More Confessions of a Hostie (15 page)

I'm not sure Helen's husband would be too thrilled about her going away again so soon, but then again, he hasn't said anything about the shopping spree to end all shopping sprees she went on in Honolulu.

She now asks me her third most favourite question: ‘So where are you off to next?'

She knows she can't go, but she asks just in case.

I explain to her that my next trip is to Santiago, Chile, and that it is not a renowned shopping destination on my world shopping calendar. I also tell Helen that Mary Gomez is on that trip. Helen has met Mary once, and although Mary's actions left Helen less than impressed, Helen loves to hear stories about Mary-go-round. I accidently addressed Mary by this nickname in front of Dean over dinner last night. When I explained why she had been given this nickname – ‘so many guys had been for a ride' – he thought it was hilarious. Poor Mary.

Most people would be mortified if they had a nickname like that, but I think Mary likes it. She probably thinks she was given this name because she is so much fun. Whatever makes her happy.

Helen makes me promise that if Mary does get up to mischief on my next trip, I am to tell Helen all about it.

‘We'll see,' I tease.

The reality is that Mary has done hundreds, if not thousands, of trips. The laws of physics dictate that she cannot be in trouble every trip. I love a good Mary-story as much as the next person, but I truly hope the next trip is drama-free, especially since I am on the same flight as her. If I can be a calming influence on her, I surely plan on being one. I immediately regret thinking this. Gee, I am starting to sound like an old aunty.

Maybe Mary might have a positive influence on me?

I sincerely doubt that.

not all emergency-related scenarios end badly

It is emergency exam day – and what a big day it is. I have done the right thing the night before and studied a little, then gone to bed early. I am confident I have studied enough, but being in the right frame of mind is as important as the hours of study I put in.

Like most things in life, you only get out of something what you are prepared to put into it. There are elements of the day that could be fun if one is not terrified of possible failure. We have mock-up emergency situations, which are hands-on, quite realistic and, to me, a lot of fun. I find it a great test of character to see how we hosties might react in an emergency situation. Most don't share my interest. All they want to do is finish the written exam, pass it and get the day over with.

I have been called a trolley dolly, a glorified waitress, a cart tart, a bun-tosser, a coffee jockey and a flying cocktail waitress. These are all service-related nicknames. The safety side of the job is what separates us from any other customer-service related job I can think of. I am proud of the fact that I have the training and the skills to possibly make a difference should those skills ever be called upon to be used. The odds are they won't ever be needed, but it is good to know I am still prepared and well-trained enough to do it.

It is the same with the pilots. They spend so many hours in simulators mimicking emergency situations, only hoping that they will never need that experience in the real world. Yet that is why they are given such training – just in case.

I think the pilots do an awesome job. Most people would think a pilot's career would be exciting. I can only comment about the international tech-crew, whom one would think would have the most stimulating jobs: I have discovered that most pilots find the vast majority of their job boring. They have a similar lifestyle to the cabin crew, but the job itself is often hour after hour of tedious and mind-numbingly boring procedures.

I work with anywhere between seven and fifteen cabin crew on any given day, depending on the aircraft and the destination, and I get a chance to move around and work with many of those crew. Pilots, on the other hand, sit in their little cocoon of a cockpit with the other pilot, and they don't get to move at all. Can you imagine doing a nine-day trip sitting next to someone you can't stand?

Over drinks one of the pilots was saying he had an upcoming trip with the ‘Poison Dwarf'. The other pilots at drinks knew exactly who that was. As the name implies, this pilot is a little man with an inversely proportionate chip on his shoulder. Apparently, he was always a painful human-being, but since the company made him a captain his pain-in-the-butt rating has gone off the scales. I can't recall flying with this captain, but then I don't usually spend much time with pilots anyway and rarely do I remember their names. The pilots have different preflight briefings to us, often stay in different hotels and are given alternative transport. On most trips, I often meet the techies (our nickname for technical crew/pilots) only after the flight and at the baggage carousel, when we are waiting for our bags.

