Why Your Flight Attendant Hates You

Ever wonder what could drive a flight attendant to curse passengers out, pop open the emergency slide and go for a ride? Well, even if you hadn’t, the good people at Reader’s Digest asked a bunch of flight attendants what sort of behaviors really get under their skin.

As a companion to its piece on pilot confessions, the Digest has posted 13 Things Your Flight Attendant Won’t Tell You.

Among the irksome things passengers do:

* “No, it’s not OK to come back into the galley to stretch and bend over with your rear end in my face while I’m in my jump seat during my only break, trying to eat a meal.”

* “Just in case you hadn’t noticed, there are other people on the airplane besides you. So don’t clip your toenails, snore with wild abandon, or do any type of personal business under a blanket!”

* “Passengers are always coming up to me and tattling on each other. ‘Can you tell him to put his seat up?’ ‘She won’t share the armrest.’ What am I, a preschool teacher?”

* “We don’t have a boyfriend in every city. And our median age these days is 44.”

* “Yes, passengers are incredibly rude, but stealing a beer, cursing out passengers, and jumping out of a plane the way Steven Slater did is not the way to handle it. You disarm an unruly passenger by introducing yourself, asking his name, and saying something like ‘I’ve been incredibly nice to you for three hours. Why are you treating me like this?’ Generally that gets the other passengers on your side–and sometimes they’ll even applaud.”

13 Things Your Flight Attendant Won’t Tell You [RD.com]

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