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.