I make unsure conversation with them as the bag carousel turns. I say, ‘Hi guys I'm Danielle. I guess I'll see you on the flight back?' Sometimes they are not even on the same trip as us. They might do one or two sectors with us and then go home via another route.

To makes things and conversations a lot more difficult, the flight deck has become a fortress since 9-11. The procedures for entry have become complicated and restrictive, and only a few crew members are allowed to enter. I once heard a hostie joke that the pilots should be given a diet of pizza and pancakes – those are the only things that can be slid under the door.

The pilots need to study similar emergency procedures as ourselves, but of course their technical training, skills and practice are things I don't need to worry about. I have enough things to worry about already – my exam day is here, I need to be alert for it.

All the study and panic seem a distant memory as I pass the main exam, and pass it easily too. I know it cannot compare with the final exams of a five-year university course, but I am going to celebrate anyway.

Dean and I decide to go to a little café, the same one where I made a fool of myself the last time we ate out. I expected the staff to see me walk through the door and mutter, ‘Oh no – here she comes again.'

They don't.

Dean is excited about our upcoming trip to Jakarta, but I warn him that I first have to survive the next trip to South America with Mary-go-round. Although Dean's brother is a flight attendant, I sometimes get the distinct impression that he did not know that much about this job until Dean started dating me. Dean and Danny are quite close, but I guess Danny has never talked much about the intricacies of being a trolley dolly. Dean has certainly never heard about a character like Mary, and he is quite fascinated. He wants to know more.

I tell Dean one of my favourite Mary stories, which actually involves Jakarta (well, sort of). When Mary and I had just started flying, we were both on a standby arrangement where we did not have scheduled trips, but were waiting anxiously by the phone to be sent somewhere. At any given time, there are a number of flight attendants who need to be on this standby arrangement, in order to cover crew who may go sick at the last minute or to crew aircraft that has been rescheduled or upgraded in size. Being new, Mary and I were keen to go anywhere, but when I received the phone call to tell me that I was off to CDG (the code for Paris) I screamed with excitement. All airports and destinations have three letter codes: for instance, New York is JFK (John F. Kennedy Airport), London is LHR (London Heathrow), Sydney is simply SYD, Frankfurt is FRA and Paris is CDG – named after former president Charles de Gaulle.

Mary tells me that she has been assigned a trip to Jakarta: the code for Jakarta is CGK, based on the Indonesian name for the airport, Cengkareng. In truth, she had actually been called out for the same flight I have been assigned on. And I guess the code for Jakarta does seem a little similar to CDG, if you are either dyslexic or if you are Mary.

Mary arrives at work with a wheelie-bag, thinking she was going on a week-long trip to the equator. When she realises that she's really supposed to go to Paris, and in the middle of winter, she is shocked and almost driven to tears.

As expected, Paris is absolutely freezing. I have been to the city many times since that trip, but never have I felt it as cold as that first time. I lent Mary some of my clothes, and then we decided to go shopping for the rest; we spent the first day in Paris looking for a jacket. Mary, unfortunately, is not really much of a shopper. I thought all hosties were born to shop, but the airline gods made an exception when they put Mary on this earth. The hardest thing in Mary's retail experiences is she cannot make decisions.

When we were done with shopping, we raced back to the hotel, freshened up and hit the town. The first bar we went to was The Buddha Bar. What a fabulous bar. Mary cannot make decisions about what clothes to buy, but she is very decisive about what she likes to drink – that decision is usually everything. The irony of Mary buying what turned out to be a beautiful and very expensive designer jacket is that by the end of the night she had spilled so many of those drinks on that same jacket and ended up looking like she was starring in the musical ‘Jason and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat'.

