When I get home, I need to get that eau de Boeing off me ASAP

Eau de Boeing is a highly distinctive fragrance that you find on each and every Boeing aircraft ever made. It is so tough that it permeates your clothes, baggage, hair, hell! it even permeates your soul if you don't scrub hard enough.

As soon as I get home from any flight (or get to the hotel) the first thing I do is strip off the uniform and get myself under a hot shower and start to scrub. Lots of hot water and plenty of lather is in order, and it's highly recommended to follow Phoebe's song from Friends, "Lather, rinse, repeat. Lather, rinse repeat. . . as needed" if you truly want to banish that smell.

The other issue with Eau de Boeing is that it gets itself right in there in your cabin bag. After a week off work, the first thing you do is make sure that everything you need is in that bag, and as soon as you open it . . .POW! Eu de Boeing comes out and says a big, fat, smelly "hello!"

In fact, I'd put good money on the only way of ridding clothing or luggage of the smell permanently is to incinerate it. And I don't mean just throwing it out onto a bonfire in the garden, no. I mean full-on, blast furnace, jet-fuelled firing.

So the next time you wander down the airbridge to board your flight and wonder what on earth that God-awful pong is, think of those poor souls that work on board the aircraft who have to live with that stench for their entire career.

Psycho Mamma

She’s a nutter next door, she is!

She screams and shouts, cries,

The dog barks incessantly, kids yelling

While she yells back, swearing

At her husband who she hates,

“I want you to leave! I hate you!”

You next door with your screaming,

I hate you!

Your kids are vile creatures,

No wonder, though.

Psycho bitch!

The 80 year-old dolly

So the UK Government has announced that it will be removing the compulsory retirement age of 65, and it got me to wondering how this could affect crew in the future. So long as we’re cleared as medically fit to operate onboard and cope with the physical demands of the job it could become highly amusing for passengers and crew alike. Imagine…

When senility starts to kick in and you’re doing your various PA’s: “Ladies and Gentlemen welcome aboard this service to… Um (looks at paperwork) yes. This flight to Palma. My name is… Is… (looks at name badge) Ah! Thats right. My name is Rowan and I’ll be your purser today.”

Somewhat amusingly I already seem to have gone a little but senile as I recently struggle to remember if a passenger wanted ice in their JD and coke, if it was diet or regular, if the other person wanted milk and sugar with their coffee, or was it tea? And don’t get me started on remembering what flavour Pringles they wanted. I’m now at the stage where I refer to Pringles by colour in the hope that it makes it easier for me to remember. It doesn’t.

More concerning could be the ramifications of it in an emergency. I can see me getting my NITS briefing (Nature of the emergency, intentions of the Captain, time until landing and any special instructions) from the Skipper prior to an emergency landing and when I go to brief the rest of the crew being unable to remember if it was an engine fire or a landing gear failure, were we landing on water? and where we were going to be making the landing. Oh dear. Back into the flight deck!

Body Clock! What Body Clock?

I went to Aruba a couple of weeks ago on a week-long layover and got back last weekend, and as it was a 7 day layover we have to have three days off to get back to “normal”. Come Wednesday night I was having real difficulty getting to sleep before going back to do my first flight after the trip. Try as I might I just couldn’t fall asleep: tv on in the background, tv off, music on, music off, eye mask on when the sun started coming up. None of it worked and I ended up going in for a 13 hour day with no sleep, and oddly enough I felt fine.

I got home, relaxed for an hour then slept for 8 hours before getting up for another 12 hour day and felt rough as boots! I knew that I hadn’t caught up with the jet lag-induced insomnia from the night before, and also knew that having two more flights ahead of me on minimum rest (around eleven hours from shift to shift) I was really going to struggle.

Anyway, after my last flight on the Saturday I knew I had two days off to try and play catch up, and ended up sleeping through til 1300 on the Sunday which meant I stood no chance of sleeping tonight, hence me blogging this at 0300!!

I now face a bit of a dilemma. Do I go to bed and try and get up at around 0900 in the hope that I’m tired enough to sleep before my 15 hour day on Wednesday, or do I push through and stay up through to tonight?

Based on past experience this can go three ways: it will go as planned, I’ll fall asleep at some point before lunch and screw any chance of sleeping tonight, or I’ll end up in that odd place where I should be tired tonight, but aren’t.

