The Waiting Game

Not to be a Debbie Downer but sitting on reserve SUCKS!! For those of you who aren’t familiar, this is what most flight attendants do when they first get hired. You are scheduled 10 Days off a month and the rest of the days you are on call from 12:00am to 12:00pm. You never know if or when you’re going to get a call. Half the time you end up staring at the phone just waiting for it to make any noise at all and the other half you live in fear of that dreadful right that will inevitably ruin everything you wanted to do that day. You can see why this makes it difficult to make any plans at all. When you do get the call you bet be ready to fly out the door (no pun intended). You must be able to get to through security and in the crew room in an hour and a half. Now I live in the city not too far from the airport but it’s still at least a 20 min drive, then you have to consider the state of traffic, whatever time of day/ night that might be, not to mention parking and the trip on the light rail I have to take just to get to the main terminal. The light rail itself runs every 10 min or 15 min on weekends/holidays and inevitably I’m going to just miss one as I’m approaching the tracks. I end up having to leave my house at least an hour prior to my report time so that leaves me thirty minutes or less from the time they call to drop what I’m doing, get dressed, usually get something to eat, and get out the door. The worst thing about all of this is that if my accumulated actual working hours equals or is more than 75 hours that month I don’t get a cent for anytime that i sat at home waiting to be called. If I worked less than 75 hours it then i get paid roughly 3.45 hour per day on call (up to 75 hours worth of pay that month of course). GRRRRRRR!!! I really do like what I’m doing but I’m not going to lie it sure is hard to make a living. What really sucks is I’m third from the bottom on the seniority list so i will be on reserve for quite a long time. We will get into seniority at a later date trust me it deserves its own rant.

Boot Camp

We are not born butchers, or bakers, or candlestick makers. It takes dedication and training to shape and mold us to fit neatly into the boxes that are our careers. Becoming a flight attendant was a similar if not even more grueling process than some. It was basically four weeks of full time college classroom training and finally a “quick and sweet” 2.5 hours of in flight training on 2:3 of our aircrafts. A beloved friend said to me, “how much training do you need to learn to push a cart?” Some people don’t realize it but you do have to be certified to be a flight attendant and everything is regulated by the good old FAA. The first day we arrived for training we came into a large room with a projector screen and a myriad of tables and desks. They were lined to the “T” and topped with perfectly arranged gift baskets, instantly communicating that everything was to be done in one way and one way only, but of course it all must be done with a smile. Everything you wanted to know about what it was truly like to be a flight attendant was subtly communicated to us on the first day. We started with the basics HR paperwork, FAA regulations, and what you can and more importantly cannot do. Everything was planned and yet nothing went as planned but rest assured even when I could see the frustration in their eyes everyone continued to smile.

It was detailed to us that we were to be in class from roughly 8am-6pm Monday through Friday and most weekends. We were to take a something like 6 Exams, 4 competency checks, 2 emergency evacuation role plays, and of course a final. Make no mistake this underpaying job was not to be given away to just anyone; you must first pass the class with acquiring a score of 80% or higher on all your exams and although some things did come with second chances if you were to get to that point, hope of ever making it through would dwindle rapidly. Fact: 12% of the people who are hired for this position do not make it through the class. We studied everything from FAR’s (federal aviation regulations), to general aviation physics, to first aid and self defense, and of course security infractions (everything but how to push carts). There was even a whole day of training I can’t divulged for if I did we would all be in a lot of trouble. It seems every other day was an exam sometimes two a day. For the next few weeks my life consisted of getting up at 6:30am get on the shuttle bus by 7:30am class from 8am-6pm, a quick dinner, studying from 7pm-9pm, showering and a half hour of television or cell phone conversation, the it was off to bed around 10:30 just to do it all over again. We were issued a manual that was proportion to the Christian bible and Just like the religious text of any major religion we were to read it, know it, and thusly live by it.

When I first embarked on this journey I had visions of a whimsical experience with magical bonding properties that would lead to everlasting friendship and end with a feeling of belonging, almost like a child does awaiting a yearly summer camp program where they first acquire a sense of identity. What did end up transpiring was almost the reverse. The whole thing was quite stressful and I grew to question myself more than when I started. I guess I still have a while to go before I find what truly feels right for me, and what’s become even more evident is that it really is up to me to find it and create my own happiness. Now that’s not to say I didn’t find the training worth while because at least for experience sake it was in fact worth every minute of it. The people were nice but for the most part we didn’t belong to the same generation. You would be supprised by the wide age range of recruitment. I suppose if there's one things that's almost always true and any situation it's that nothing ever turns out exactly as expected. But then again isn't that what makes life interesting?

