Day 1 at the airline was nothing like I expected to be. With the amount of castoffs from society all to be living in a confined space for a month, I felt like I was on the set of my most hated TV show Big Brother. Loud mouth wannabes with the IQ of a courgette- my worst idea of company. However, I'm not a prejudiced kinda girl, so I decided to break the ice with them in the bar.
For the main part, my suspicions were true. A lot of them had left school with no qualifications (at which point I felt cheated as I had brought all my certificates to the interview and was asked to show them) and had had previous exciting careers as nightclub dancers, the pound shop and bargain booze. Classy! I took a dislike to some of the straight males right away, especially when one announced to the bar 'I'm here for the pussy!' in a Del Boy accent. The same gentleman proceeded to shout 'she'd get it' after various hostesses the duration of the course and ended up getting fired after his first flight, but that's another tale. 'I'm doing this job to marry a hunky pilot and never work again!' announced a rough Liverpudlian female. Could this night get any worse? Then, I saw light at the end of the tunnel. A group of immaculately turned out twentysomethings with airline ID were sitting in the corner, speaking Italian and Spanish, sipping their espressos. I joined them and thankfully they were also to be my colleagues. Why do the English always have to show themselves up? I don't mean to be a traitor to my country, but I am increasingly ashamed to be associated with these louts, which is why I chose to live abroad. There is more to life than booze, footy and TV, as these intelligent, beautiful Mediterranean cabin crew illustrated. We chatted and I mustered up the courage to speak Spanish with them, conveniently using this opportunity to bitch about our chavvy future colleagues. At this point, two were dancing on the bar, having a drinking contest. Let me tell you, if I were a passenger about to fly with The Airline, and I watched that drunken show, I would be cancelling my flight and taking nice coach holidays in future, not before snapping away with my camera phone and sending pics to the Sun though!
Friday 29 April 2011
Monday 25 April 2011
Long time no see!
Hello my fellow Mile High Clubbers- I bet you thought I'd forgotten about this wee blog! I've been extremely busy the last 6 months with other projects and enjoying my 'normal' job, but now the time has come to kickstart the blog again as I have remembered some hilarious tales from my flying days thanks to my friends on Facebook. Don't worry, names will be changed to protect the innocent- don't wanna make you guys (in)famous now do I?
Ok, now I've introduced you to the different breeds of cabin crew, let's start at the very beginning- training. It was the beginning of summer and was the complete opposite to what the glamorous life of a cabin crew is about. You see, it was in a nondescript town with a high crime rate in the South of England, famous for its ugly 60s architecture. It is then I realised that this job was not to be as glamorous as I was led to believe. The glory days of aviation had long gone, with budget airlines causing air travel to be like a glorified bus service. With the great unwashed (otherwise known as Benefit Scum) now being able to afford flights, and thinking it's their right, not a privilege to be able to fly, the target audience of the airlines consisted of stags, hens, roughnecks, immigrants, deportees- the lot. And with this new 'friendly face' of passenger, they had to downgrade the staff to go with it. This was evident when I turned up on my first day to train- these air hosts and hostesses looked as if they had been recruited on the Chatsworth Estate! Bleached extensions, size 18 arses shoved into pencil skirts bursting at the seams, an extensive vocabulary of 'c*nt' and 'tw*t' combined with an indepth knowledge of Jordan (the glamour model, not the country), a 22 year old with a 5 year old kid (you do the math!), I held on to my purse with great fear as I thought I was going to be mugged by these delinquents. I thought I'd arrived at the wrong place- where were the model like stewardesses and super groomed gay hunks? Had I arrived at some outreach programme for the local council estate? After enquiring at the hotel reception, I had indeed arrived at the cabin crew training course. I shivered with fear. Not only was I to spend 4 weeks training with these inbreds, I spied a notice on reception saying 'we rent rooms by the hour'. Delinquents and prostitutes- classy.
Somehow, I was scared I made the wrong decision and regretted not taking the bank job I was offered....
Ok, now I've introduced you to the different breeds of cabin crew, let's start at the very beginning- training. It was the beginning of summer and was the complete opposite to what the glamorous life of a cabin crew is about. You see, it was in a nondescript town with a high crime rate in the South of England, famous for its ugly 60s architecture. It is then I realised that this job was not to be as glamorous as I was led to believe. The glory days of aviation had long gone, with budget airlines causing air travel to be like a glorified bus service. With the great unwashed (otherwise known as Benefit Scum) now being able to afford flights, and thinking it's their right, not a privilege to be able to fly, the target audience of the airlines consisted of stags, hens, roughnecks, immigrants, deportees- the lot. And with this new 'friendly face' of passenger, they had to downgrade the staff to go with it. This was evident when I turned up on my first day to train- these air hosts and hostesses looked as if they had been recruited on the Chatsworth Estate! Bleached extensions, size 18 arses shoved into pencil skirts bursting at the seams, an extensive vocabulary of 'c*nt' and 'tw*t' combined with an indepth knowledge of Jordan (the glamour model, not the country), a 22 year old with a 5 year old kid (you do the math!), I held on to my purse with great fear as I thought I was going to be mugged by these delinquents. I thought I'd arrived at the wrong place- where were the model like stewardesses and super groomed gay hunks? Had I arrived at some outreach programme for the local council estate? After enquiring at the hotel reception, I had indeed arrived at the cabin crew training course. I shivered with fear. Not only was I to spend 4 weeks training with these inbreds, I spied a notice on reception saying 'we rent rooms by the hour'. Delinquents and prostitutes- classy.
Somehow, I was scared I made the wrong decision and regretted not taking the bank job I was offered....
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