Classless in First Class

So back to a more lighthearted look at “Oh no you didn’t…”

Folks often wonder if flight attendants ever thought of sort of “getting back” at particularly difficult passengers. Well, c’mon, we are human.

Thank goodness for filters. If the running dialog in my head as I worked a beverage service in a packed cabin on a bad day were to go public it would not be pretty. Sometimes a situation just had to be handled, though, and we knew what those situations were.

So we had a fairly senior crew of good friends flying back from Hawaii one night and this crew was a particularly good one. We actually all had a good time together and cared about making sure our guests had a good time too. The two of us working in First Class were so dismayed when an attractive woman from 6C came up to our galley and closed the curtain behind her during the night. She immediately started crying. She was inconsolable. Finally we learned that her husband of 20 years, with whom she had just spent a week in Hawaii, told her he had been seeing someone else and he wanted a divorce.

He waited until it wouldn’t ruin his vacation and did it in a public place where she couldn’t react. That was impressive, on many levels, and we had seen a lot of divorce declarations. After a while I cruised through the cabin, and he was sleeping like a baby! Oh no sir, not on my watch.

So we gave his wife a few glasses of our best wine and let her talk it out and finally we had to prepare to land. Everyone was seated and I walked through the cabin to pick up the remaining service items. I was careful to take a full glass of water on my tray with me.

As I approached the last row, I did my best “trip over the briefcase in the aisle” impression and deposited that entire glass of water in the lap of the wayward husband. During the ensuing frenzy and my robust apologies I did manage to slip a quick wink in to the wife so she would know it was a gift of solidarity.

Nobody was prouder than the First Class crew, watching that man walk off that plane early in the morning as every businessman in the terminal was starting his day and there walked Aloha Bob in his nice khaki pants strategically soaked.

There’s just some things that can’t go unanswered…

You really don’t want to find where that line is do you??