Heather Poole - Cruising Attitude

“I want your name,” growled a tweenager after I refused to remove another passenger’s bag in order to make room for hers. What I want is to know what happened to respect! If not for me, how ’bout for the passenger who got on board first?

“When are you guys going to make these bins bigger?” shouted a passenger, struggling to basically push a square into a circle.

“We expanded the bins last year,” I informed him, while moving things around so that his suitcase would fit. “So passengers started bringing on bigger bags.”

And that’s the truth! They went from eighteen to twenty-one inches in length.

Based on my limited international experience, I’m pretty sure international flight attendants spend a lot less time saying, “I’m sorry.” After all, beyond the luggage situation, they get the tools they need to make passengers happy—and then some. I’m talking blankets, pillows, headsets, movies, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks—sometimes all on the same flight! Did I happen to mention there’s alcohol? Free alcohol. Doubles! In coach! Well, at least to Europe there is. And it’s the good stuff, real champagne, not sparkling wine. On top of that, first-class and business-class passengers receive newspapers, amenity kits, and, on some airlines, silk pajamas and slippers. Is it any wonder that international passengers seem happier?

Happy people tend to have good flights. That’s a fact. So my theory is that domestic travel isn’t as bad as some people would love to make it out to be—it’s just that they’re starting off on the wrong foot. But for whatever reason, I’ve notice a real uptick in unhappy—and outspoken—passengers in the last few years. And that’s why I am sorry, sorry I have to say sorry all the time for things that don’t even make sense. Like having too many middle seats. I’ve even apologized because we needed to get rid of the last row.

“But then the second to last row would become the last row and then we’d have to get rid of that, too,” I chuckled, trying to make light of the situation. The passenger did not find me the least bit amusing.

In a magazine I read years ago, a bigwig working for an international Asian carrier was quoted stating, “Passengers wouldn’t dare yell at a flight attendant wearing a dress.” It felt like a snide remark directed toward flight attendants in the United States who prefer to wear pants. Instead, it just demonstrated that he hadn’t spent much time with U.S. passengers, who are nondiscriminating. They are happy to yell both at flight attendants wearing dresses and passengers wearing dresses.

Of course, yelling tends to work best when you speak the same language, which is another advantage that international flights have. On domestic routes, we hear any and all complaints loud and clear. On international flights, there’s often a language barrier, which means there are fewer problems on board. Sure, international routes are staffed with flight attendants who speak the destination language, but at my airline, it’s only one per cabin. If you can’t tell the flight attendant who doesn’t speak your language that you’d like to speak to the one who does, the flight will continue on as peacefully as it had been.

At most airlines “speakers” wear the country’s flag of the language they speak on their name tags. If there were a flag for Jive, I’d channel my inner Barbara Billingsley from the movie Airplane and wear that. If I could, I’d also attempt Yoda-Speak, just as a way to get the attention of passengers when I’m trying to prepare the cabin for takeoff or landing. Unfortunately (or maybe it’s fortunately) for the passengers stuck on my side of the cabin, my gold-plated name tag is a flagless one. Once, a passenger tried to rip me a new one because I didn’t speak Spanish (I think). I knew just enough “airplane Spanish” to say, “No com-pren-DAY!” as I handed him a glass of naranja , no ice (what’s the word for ice?) and smiled real big. It’s easier to keep smiling when you have no idea what they’re yelling.

Even when international passengers do speak English, accents can occasionally lead to an awkward moment or two. One passenger asked my friend Vicki for a “cock,” pointing at his throat. He got exactly what he wanted, a Coke, served with a smile. “Your cock, sir.” But I must have said, “Excuse me?” five times to a passenger who wanted “penis cake” before I realized she was trying to say peanut cake. After I apologized, I informed her we didn’t serve either—just to cover all my bases. There’s an urban legend of sorts about a passenger from India who rang the call light and then, pointing to the button above his head featuring a stick figure, complained about fingering the flight attendant numerous times because his wife was a vegetable and he was a vegetable, too. Turns out he had ordered a vegetarian meal.

And miscommunication isn’t limited to passengers! One time a coworker accidentally skipped a row while we were serving drinks. The passengers started chanting and making weird hand gestures at him—er, us! Because I was on the other side of the cart. A voodoo curse, I presumed. I’d heard stories from other flight attendants who worked the Haiti route about this kind of thing happening. To say I was scared is an understatement. The Haitian speaker working my flight that day wasn’t surprised to hear what had happened, because in Haiti, she said, there were a lot of witch people. She started telling me about witch people who wore witch clothes and lived in witch neighborhoods and sent their kids to witch schools.

It wasn’t until the passengers were deplaning that the Haitian speaker leaned over and whispered in my ear, “Here come some witch people.” That’s when I noticed a well-dressed couple making their way up the aisle. They did not look like witches, unless of course they were good witches. And then it dawned on me: on top of an accent, my colleague had a lisp that made her r ’s sound like w ’s. Our thirty-minute conversation about “witch people” had really been about rich people! Even so, I was nervous—I had no idea what kind of a curse might have been put on me. All that chanting still gives me nightmares.

What might give you nightmares is a story about the time I sat in the cockpit on a flight from New York to Caracas sometime around 1999. Over the radio, I heard an air traffic controller say something in a thick accent that for the life of me I could not make out. The captain picked up what looked like a CB radio handset, answered back in English, and then adjusted a few knobs before turning his attention back to me and the conversation we were having before the interruption.

“How do you understand what they’re saying?” I asked.

“I don’t.” He smiled genuinely and added, “I’ve been flying this route long enough to know what to do.” Something in the tone of his deep voice and the look in his droopy hound-dog eyes made me believe him. To this day I still have no idea if he was kidding around or not.

The other area of life where communication issues can cause, well, issues is when meeting attractive foreign men. Some may disagree, but I believe it’s important to understand what your partner is saying. Life is hard enough without assuming he’s talking to his Dutch female friends about you while you’re sitting right there at a beachside table with them. When this happens it’s probably not a good idea to drink too much wine and then try to imitate their accents or, worse, pretend you know what they’re saying after they refuse to let you in on the conversation and then tell them off! I beg you, please, learn from my mistakes. Sign up for a foreign-language class ASAP or stick to dating English-speaking men.