During her 17 years as a flight attendant, Heather Poole has now not handiest been pouring sodas and telling passengers to lock their seatbelts, she’s been taking notes. Copious notes.
Now, in an offbeat memoir, Poole is dishing approximately flight attendants’ lives within the air and on the floor and the often outrageous conduct of each passengers and different team individuals.
Here’s an excerpt from an interview I performed with Poole for msnbc.com’s Overhead Bin approximately her new e-book “Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet.”
Q: Why did you need to jot down a e-book about some time in the sky?
A: Airlines have had a lot tight manipulate on their photograph that human beings have no concept what the fact is. I wrote the book so people could have a better know-how of the lifestyles.
Q: So what made you want the existence of a flight attendant?
A: My mom. She’s additionally the reason I didn’t want to become a flight attendant. Whenever some thing could pass incorrect in my existence, she’d usually endorse applying to an airline. I didn’t officially decide to grow to be a flight attendant until I didn’t get a enhance at the business enterprise I labored for. I had seen a “Flight attendant desired” ad in the paper and determined to move for it. At $14 an hour, I figured, “Why not?” It might be amusing, and I may want to travel and meet new human beings. Seventeen years later, I’m still flying.
Q: Was that first process tough to get?
A: The first airline I interviewed with didn’t lease me. It turns out “glamour and loose tour passes” isn't always the proper solution to the question, “Why do you want to grow to be a flight attendant?”
Q: Obviously you did sooner or later get hired. Is “Barbie Boot Camp” actually what flight attendant education is known as? And what's it like?
A: It’s no longer absolutely called Barbie Boot Camp, however that’s our pet term for it. Basically, it’s seven-and-a-half of weeks of hell. The only component I can examine it to is being on “American Idol” throughout Hollywood Week. It’s now not that what we have been learning turned into difficult, however we have been under a lot of stress and completely sleep disadvantaged due to late night time observe organizations and early morning drill tests. When it came to commanding evacuations, we had 3 photographs to get it right. If we did something wrong, an trainer could stop us and ask us to do it again. One small slip, one point in the incorrect direction, and it turned into buh bye, adios, sayonara!
Q: Why did you stay with it after your first job with Sun Jet International [a long-defunct, low-fare, charter airline]?
A: In that chapter, I write about the bounce seat falling off the wall during landing, the passenger who followed me into the [airport] bathroom to rip me a new one thru the toilet stall over a flight delay and the passenger who was escorted off the plane in handcuffs however then wound up in a neighboring booth at a nearby restaurant after the flight. The crazy factor is that’s once I determined I definitely wanted to be a flight attendant. After experiencing all that, and greater, I implemented to some other airline. I desired a profession, not just a process, with an airline I will be proud of.
Q: You additionally write about crash pads. What are they and what without a doubt occurs there?
A: Did you ever see that reality show with the Virgin flight attendants who all shared 1,000,000 dollar home close to the beach in Venice? That was no longer a crash pad. Most new-hire flight attendants make among $14,000 and $18,000 their first yr at the process and junior flight attendants don’t generally get primarily based in which they stay. So they’ll proportion an condominium and commute to paintings. Crash pads generally have bunk beds lining the partitions in every room. There are even crash pads that provide “hot beds”: Flight attendants will percent up their pillows and sheets and save them in a bathtub so that others can use the mattress when they leave. Not loads goes on in a crash pad except sleep and Chinese food takeout parties. Commuters suggest commercial enterprise.
Q: What is “bounce seat syndrome?”
A: It’s a term I made up. It’s like being a bartender or a hairdresser, the manner people confess matters to you. I’ll fly with other crewmembers and we’ll cross proper into personal memories. You get close actually quickly and then you can in no way work with them once more. It’s like having these types of one-night stands; you get truely intimate and then it’s done. It additionally every now and then happens whilst we start speaking to passengers in the galley.
Q: You proportion a whole lot of horror stories about passengers to your flights. Do you have got a idea about why individuals who are “everyday” at the ground become hassle within the air?
A: One motive awful behavior stands proud at the plane is because we’re unable to multitask the way we do at the ground, so we’re greater in track to what’s happening. If a person bumps into us on the road without apologizing we might curse underneath our breath, but pass on. On the plane, we take a seat and stew over it for a four-hour-long flight, and then explode when the kid in the back of you kicks your seat or the flight attendant tells you they’ve run out of the beverage of your choice.
Q: In your ebook and on Twitter and other locations you write approximately your paintings, you don’t call the airline you work for. Why?
A: So I can preserve my task. Plus, I’m not writing approximately my airline. I’m writing approximately what it’s like to be a flight attendant. It doesn’t certainly matter which airline we work for, the task is quite tons the identical wherever we move.
Q: Are there also subjects you cannot or will no longer communicate approximately?
A: Anything to do with safety. I received’t communicate about faith or politics with passengers, and I refuse to talk about the electronic tool coverage any extra. The rule is, if it has an on/off transfer it needs to be off and stowed. It’s usually been the rule, however now that humans have so many devices you’d suppose it become a state-of-the-art rule.