And so this leads me into the title of this little blog. Cabin Crew wave goodbye to their body clock not long into their career. We’re so accustomed to working at the oddest hours and fighting our circadian rhythm that it no longer exists, or at least as good as doesn’t. We push through that tiredness barrier so often that we do it involuntary (and usually when we least want to), we have such odd sleep patterns and can operate on little sleep for days on end that it catches up with us and has us so drained that a meteor crashing into our bedrooms wouldn’t wake us up from our marathon catch up sleep.

Anyone who thinks that flying is glamourous should consider this, along with a long list of other reasons.

I’m now off to make a coffee and try to figure out how to keep myself awake and entertained until the sun comes up and the rest of the non-flyer people start their daily lives.

Wish me luck!!!!

When passengers think that their seat is a throne

It’s amazing that as soon as some people sit down in that passenger seat they become convinced that they are, in fact, sitting on a Royal Throne and that the call button is their sceptre with which to rule their subjects (that being us, the Crew).

Yesterday, for instance, me and Tom were tottering through the cabin with our duty free cart, offering our various duty-paid wares and what-not, when we were accosted by a woman with a mound of rubbish on her tray table that she had accumulated between herself and her two friends. It was entirely piled up on her tray table, and for the briefest moment I wondered if perhaps she was one of those arts and crafts types and was trying to build a model of the Taj Mahal.

No, it turned out she wanted us to take it away for her. Now this wouldn’t normally be much of a problem, but she’d already been quite nippy with myself and a couple of the other crew earlier on, so I wasn’t especially inclined to be too helpful.

I explained to her that I couldn’t take it from here then and there as I had nowhere to put it (I had my duty free cart with me) and that I wasn’t allowed to leave my cart unattended for safety reasons.

“Well NO ONE has been to collect in the rubbish. HE has rubbish too!!” she snapped. “He” was the poor chap across the aisle who had an empty pot of pringles and a can of beer he was still drinking from. I smiled at him sympathetically as I could tell by his face the last thing he wanted was to get drawn into anything with this woman and her friends.

I explained to her that the crew had in fact been through to collect in rubbish after we finished the bar and perhaps she had just missed it or hadn’t been finished eating when we came through. Anyway, before she could contest that (as they always do) I gave the woman one of our duty free bags and said that she could put the rubbish in that and either wait for us to come back through for rubbish, or to take it to the toilets when she next went there and pop the bag into one of those bins. Or she could even take it to the galley.

Well, you’d have thought I’d told her to sacrifice her first born! After snatching the bag out my hand she started throwing her rubbish into it in a very childlike huff.

A little while later I was passing through the cabin when a passenger seated in one of the aisle seats calls out, “Here, get me a lemonade!”

I should point out here that I often say the first thing that comes into my head (which isn’t always the moat appropriate), and on this occasion it was “Get up and get it yourself.”

I know that many of you may be horrified at this response, but he was slouched so low down in his seat and said it in such a snide voice that I really couldn’t help myself. By the by he never did follow me down for his lemonade.

Which brings us round to today’s little argument.

PAX: “My seat doesn’t recline”
Me: “No. It doesn’t. The jumpseat behind you stops it reclining.”
PAX: “This is not good enough. I want to sit there where the seat reclines.” At this he pouts behind him to two empty extra legroom seats by the second set of main doors.
Me: (having seen this coming a mile off) “I’m afraid you have to pay extra for those seats at the time of booking or at check-in, so I can’t let you sit there. However…”
PAX: “This is an outrage! This seat is not comfortable. I want a comfortable seat! I want those seats!”
Me: “As I said you can’t sit in those seats. But if you give me a…”
PAX: “No! This seat does not recline. I want one that does. You are useless!”
Me: “I see sir. Well, I was going to look and see what seats we had elsewhere in the cabin you could move but now you can just stay where you are.”
PAX: “What?”
Me: “Well if you hadn’t kept interrupting me before calling me useless I would have tried to find you a reclinable seat, but it’s pretty clear that all you want is to get the extra legroom seat. So as I just said you can stay there for the next four hours.”
PAX: “This is outrageous. How dare you…”

At this point I lost interest in his rantings and turned away from him to ask the lovely woman across the aisle, “Any drinks or snacks?”

I guess this must make me seem like an awful crew member, but it really is only he small percentile of immediately rude and obnoxious passengers who get this sort of attitude out of me. Normally I’m chatty and engaging with passengers. But theres always the few who instantly push all the wrong buttons.