Aim for "Work"

It’s been said “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life”…  In a week I return to flying.  It has been, hands down, my favorite job ever!  Each day is different.  You meet people, and you see places you wouldn’t have seen.  Yes, there are bad days, such is life in ANY occupation…  I simply love being a Flight Attendant.  It’s my own private party.  I talk to everyone.  I love to get to know their stories.  I “pick on” someone on each flight and make them entertain me.  Someone told me once I never have met a stranger in my life.  It’s true.  I like to meet people.  Even on the worst days, passengers hug me as they walk off the plane.

This is a job I wanted to do when I was 12 years old.  I even took a United Wing Scout Class...  Life got in the way.  When I finally decided to do it at 40 people told me I was crazy.  But now they GET it.  I’m a great Flight Attendant.  I make people smile.  When I found I was going to be taken off line for two years to be a Union Rep, I actually teared up on my last flight.  I knew I’d miss it terribly.   After one of our recent snow storms the Company asked if I could help out by flying a day or two.  I told them I wasn't allowed to but I stared at the flights available in our "open time".  I was chomping at the bit to do it.  I ogled at those trips like they were a box of chocolates just out of reach.  I yearned for a flight.  God listened to my heart and wanted it to sing again.

Next weekend I go back to the job I love doing.  This weekend I’m escaping to family and friends back “home” in SF where I grew up.  I want a break between being a Fighting Machinist and the Hostess with the Mostest Flight Attendant.  As I’m flying to SF I’m grinning my ass off.  I MISS this gig and I know I’m going “home” again next weekend.  Home to the skies I love.  Home to the friends that I DO have at work.  Home to working again with the love of my life, taking 50 people at a time to the place they really wanted to get to.

Next weekend is as good for me as much as going back to Half Moon Bay is today.  Next weekend is all about finding my joy again.  Returning to everything I love.  I am so blissfully happy and excited I’m going to make people puke with my saccharine sweetness.

A quick sidebar...  My mother has me subscribed to a few of my old favorites magazines... They stack up on my ottoman until I have a lazy day or I fly somewhere for fun.  I bring the stacks of magazines on these flights and do my best to get through one or two and give them to the Flight Attendants.  I know they scour People and the other junk magazines when they have downtime between flights.  Thus I do my best to hand them magazines like “Country Living”, “Martha Stewart's Living”, and “This Old House”, knowing it’s like being handed a steak instead of ground beef.  Those magazines are rarely found on planes.  So my non-Flight Attendant friends… when you’re in the airport and choosing a magazine… Choose one of these or Bon Appetit or Gourmet Magazine.  It’s as much of a treat as a box of chocolates… Granted you can hand your friendly Flight Attendant Godiva too…

I’ve made some of the best friendships flying.  We talk when everyone is asleep.  We spend 3-4 days together at a time and get to know each other.  Why do Pilots and Flight Attendants hook up?  It’s like speed dating… You fly with one crew for 4 days.  Then another crew for 4 days… then another…  The odds are sooner or later talking on the aircraft and/or doing dinner with a crew you’re going to meet a friend or a significant other just because you find people with common interests.  You end up doing things outside of work; Running, art festivals, dinners/lunches.  We are a different breed.  Not everyone can live sleep deprived for 4 days, working 14 hour shifts and then return 3 days later.  Most of the people I know have a problem with jet lag after ONE flight in one day.  We do 18 in 4… and we thrive on it.  It’s hard to date someone outside of the industry.  They don’t understand that when you’re home you need to 1)  sleep until you’re alive again, 2) don’t want to leave the house… and 3) may not get home for hours after you were scheduled to because flights aren't always on time.   Especially when it’s important to you.  Some crews are truly a joy to work with… when you have one of those magical crews the customers glow… and you laugh at anything that goes wrong... because of the people you are with.

I met the love of my life flying.  I know I’ve blogged about it over the years…. It’s been a few so I can afford to do a minor repeat…   We flew three days together way back in 2008.  By the end of the three days together we were already in a plastic bubble where no one else existed.  I RAN off of his plane after the last flight because my whole being was screaming “danger danger escape escape!!!”… and he found me cowering in a corner in our old lounge desperately trying to get released so I could run home and hide… He came up to me with a “WTF?” look on his face… I looked in his baby blues and I looked away from him and then back to him… multiple times… Then I looked up in the air and thought “My life will never be the same”…. And gave him my number.  I was right, he was danger… he was trouble… he was drama… and my life will never be the same… and yet today, I couldn’t be happier that he’s in it.  

I’ve met celebrities… (Shawn Mullins, Mike Epps, congressmen & women , misc pro wrestlers and football players…) I’ve met amazing individuals (one man sticks out who had no lower arms and no legs and yet he jumped off a wheelchair in a jet bridge and jumped up into his seat before I could blink... Made me think ‘handicaps’ are all in the mind)…

I’ve woken up in Canada one morning and on a beach in FL the next.  Where do you get that in a 9-5 job?  You go to work daily and if Lois is complaining about life every single day in her cubicle you can’t get away from it or make her STFU.  My job, if someone is complaining, I try to make them happy… if I can’t… in 2 hours I’ll never see them again.  

Every day is an adventure.  And… maybe that’s the secret to our breed… We love the adventure.