Mary may be a lot of things, but ‘fun' is right up there in the positive ledger. The only trouble for Mary is she doesn't know when to stop having fun. The more she drinks the more fun she has. At some point the fun stops though, and Mary either passes out in the arms of a stranger or passes out in the arms of a friend. Luckily she had me to carry her back to the hotel.

I am sure plenty of hosties have misread rosters, schedules or patterns over the years: Mary is surely not the only one to do such a thing. I was talking with another flight attendant from an airline based in the southern hemisphere, and she was telling me about a particular male colleague who was even sillier than Mary. This airline occasionally does day-flight charters to Antarctica where they fly over the arctic region and then return. It is obviously a sight-seeing day trip only. This flight attendant was on a standby arrangement, thus was called out to operate the flight. He turned up to the crew briefing with a large suitcase full of warm clothing. He assumed that they were going to land at the South Pole and he would be staying there for a few days.

Apparently the same flight attendant the very next week was called out again for a trip going to LHR, but misunderstood and thought he was flying to Peru instead. LHR is the code for London. When the crew scheduling staff phone a flight attendant to tell them the pattern or trip they will be working, they use the standard aviation alphabet, i.e. A=Alpha, B=Beta, C=Charlie and so on. They gave the code to the flight attendant for London (LHR) as ‘Lima Hotel Romeo', and because the word ‘Lima' was used, the flight attendant thought he was going to Peru.

Not all flight attendants are air-heads like this man though. In fact some are extremely intelligent. Like most other workplaces, when you have such a large workforce there are going to be extremes of personalities. There is no such thing as typical hostie. As they say, most generalisations are false – including this one. By and large, the only general assumptions one can make about flight attendants is that we are outgoing people, love to travel and we are usually very well organised. After all, these are things we all need to be if we want to keep this job.

For people like Mary and the crew guy who packed a suitcase to stay in Antarctica, it must be indeed be a frustrating life. In all my years of flying, I have only once made an error through being disorganised, and even then it was through a combination of events. On that occasion I was late for work. I had a very early start, and I set two alarms. One was an electric clock, while the other was battery operated. There must have been an electrical surge or a loss of power through the night, because when I awoke the electric clock had been reset. The other clock, coincidentally, must have just been running low on battery power and had slowed down. When I checked my watch, I came to the realisation that I was due at work in ten minutes. It was an impossibility to get there on time.

If you work in a bank or the like, the other staff can cover for you until you get there. This is not the case when there is an airplane fuelled and ready to go. I could have rung in and gone sick, which would still have had ramifications due to the late notice, but I chose to be honest. I liaised with scheduling staff, caught a cab (at my expense – and a big expense) directly to the terminal and made the flight with seconds to spare. I expected to be called into the office for a ‘please explain', but fortunately it never happened.

Mary has had dozens of similar instances that resulted in ‘please explains' and somehow she has managed to keep her job. My biggest fear is missing a flight while I am overseas. It has happened to Mary. She was not in her hotel room, and the crew was forced to go without her and operate one crew member short. Mary phoned the company a short while later, explaining that she had been out the night before at a bar and she must have been slipped a drug in her drink. She insinuated that her drink was spiked with Rohypnol or some other date-rape drug, and so she woke up in a random hotel room.

The company was very sympathetic and sent Mary to be drug tested and she did indeed have a cocktail of drugs in her system. Not Rohypnol, but some fairly heavy recreational drugs which may (or may not) have been slipped into her drink. The company was very good to Mary over that incident, even sending memos to other crew warning them of the dangers within some of the ports we stay and for crew to be vigilant.

Very few people know the truth to Mary's story. I am one of them.

collecting bruises is not my favourite hobby

It is quite a junior crew going to Santiago. There are three Ambers and four Hollies. I jest about the names of course, but there actually is an Amber and, true to my theory, she is blonde and gorgeous. She has only been flying for a few months. That is long enough to know a little, but I can tell that she is young and extremely immature. I meet her for the first time as we are about to enter a room to have our crew briefing. Within a fifteen seconds she has asked me twenty-four questions.