of the flight attendants on my training flight looked at me and asked why I was wearing such a nice suit. I told her that all my suits were nice. She gave me a dirty look and whispered something to another flight attendant. I realized at that point that I didn�t really like the service aspect of the job but I wanted to travel.
Those three things should have been a warning sign to me telling me that maybe this wasn�t the right job but all I saw was that soon I would be traveling all across the country and the world. I was in for a big surprise.
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