Some Senior Mamas Are Scary (Until You Get To Know Them)

There are few people more terrifying to a brand-new flight attendant than a senior flight attendant who is both very good at her job and impossible to read.

People in the airline industry are just like people in every industry, but with a few more quirks. There are many thousands of flight attendants at every major US-based airline; working as in-flight crew is the literal definition of "your mileage may vary." Some of the people you work with are cold, standoffish, or mean. Some are welcoming and kind, and help you get better at the job. Some people present one way and turn out to be another.

With the number of flight attendants numbering almost twenty thousand when I worked at Delta, you can imagine that there were a lot of personalities. The ones that stressed me out the most were the Extremely Quiet, Extremely Efficient ones.

In my experience, the Mean Senior Mamas are actually easier to deal with. I understand where I stand. They're bitter about some old seniority bullshit, bitter about trips ("lines") they want to hold but can't, bitter about not getting a union, bitter about people trying to unionize...always bitter about something.

Mean people give you something to work with. You can privately decide they're an asshole, complain about them to your friends, and spend the rest of the trip doing your best job while mentally composing the story you’re going to tell about them later. You can play up your Southern accent (or make one up, how would they know?) and kill 'em with kindness. You can use them as a foil to your friendliness with passengers.

Competence without emotional engagement is much scarier to me, personally. Especially when it comes in the form of a woman who has been flying longer than you've been legally allowed to drink and can probably look at an airplane cabin for approximately four seconds and identify seventeen things you have done wrong.

I met one of those women on one of my first international trips.

Picture it: 2008, JFK to SNN. Shannon, Ireland. (re-read that in Sophia's voice from Golden Girls)

Shannon, Ireland is a beautiful place to visit. It is not, however, the same kind of international trip as those to mainland Europe. If you are picturing my glamorous introduction to international aviation involving champagne, a sleek wide-body airplane, sweeping staircases, and me emerging into Europe looking like Audrey Hepburn with a rolling suitcase, I would like you to know that I had pictured something similar. Instead, I got Shannon. On a 757.

Flying international on a 757 is like flying a domestic trip with a passport requirement. It's so anti climactic to attempt international meal service in a single-aisle aircraft, but this was very early in my career and I was thrilled to be leaving the country and getting paid for it. I would have been thrilled with anything as long as I could collect a new stamp in my passport!

I was also terrified on this international trip, mostly of her. I'm not going to use her real name, so we’ll call her Bridget. Bridget was immaculate. Perfect uniform. Perfect hair. Perfect lipstick. Perfect shoes (not too high, not too low). Not a stray thread, not a crooked scarf, not so much as a visible human pore. She didn't smile during briefing. She also had approximately nine words available to her at any given time and apparently saw absolutely no reason to use all of them. Me? You've met me. Why use five words when 15 will do? People who don't smile and don't speak much send my anxiety through the roof.

I was very junior, which meant I was still operating under the assumption that senior flight attendants possessed some secret adult knowledge that would eventually be bestowed upon me once I had survived enough flights, nonrev travel, divorces, crew scheduling calls, and passenger medical emergencies.

I assumed they knew which hotels had free breakfasts. Which pursers would make your life miserable. Which captains were creeps. Which airport food you could safely eat at 10:30 at night. Which routes were worth bidding. How to identify and troubleshoot galley carts with a sticky brake.

It turns out that this was correct, at least about Bridget. She knew everything. So naturally, during boarding, I fucked something up directly in front of her. It wasn’t catastrophic. Nobody died. The FAA did not send me a fine in the mail. But it was exactly the kind of rookie mistake that feels enormous when you are approximately six minutes into your career and desperate to prove you belong there.

I had gotten myself into a jam during boarding, put my body somewhere it shouldn't have been while directing passengers to do something with their luggage, and created a tiny bottleneck that was about to become a much larger one. Bridget saw it happening (of course she saw it) and I tried not to cringe when I saw her come out of galley and head toward me.

She stepped in, moved one thing, redirected one passenger, said about four words to me, and the problem disappeared. More importantly, nobody knew it had been my fault. She hadn't corrected me in front of passengers. She hadn't announced my incompetence to the rest of the crew. She hadn't even given me a soul-withering Look. She had just fixed it.

Which was somehow worse, because now I felt like a lecture was coming. I had something happen on a trip to Mumbai, which caused another, more senior flight attendant to chew me out so long I ended up crying for twenty minutes. For some reason, this silence felt similar, and I spent the next two hours waiting for the shoe to drop.

During takeoff, I waited for it. During the first beverage service, I waited, knowing that it wasn't going to happen while we were delivering meals. I expected it during the clean up, while clearing meal trays from passengers (who had just realized that flying from New York to Ireland overnight does not actually provide enough nighttime to get a decent night’s sleep).

Every time Bridget appeared in my peripheral vision, I thought: Here we go.

But I waited for nothing. She just worked. Diligently, not speaking, no expression the entire time. There is a rhythm that experienced flight attendants have that you don't possess yet when you’re new. You're still doing every task individually. You could almost use a metronome to time your movements once you've gotten into a groove.

Start coffee brewer.

Warm the carafe.

Stack the cups.

Break up ice.

Ice into bucket.

Coffee into carafe.

Unwrap napkins.

Open stir sticks.

