Anyway, today's blog post is about what happens when we clock off for the day and go to our hotels. 'Oh your lifestyle sounds so glamorous!' say all those who've never flown before. I tell you what, some of you readers sound as if your lives are boring as frig but you're not half lucky as when you finish your shift at the chicken plucking factory/ call centre/ claiming benefits for your depression, you don't have to eat your dinner, breakfast and spend the night with the boring twunts you work with. There are two ways a nightstop can go- fabulous with a load of fit PILFs and fun, party animal cabin crew, or mind numbingly awful, with jobsworth crew who feel guilty stealing coke off the plane (the drink I mean, not beak) and pilots who seem to have come dressed as Luxembourg in a 1980s Eurovision with the sense of humour to match.
When I spotted a night in Paris on my roster, I got rather excited and calculated complex equations in my head as to the probability of having a load of PILFs for the eye candy and my best pals on the nightstop with me. Also, I researched into what other airlines may possibly use my hotel in the hope that there'd be an orgy with a load of Gulf Air swarthy PILFs or maybe the opportunity to make party with a big-nosed, circumnavigated Turkish Airlines cadet First Officer. Nah, scrap that. Airline Cougar told me those cadets are cadets in more ways than one and if they use an autopilot to land the plane, then the lucky lady will obviously have to finish herself off. Talk about First Officer's Mess!
Anyway, D-day drew near and my mate decided to pull a sickie, so bang went my party partner. The top drawer PILFs had been rostered on to other duties. Who the hell was I going to spend one night in Paris with? I checked my roster in the morning. Oh no. Oh please god no. No no no no nooooooo! I was rostered with a bunch of the most miserable twats on the face of this earth. This was the days before I Phones, Facebook and many other great antisocial gadgets too. This was 2005. A period when conversation was to be expected. I needed an action plan.
The group of people I was with were known as penny pinching tight arses. If they saw me, they'd try and blag a drink off me. The worst thing was, we were to passenger down and then work the next day. I hope to god the people in rostering weren't expecting us to sit together on the plane like some sort of jolly outing? I hated that stuff at school, I'm not doing it now. Work and private life should be kept separate, unless you've pulled a fit PILF that is.
My strategy was to hide in places where tight arses tend not to go. I checked in 3 hours before departure for my flight, knowing that tight arses check in last minute as to avoid spending money in rip off joint airport caffs. I promptly made my way to the most expensive airport caff, armed with a load of mags, my Nokia brick for some hardcore Snake playing and that new invention of the time, the MP3 player. Bitte nicht fucking storen, my vibes were giving off hopefully. As I was in my civvies, I hoped I was harder to spot but those pesky gits spotted me when I was at the gate listening to Sugababes Push the Button. 'FLIGHT DECK FLOOZIE! WE'RE HEEEERE!' They shouted. Weird, they usually ignore me. I felt like Shirley Valentine when Dougie and Jeannette asked her to sit with them. Reluctantly, I walked over to an evening of boredom, the pitying glances of the whole of gate 59 burning into my back. My 'friends' were already bitching about the price of milk or some other boring topic that people under 60 shouldn't be interested in, I carried on listening to Sugababes and pretended to sleep. It got worse. A member of ground staff offered to preboard us all and let us sit together! How utterly generous! Think Floozie, think. How am I going to get out of this situation. Then it came to me- the runs! I started clutching my stomach and said I need a seat by the bog as I was going to be needing it and not to join the mile high club. This deterred them for the duration of the flight. Phew. I was still within earshot of them though and all they were doing was moaning about the French and asking every 10 minutes for a drink or an item of free food. I sincerely hope that the sadistic looking purser on the flight had shot his man milk into the complimentary caffe latte. Saying that, my colleagues would probably have relished it as it was free. A money shot indeed.
After touching down in the city of love, I thought I was being clever as I only took hand luggage and they checked in a massive case each full of food to save them buying stuff in Paree. No such luck. I was hoping to intercept them but the bus was an hourly service so it meant waiting for the bus with them. I bagged that seat next to the bus driver that nobody ever wants to sit on (plus he was a bit of alright, swarthy and North African mmmm what a BILF). I managed to get off the bus first and check in, not revealing my room number to them thank God. The worst was yet to come though, breakfast the next morning. The number of tools had multiplied overnight and there was about 10 of them round the table, discussing money, politics and which nationalities they hated. I was hoping for a cosy table for 1 with my pot of coffee and Take A Break mag but instead, I was stuck in a low budget re-enactment of the four powers having that conference in Potsdam at the beginning of the Cold War. 'Hey Floozie, that is a big handbag' one of them said to me. Wow, how nice of him to compliment me, I thought. 'Is there any room in it to put these bread rolls in as I don't want to buy lunch' he said. WTF. OMG. Floozie was speechless for once. Why the hell was he being a tight arse and nicking from the breakfast buffet and more importantly, why did he want to shove his stinking contraband Brie sarnies into my expensive bag? I told him to do one in the most polite way possible. I had to work with 3 of them that day, so I turned up at the airport 2 hours early so I didn't have to bus it with them. After 2 hours of eyeing up French businessmen tanked up on coffee, I sailed through what could have been an awful day.
The following day, they had invited me to the mall with them. Can these people not take the hint or did they want to torture me? I got up at the crack of dawn and went to the mall myself, again to avoid bussing it with them, and hid in the most expensive, designer shops and caffs as I knew they'd be homing in on the Euro Shop or cheap and nasty fast food joints, eating the stolen goods from breakfast on a bench somewhere like a bunch of bag heads. Success.
The measures that you have to go to sometimes to avoid the workplace arsehole can be exhausting, but if you are successful, it is a rewarding feeling. All you smug gits who do 9-5 jobs have it lucky, air crew have to do breakfast, lunch and dinner with horrid colleagues at times.
So, to summarise:
1. Every workplace has twats
2. Your friendly cabin crew probably hate each other's guts
3. If you're a businessman in the Paris area, you have probably been mentally undressed by me