The LOOOONG Beginning

So you’re probably wondering how someone just gets up one day and decides to be, what my friend so lovingly refer to as a “sky waitress”. Well this is a far more complicated and hopefully somewhat what more interesting explanation that you’re expecting but here goes. I suppose it all started when I was taking a marketing capstone course called….well I can’t remember what it was call but that’s not important. What is important is that for our first and pretty much only assignment we had to write a giant paper about ourselves, what industry’s we might like to get into, and all our findings about said industries and the jobs there after. We were to begin by creating a large list of what made us happy in life and this, as my teacher explained would inevitably and easily depict what we are supposed to do with our lives. Well I found this task daunting to say the least. I’d like to think everyone struggles with who they are and what they want out of life but it seems I had a particularly hard time with it. What took some people minuets to complete took me days. My list eventually ended up with consisting of things like: friends, travel, helping people, learning about different cultures, children, adventure, and shoes (we all have to have our minor indulgences). After viewing this list I thought to myself this says nothing to me about what I should do; in fact, I felt more lost having completed the list than when I began it. So it was then and there that I decided that instead of chasing this life of stability and sensibility that I had planning for so long, I would do something radical. I would attempt to do something that makes me…wait for it….. happy. I know I know crazy right. Now I can’t say that this is entirely where I’m sitting right now but at least I’m taking a chance and experience life and that far more than I can say I have ever done. Well so there I was looking at this list and I trying to decipher what I should do when it came to me, I should try being a flight attendant. It fits many of the criteria so why not. Now how the heck do you get into that, I had no idea. I just did what any twenty first century young person would do, I goggled it. Sure enough there was a job posting for Flight Attendant in the twin cities for a regional airline. I thought it must have been fate. So just like that I interviewed and got accepted. Now you would think that this is where the story would end. And I know your thinking, now come on that was kind of lame. But OOOOHHH no the story has just begun my friends. That was, believe it or not, over a year prior to me starting my job with yes the same airlines.

You see I was naive enough to think starting a career went in some sort of sequential order. Step one: interview for a job, step two: get the job, and finally step three: start working said job. Apparently, I was tragically mistaken. After I was hired they were going through a secret bankruptcy and then a merger so they continually kept pushing off my training date and I like a hopeful and semi desperate newb kept waiting. I moved home, the one thing I told myself I wouldn’t do, (love you mom and dad) and started working at the daycare next to my house for next to nothing. After the third time training was pushed back I get a call telling me that, for reasons they can not disclose, they have decided to cancel training new people. They lovingly stated that, “your offer has not been rescinded but you are not being hired at this time.” WHAT!!!! Soo after crying about it like a lost child I decided the next step was to move out and get a clue. I packed my worldly belonging in the back of my late great beloved blazer and moved to the cities. With a little help and some called in favors I got a job with a rental car company which I’m sure would like to remain nameless. Needless to say I HATED it! For seven months or so I forcibly worked over 50 hours a week selling useless coverage on rental cars in whatever the Minnesota weather wanted to throw at me. After catching H1N1 and being too depressed and stressed to enjoy the little time I had left in my day I decided I needed a big change. My next move started with a random rant about wanting to go live in Copenhagen where the happiest people on earth live (well Denmark in general but look it up its super cool).

I wanted to change every aspect of my life. I had finally, after years of planning, perfectionism, and stressing over every little thing, decided that life was way too short to be unhappy. No I did not move to Copenhagen but I did get somewhat close. I posted my profile on a great website called au pair world and with no expectations at all calmed my restless sprit with the possibilities of life overseas. Surprisingly, I did get responses. I found a wonderful family in England, a place I have always had a special affinity for, wanted me! They were wonderful and quite affluent which couldn’t hurt. We talked back and forth and after many hash out sessions I was ready to hop a plane and go. I sold my now dying car, subleased my apartment, packed all my things, and said goodbye to the world I knew. I got all the way there when I was stopped at the border with what I would later find out was a judgment call that there are no written rules for. After a traumatic experience in holding I was reluctantly sent home. It’s a long story in itself so and I don’t really want to get into the details but needless to say it sucked. So I found myself once again without direction and completely hopeless. Not a week later do I get a call from the airlines saying they would like to know if I was still interested in a job. Now this was either one of life’s cruel jokes or the long lost window to my many shut doors. After one more push back of training I was able to take the job at last and here I am…oh wait not yet I had to survive training which we will get to next. Am I boring you yet?

*I swear after the next section it’s will get far more entertaining, at least that’s the intention

So Much for an Introduction

Like any good story the first question is where to start. This is about the time some smart aleck chimes in with “why don’t you start at the beginning.” Even though this particular beginning is quite hard to find, I will try to do just that. Let’s start with a little bio shall we? I have always found bio’s the most frustrating things to write. If you write too much then you appear super self involved, too little and you’re bland and purposeless. In the end it’s almost pointless because you can never truly capture all the nuances that make up who you are and really in your everyday world that’s all that really makes you well, you is it not? Ok I admit that was a tangent, the first of many. So let just get this thing over with. Well let’s see here, I’m 23, living in the Twin Cities, and im recent college graduate. I have a bachelors in marketing and Psychology and like many graduates these days I have no clue what I want to do with it let alone what my options are in a slow economy. I enjoy reading, watching Indi films, listening to music that was created before my time and, just like every reincarnated hippie activist, searching for something meaningful that will give me a true sense of purpose. I seem to be continuously reinventing myself, often times not intentionally. Keeping an open mind and truly thinking about things without bias is something I have been working on and is something I value highly. Taking the time to appreciate and analyze life is the most important thing there is; not surprisingly this is one of the things I as well as most individually struggle with the most. All in all I am striving for something simple, Happiness plain and simple. How I stumbled into this career is something I’ll get to shortly but before I do let me give you a little summary of what to expect in future blogs:

• I plan to write about all the little musings I encounter in my daily life as a Flight attendant as well as the journey it takes me on in and outside of work
• I will do my best to update as much as I can (hopefully a few times a week at least)
• I make no attempt promises of grammatical correctness and do not plan to put much effort into it so if your one that is bothered by such things I apologize but maybe this blog is not for you. I write the way I speak and am enjoying every minute of it so please no comments about it.
• There are certain things I simply cannot divulge. Please, if you do not know me personally do not try to find out what airline I work.
• My opinions are my own and do not reflect the opinions of any company or larger body of people. Cliché I know but I just got this job and I really need to pay my bills so loosing it over something that was supposed to be fun would suck.

Well that was kind of lame let’s move on to something more entertaining shall we…..