Champagne in Times Square, Airport Standby, and a Flight to Rome for My Birthday

I said in my last post that once training ends, you don’t ease into being a flight attendant. You get dropped into it. Sometimes you don’t even know where you’re going until the night before, and sometimes, if the universe is feeling particularly generous and not a little bit dramatic, you also don’t know where you’re going until they call your name over the intercom at JFK and tell you to go meet a crew because you’re headed to Rome. ROME. On my birthday!

Fortunately (or perhaps unfortunately) for all of us, I cannot tell a simple story in a straight line when there is backstory available, so before we get to Rome, we have to go all the way back to 1998 and Love@AOL.

I’ve known my friend Joel since I was 17 years old, which should already tell you this story has weird roots. Back then, AOL had this dating section called Love@AOL.com, which I suppose was the elder millennial version of downloading an app and making a series of choices that your frontal lobe would absolutely not endorse once fully formed. I'm 17 years old living in Charlotte, North Carolina, restless in a way I did not understand yet, deeply convinced that my life was not supposed to stay there, though I would not have had language for that at the time. I just knew I was itching for some kind of escape hatch. So naturally, like any teen girl who had access to the internet and a little too much audacity, I lied about my age and made a dating profile.

Totally reasonable behavior. Very demure, very mindful. Gold star decision-making. Y'all will soon notice a common thread amongst these adventures I'm going to share.

I talked to a few people through that weird little AOL site before getting bored of it and wandering off, but Joel is one of two amazing humans who got stuck with me for life because I said "We're friends now, deal with it." We met up at Rock Bottom Brewery, and I honestly do not remember enough of the lead-up to tell you what version of my fake age or fake maturity level I was working with that day, but I do remember that at some point I pushed him into a fountain and he took it like a complete champ, which, frankly, is one hell of a first-date screening tool. If a man can survive being unexpectedly shoved into decorative water and still remain chill, that tells you something. We stayed friends, and over the years he remained this sort of random but beloved thread in the fabric of my life.

Fast forward to 2008. I’m in New York now, living in Kew Gardens, fresh-ish off flight attendant training, and still so new to the job that almost everything feels fake. I had been flying for maybe three months. Three months is enough time to stop feeling like a complete newborn baby bird, but not enough time to actually understand the scale of airline operations or trust that you know what’s coming next. Three months is enough to have some stories and some confidence and still be wildly delusional about how much you understand.

It was my birthday, and Joel happened to be in New York, visiting from New Haven, Connecticut (a location that features in a few future stories) for the 2600 conference, which, if that means something to you, congratulations on your extremely niche tech dork credentials, love you <3.

We met up in Times Square, which is objectively one of the weirdest places on earth, because it is both a tourist hellscape and also, when you are twenty-seven and a little drunk and staring up at the billboards, undeniably magical. We split a bottle of champagne, poured it into Starbucks paper cups (because apparently we were committed to elegance but only in spirit because open alcohol might not be totally legal), and I remember leaning against one of those squat concrete barriers in Times Square and just feeling absolutely stunned by where my life had ended up. I remember thinking "That psychic I talked to last year was totally right, I don't recognize my life anymore."

It is one thing to see Times Square on television. It is another thing entirely to stand in the middle of it, at night, with the whole place flashing and blinking and humming like a pinball machine, built to overwhelm the senses. It doesn’t just light up the street. It lights up the sky. It lights up your skin. It makes everything feel louder and brighter and more cinematic than real life usually allows. And I remember thinking, in that private little way we sometimes do when life catches us off guard, How the hell did I get here? Not just geographically. Existentially. How did I go from being a girl who lied on AOL because she wanted out of North Carolina to standing in Times Square with a friend from my weird internet past, drinking champagne out of paper cups, while my brand new airline job waited for me in the morning?

Well, not morning, exactly. See, as of midnight, I was on call. On A-days. Access days. Which meant Delta had access to me for a three-day block of time, 24/7, but I had already been assigned airport standby starting at 4 p.m the next day. That matters, because once you’re assigned something specific, you can call scheduling and get what was called “released.” Released meant they were confirming that yes, this is your assignment, yes, for sure, yes, they are not going to yank it and reassign you to some fresh hell at 6 a.m. Released meant you could exhale. It meant you were safe to have a life until you had to report for whatever you were assigned. It meant, in my case, that I could absolutely drink champagne in Times Square at midnight on my birthday, because I was still legal per FAA "bottle-to-throttle" requirements, and I knew I could get enough sleep, wake up at a civilized hour (noon, obviously), pack my bag, and get myself to JFK in full responsible grown-up mode.

