Every profession (well, I won’t say EVERY profession. NEARLY every profession) has its share of people who are, shall we say, not angels. You’ve undoubtedly heard about these people through warnings:
- Don’t agitate the front desk person when you’re checking in or you could wind up with the worst room in the hotel.
- Don’t make a restaurant server mad because they could spit in your food.
The same thing goes for flight attendants. Except when it comes to flight attendants, with a few hundred people on each of their flights, sometimes several times per day, they get their share of rude, demanding, oppositional people on a pretty frequent basis.
Some of them, bless their hearts, deal with all that angst with their heads held high and respond like a perfect lady or gentleman.
And then you’ve got the passive-aggressive ones. Or the ones who know things that maybe you wish they…didn’t.
Several years ago, a Redditor named Bobbylink21 asked on the r/AskReddit subreddit:
Flight Attendants, what’s the dirty little secret of your industry?
There were over 3,000 replies before the post was eventually shut down. Here are some of the dirty little secrets they admitted to:
- I used to be a flight attendant and when someone was really rude I’d just go to the computer we had to reset the inflight tv screens and I’d keep resetting theirs sporadically so that they couldn’t watch their movie. Very petty of me I know.– Fluffy-Departure
- (Remember the guy who complained about flight staff cutting the line? Here’s more of the story) Never affiliated with an airline, but worked at hotel that had an airline contract. We’d pick up a crew, guarantee their rooms, and take them back. Part of their contract was that they had to have 8-10 (can’t remember specifically) of uninterrupted sleep. Basically their rooms had to be perfect (AC can’t go out at 2am). No vacuuming the hallway while those rooms were occupied. Don’t even check in guests with kids near them. We were always told that if a pilot doesn’t get the 8 hours of sleep (or whatever, they have to cancel the flight).– Anonymous
- If the air pressure sensor goes off to trigger the oxygen masks, the PA system will automatically roughly triple in volume since there’s less air to convey sound and there’s likely to be a lot of noise in the cabin.– KNHaw
- Not a flight attendant, but my friend is. She is very skilled at cropdusting. — hairymonkeyinmyanus
- (in reply to the above) Best to drop one near children or old people. They’ll get blamed. — DreamerMMA
- I once overheard a phone call at the gate check-in. A flight attendant was hungover, slept-in and was going to be pretty late. A minute later, the person at the kiosk made an announcement about how some pre-flight maintenance was going to delay the flight. I was thinking like, “you lying S.O.B.”. Lol — TheDjTanner
- The toilets are near where we sit, and no matter how hard you try to cover the fact that you’re taking a dump. It makes a different noise than if you just go number 1.– FlyFeetFiddlesticks
- You have a set limit of how many hours you can fly, and you need 12 hours of rest between duties, i’ve once seen a pilot Wait 2 unnecessary minutes to turn off the engine to make the flight attendant out of hours for the next day– Pellem01
- We give you decaf even if you ask for caffeinated — Dry-Dingo-2678
- Not a flight attendant, but used to be a supervisor for a major US carrier. We had an employee whose child had a science project about germs. She brought her kid in on an overnight aircraft and they took samples from all over. The galley, lavatories, seats, tray tables, just about everywhere. The area with the most amount of fecal matter was the tray tables. Yep. I also never drink anything that is never sealed because I have witnessed cleaners who clean the lavatories then jump to the galley without changing gloves.– cardfan4life17
- We have a list with every passenger’s full name and seat number. Sometimes when we’re bored we’ll Google you.– TheVintageStew
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