Heather Poole: Cruising Attitude

The other tricky part about dating internationally is the time difference! Imagine landing in an amazing city you don’t get to visit often if at all, because you’re too junior to hold the trip, and not taking full advantage of it—and your date—has to offer. To be honest, it doesn’t matter where the man lives—California can be just as tough as Europe! One man from Los Angeles was adamant about picking me up the moment I called to tell him I’d arrived. It was nine in the morning when we landed in California and I’d been awake since three o’clock his time. When I suggested meeting later on so I could take a nap before meeting him on his boat, he assumed I wasn’t all that into him and left without me. He never called back. But when I gave in to another man from San Francisco, my lack of enthusiasm for everything but a bed (without him in it) on a Napa Valley wine tour was a turnoff, and our first date quickly became our last. Overseas it’s ten times worse.

The real advantage that domestic flight attendants have, in my opinion, is sleep. Can you imagine working an eleven-hour flight to Brazil, laying over for eleven hours, and then working the trip back, not once seeing the light of day for thirty-three hours? That’s what it’s like for a lot of flight attendants these days. Personally, I think it should be illegal to have layovers shorter than our duty days. As far as I know, this does not happen with overseas carriers. It’s one reason why foreign-based flight attendants look so much better than us! They get more sleep. Still, I know U.S.-based flight attendants who actually enjoy working these horrendous trips because of all the days off. I have no idea how they cross several time zones in a single day, several times a week, without feeling like they were hit by a Mack truck. But there are a lot of flight attendants who can do it, and not all of them turn to the wine-Ambien-caffeine cycle in order to accomplish it.

Not everyone loves to fly international trips. Some flight attendants don’t do jet lag well. I’m talking about me, of course. Even if I’d get more days off each month, what’s the point if I end up spending those extra days off recuperating from the last trip? It doesn’t matter how much water or coffee I drink, the kinds of food I eat, the amount of melatonin I take, or how long I nap, I’m dragging after a long-haul, red-eye flight. When you work flights like that, a lot of time is spent on the ground adjusting sleep patterns. Some flight attendants will wake up early the day their trip departs so they can take a nap before they have to stay awake all night. For me it’s easier to become a vampire by staying up all night so I can sleep all day, but what kind of life is that?

Those of us on reserve can’t prepare for an international trip the way line holders do, because we have no idea what time our next trip will depart. I’ve been brushing my teeth and getting ready for bed when crew schedule called me out for an 11:45 p.m. departure to London. That’s a tough one to stay awake for, especially working in a dark cabin for eight hours straight! “Resting” one eye at a time during flight helps, as long as the other eye doesn’t accidentally decide to join in. Before I became a flight attendant, I never drank coffee. Now, depending on my trip, I drink it by the gallon. One of my biggest pet peeves is when passengers get angry with flight attendants talking too loudly in the galley during a night flight. First of all, the galley is my work space. There’s nowhere else for me to go! Second, how else am I supposed to stay awake? Sipping weak coffee and whispering in the dark sure ain’t gonna do it.

On flights longer than eight hours, flight attendants get what is called a “crew rest,” a nap that is scheduled based on crew seniority. Junior flight attendants almost always get stuck with the first shift. I don’t know about you, but right after takeoff is when I’m the least tired. It doesn’t help matters that most of our airplanes don’t have crew bunks like the foreign carriers do. A lot of times we sleep in passenger seats that have been blocked off for crew in the last row of coach. I’ve never felt comfortable sleeping in front of passengers while wearing my uniform, even when I’m allowed to do so. I imagine they’re staring at me and thinking, look at that lazy flight attendant with her mouth wide open! While it might look like I’m sleeping on the job sitting upright and leaning into the window in a passenger seat, I’m probably just lying there with my eyes closed counting the number of times the toilet flushes. This explains the dark circles around my eyes and the delayed reactions to passenger requests when my nap is over.

YOU: Can I get something to drink, please?

ME: ( blink, blink, swallow ) Sure.

YOU: ( whispering to seatmate ) What a bitch!

I’m not a bitch, I swear! I’m just tired.

It also can be expensive to fly international routes! True, the flight attendants may make more money per hour, but it’s impossible not to spend that extra cash on layovers that are longer, with more expensive things to do. This isn’t so much a concern for senior flight attendants making the big bucks. In Lima, Peru, my crew invited me to go to lunch with them, but not without first making it clear that they liked to enjoy their layovers and did so by first ordering a $60 ceviche appetizer. If I wasn’t up for it (i.e., couldn’t afford it), they didn’t want me to go. Well, I went anyway. And I’m glad I did, because the ceviche turned out to be the best I’ve ever had. But I couldn’t afford to order anything else and wound up hitting a bodega for cheap rotisserie chicken on my way back to the hotel. In Paris, the crews like to drink French wine. Expensive French wine. Before meeting my crew in the lobby, I went to find an ATM machine so I could take out some money. I figured $50 would do. I almost had a nervous breakdown when I accidentally extracted my entire life savings! Here’s a tip: know the local currency rate before you enter your PIN and press enter. A thousand dollars might not sound like much to some, but that’s all I had, and now I was walking around with it in my purse! At night! In a foreign city! A few glasses of red wine later, I calmed down, but not before the wine had convinced me to put a pretty good dent in it. Now I had to pick up another trip just so I could afford to pay the rent. A domestic layover with nothing to do didn’t sound like such a bad idea after all.

I had just sat down with my birthday Nutella and croissant for a solo pity party when Yakov walked in to the room to announce that he was getting married. But first he had to travel to Russia to find a wife. How’s that gonna work out with all of us here? I wondered. It turned out to be something I didn’t have to worry about, because Yakov gave us five days to move out. What he forgot to mention was that on day 3, a family from Russia would be moving in.

That week I saw thirteen real estate agents before I found a guy willing to work with a flight attendant. They’re all afraid we’re going to move into a place and sublet it to a million different people. That’s because we do. This explains why no one cared that I had $3,000 in cash to throw down on the first decent place I found. At least not until I let it slip that the person I’d be sharing the apartment with was not just another flight attendant but my mother. “She’s married to my father, who makes really good money,” I assured him, so he wouldn’t think we couldn’t afford the place based on our crappy salaries. I guess that did the trick because he agreed to show me a one-bedroom apartment in Forest Hills that had a “cute little balcony.” In Texas we call it a fire escape. Not that it even matters. What mattered is that now I had to work high time—or international trips—to afford it!