Joel and I parted ways around one in the morning. I took the Long Island Rail Road back to Kew Gardens. I slept until almost noon, which felt delicious and exactly right. Then I got myself together and headed to JFK for standby.

Now, airport standby is a strange little purgatory. You have to be completely ready to go. Uniform on. Bag packed. Lunch packed. Makeup on. Hair done. You are not “kind of maybe on call.” You are physically there at the airport, fully marinated in anticipation, waiting for something to happen. And from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. at JFK, especially in those days, there was a very real chance something would happen. You have to understand the scale of Delta’s operation out of JFK. The international departures alone were enough to make that place feel electrically alive. Somebody’s commuter flight could be late. Somebody could call out sick. Somebody could time out. A trip could fall apart at the last second and they’d need a warm body ready to go. You'd be surprised at how often it happens.

Also, standby only paid half your normal hourly rate, which was rude, frankly. Sitting there for four hours and not getting picked up felt like the world’s most boring punishment. So naturally, on my birthday, I had decided I was going somewhere exciting. I was absolutely certain of it. This was one of those moments in my life where I just believed something with my full heart and expected reality to fall in line. It was my birthday. I was in New York. I was young and cute and full of good energy and I had the kind of optimism that only exists when you have not yet had enough bitter travel days to temper it. I just knew I was going to go somewhere fun. I manifested it!

“Margaret Thomas, please report to the duty desk.”

If you have never had your name called over the intercom in that tone, let me tell you: your body reacts before your brain does. Y'all, my butt clenched involuntarily. I grabbed my bags and scurried over to the duty desk. I get there and the In-Flight Manager on duty told me to go meet my crew in briefing room K. I’d been assigned a trip. "You’re going to Rome.”

Oh. Hell. Yes. There are destinations, and then there is Rome. Rome is not, “Cool, another layover.” Rome is one of those names that has enough cultural weight behind it that even saying it to yourself feels dramatic. Rome. The Colosseum. The Vatican. Gelato. Ruins. History. Audrey Hepburn-adjacent fantasy nonsense. Cute Italian men on Vespas. "Ciao, Bella." Delicious gelato. Excellent espresso. Rome is ICONIC, and today is my BIRTHDAY!

I was thrilled. Deeply, embarrassingly thrilled. I had no fucking chill, y'all, I bust into that briefing room excited. Like, golden retriever level of excited. I was, of course, the most junior flight attendant on the crew, which meant I got the shit position. That’s just how it works. The most junior person gets the least desirable working position, the worst jumpseat, literally whatever nobody else wants because you sign up for your spot in seniority order. I don’t remember exactly which position I had going over, but I remember not caring in the slightest because I was going to Rome. You could have put me in the least glamorous trash picker-upper role in the history of Delta and I still would have been glowing.

The thing about crew briefings is that if you don’t know what’s happening, they look like chaos. They are not chaos. They are a very specific form of organized, ritualized information exchange that keeps the machine moving. The flight attendants do our own briefing first. Everybody signs up for a specific position. Each position has responsibilities tied to it, equipment you’re responsible for checking, doors or exits associated with your jumpseat, service flows, safety duties, all of it. Then we go meet with the pilots, usually on the plane, standing in first class, and the captain gives the flight deck briefing: expected flight time, weather, turbulence, any delays, anything weird operationally, just enough information so that everybody is moving with the same set of facts in their head.

And at some point during that pilot briefing, the captain asked if it was anyone’s first trip to Rome. My hand shot up immediately. So did one of the first officers.

Everyone else on that crew had this jaded, old-hat attitude, like yeah yeah, Rome, eyeroll, been there, eaten that, moving on. We call those folks "Slam-Clickers" for the sound the hotel door makes when we get to our layover. Slam. Click. See you when it's time to get picked up and go back to the airport. But me and this one pilot were like "let's plan to walk around Rome when we land."

The flight itself is not especially what I remember most, which is probably a good sign because it means nothing terrible happened. I do remember one family with three children seated in the middle section of the 767, which was a 2-3-2 configuration, and those children were so absurdly well-behaved that I became suspicious. Not suspicious like they were plotting something. Suspicious like, where did these tiny polished diplomats come from? They were maybe eight, ten, and twelve, and they were poised and quiet and self-contained in a way that made me want to find their parents and offer tribute.

So I asked where the parents were, and the kids pointed out that they were in the surrounding seats, window and aisle, and I leaned over and said, “Can I buy you a drink? I know the beer and wine is free, but do you need a cocktail? Your children are so well-behaved. I really appreciate it.” And I meant it. People who don’t work with the public may not fully understand the emotional impact of encountering lovely, calm, small humans when you are prepared for the opposite. It can feel downright spiritual.

We landed in Rome sometime around ten in the morning, which was ideal because it meant we had basically a whole day on the ground. A twenty-four-hour layover is magic when you’re young and new and ready to see the world. Because of the time zone change, I had an extra eight hours of my birthday!

Me and the other first-timer were ready to go full feral tourist. We basically made plans on the bus: Meet downstairs in twenty minutes. Let’s go see the city. We were in Rome and we were absolutely going to see it all. So that's exactly what we did: we walked for miles. I wore flip-flops, because at twenty-seven your body has not yet taught you all the lessons it will later insist upon.

We wandered through streets and piazzas and public spaces that felt impossibly old to my American brain. That was one of the things I remember so vividly from Europe in general: the humbling experience of being surrounded by buildings and ruins and architecture that make the United States feel, by comparison, like a brand new strip mall. Everything felt textured and ancient and sun-warmed and just slightly crumbling in this glorious way. We took photos of statues we absolutely could not identify. We marveled at details we did not understand. We probably walked past historically significant things without realizing it because we were too busy going, “Oh my god, look at that building.”

This guy was definitely taking a selfie, if you ask me:

At one point, and I still genuinely do not know how this happened, we set out for the Colosseum and somehow ended up at the wrong one. I didn't even know there was a second one (I'm not crazy, it's real, but I don't remember what it was). You can't possibly know the disappointment we felt when we realized we were idiots.

How do you go to the wrong Colosseum in Rome? How does that happen? I could not tell you then and I cannot tell you now. But I remember that moment of turning a corner expecting to find the entrance and feeling confused because there were not enough people around and the vibe was off and then slowly realizing that whatever grand old structure we had confidently marched ourselves toward was not, in fact, the Colosseum. It was the kind of travel mishap that only becomes funny once you stop being annoyed, and luckily for us we were too delighted by the day to stay annoyed for long.

Eventually we found the actual Colosseum, which looked exactly like the Colosseum should look, all grand and iconic and sunbaked and full of the weight of centuries, and then we found out how much it cost to go inside and both quickly reached the same conclusion: absolutely not.

So instead, we did something far more aligned with our budget and our general energy, which was get a beer somewhere within view of the Colosseum and call it good. I think it was a Peroni. It tasted like triumph.

We sat there drinking cold beer in the proximity of one of the most famous ancient structures in the world, and honestly? That may have been the perfect way to do it. We didn’t need to pay for a full educational experience. We were young (on my side, at least), underpaid, overexcited airline crew members on a layover we couldn't guarantee we would experience ever again. We wanted the feeling of Rome, and we got it.

We made it back to the hotel sometime in the late afternoon so we could rest a little before dinner with the crew, and then we all met up that evening and went out together. It was one of those lovely travel dinners where the old hands and the newbies all kind of settle into each other. Nobody is performing too hard. Everybody is relaxed because the work is done for the day. There is wine. There is pasta. There is that particular atmosphere international layovers can have where everyone is just slightly shinier than normal because you are all temporarily living a type of life that transcends reality.

I mentioned at some point that it was my birthday, and the captain bought my dinner, which felt both kind and perfectly cinematic. The wine was wonderful and very inexpensive, which is its own kind of European insult to the United States. We lingered. We ate. We talked. And somewhere in there, I had the very distinct sense that I was living inside a story I would one day tell.

The next morning, before we had to head back, I put on a dress I loved and walked around near the hotel to find coffee. Real coffee. Italian coffee. The kind that feels like you should stand at a little counter and drink it with purpose (because that's how the Italians do it). I remember two very handsome Italian men in suits whistling at me on the street, and I, being twenty-seven and full of birthday magic, accepted this as evidence that I was a devastating beauty in Rome. It later occurred to me that they may simply have been Italian men existing in their natural habitat, because everyone in Italy seemed to be wearing a suit and carrying themselves like a person in a fragrance commercial, but at the time I was happy to be perceived.

Then I went back to the hotel, struggled on my pantyhose and my wool-polyester uniform skirt and vest, packed up my suitcase, zipped myself into flight attendant mode, and flew home.

That was my 27th birthday. At the time, it felt like proof that I had figured something out. Like I had somehow hacked reality. Like this job was going to keep rewarding me with exactly the kind of life I’d been secretly trying to conjure ever since I was that restless teenage girl in North Carolina pretending to be older and looking for exits. And to be fair, sometimes it did.

But what I did not understand yet—what I was still too new and too dazzled to understand—was that if the system could drop Rome in your lap with almost no warning, it could just as easily hand you something much less glamorous. Eventually, of course, it did. Like the Christmas I spent in Omaha, Nebraska.