Once the second drink service was done, she broke it all down again in nearly the same order. Watching her made me feel like a toddler helping her mother cook Thanksgiving dinner; I was technically participating. I felt clumsier than usual, no matter what I was doing. Bridget, on the other hand, made no wasted movements.

Eventually we got done and the cabin went dark. Passengers reclined their seats the full two and three-quarters inches afforded to them by modern aircraft interior design and attempted to sleep before we turned the lights back on approximately nine minutes later to tell them Ireland was approaching.

The crew gathered in the galley (except for the flight leader, they stayed up front). This is where I learned that seniority does not make flight attendants more mature — it just gives them better gossip.

I heard about somebody's third husband, somebody else's second bankruptcy, a captain who apparently had two girlfriends in two different base cities, and a flight attendant whose name caused two other people in the galley to simultaneously say, "Oh, honey," but no one would say anything further.

Bridget contributed almost nothing to this chatter. She sat there with her coffee, listening. At some point she pulled out a notebook from her apron pocket to check something, and I noticed a little cardboard matchbook tucked inside it.

A matchbook from a hotel. I remember being curious about it because even in 2008, carrying around a hotel matchbook felt vaguely like something you did if you were either scrapbooking or having an affair. Bridget didn't strike me as someone to do either of those things. She also didn't smell like a smoker.

I didn't ask. I'm new and I'm nosy. But I'm not stupid.

Eventually Ireland appeared beneath us, green and gray through the windows, and we started preparing the cabin for landing. Bridget and I started the flight strapped into neighboring jumpseats. She hadn't said a word to me during the entire climb out. I expected the same experience as we landed.

If you have never experienced jumpseat intimacy, there is really no civilian equivalent. You can work beside someone for six hours and learn almost nothing about them, then buckle into two fold-down seats facing each other with your knees practically touching and suddenly hear about their childhood trauma, hysterectomy, bankruptcy, mother-in-law, or boyfriend who has recently discovered ketamine. Something about being physically restrained to a chair (that disappears when you're not in it) while hurtling through the sky encourages disclosure, I guess. I don't really have a theory, it's just fascinating.

We were descending into Shannon and I was mentally reviewing everything I had done wrong on the flight and still half wondering whether Bridget had saved her critique for after landing. At this point in my career, I'm not used to people not having something they want me to know about the job I had done, or what they thought of juniors in general or me in particular.

Just like during the takeoff out of JFK, Bridget looked straight ahead. Then, completely without warning, she said: "I think my husband has another family."

My eyebrows flew into my hairline. They practically climbed into the overhead bin. There are moments in life when you realize you have wildly misjudged the direction of a conversation; this was one of them.

I turned toward her. She was still looking straight ahead. I waited for more. Nothing. I didn't want to breathe in case she was going to continue but eventually I ran out of air. That descent took forever.

Because, again, unlike me, Bridget did not use ten words when three would do, and apparently I think my husband has another family had exhausted her conversational budget for final approach. I was screaming on the inside, my curiosity fully piqued.

I finally said something deeply insightful like "What?"

She turned her head to look at me. And that was how I learned why Bridget had specifically bid for Shannon when, at her seniority, she could hold Paris and Rome. Shannon, Ireland, is a place I learned to privately consider the participation trophy of international flying. The route didn't rate an aircraft bigger than a 757, and took less time than JFK to Seattle. It's not glamorous and there is very little to actually do in Shannon. Turns out there was a very good reason she bid for Shannon that month, and that matchbook in her passport also had a reason for existing.

I assumed I understood what we were doing almost immediately. I was ready to get into my Harriet the Spy mode. Wouldn't you jump at the chance to do some international sleuthing?! I legit thought Bridget was trying to catch her husband cheating. That was the obvious answer, but it was the wrong answer.

What she already knew—and what I did not understand until we were well into our 24-hour layover—was much stranger and, somehow, much sadder.

We got to the hotel that morning exhausted, smelling distinctly of of airplane coffee and other people, and theoretically went to our rooms to sleep. An hour later, Bridget knocked on my door. She was wearing jeans. I had never seen her out of uniform before, and it was deeply unsettling. Like seeing your elementary school teacher at the grocery store.

She said she needed to "check something" and that was the whole invitation. Obviously, I grabbed my purse. Because I am nothing if not a down bitch for adventure and shenanigans and apparently if an intimidating senior flight attendant knocks on my hotel room door in Ireland and tells me to come investigate her husband’s possible second family, I will go.

Somewhere along the way, I realized we weren’t actually looking for what I thought we were looking for. And I was more and more certain that Bridget had absolutely no idea what she was going to actually do if she found what she had come to Shannon to find.

That surprised me more than the secret itself, because I have, for years, assumed older women (not just senior flight attendants) had adulthood figured out. They had marriages and mortgages and good plates. They understood insurance deductibles. They remembered to send birthday cards. Surely, by whatever age Bridget was, you stopped standing in foreign countries wondering what the hell you were supposed to do with your life. That's for the youngsters, right? (As I write this almost 20 years later, I realize I'm still not sure what adulting is. I make all the decisions, but are they good ones? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Maybe.)

Apparently, that is not the case at all. Experience does not eliminate uncertainty. It just gives you much more complicated things to be uncertain about.

By the time we returned to the hotel, I knew more about Bridget than I had any business knowing. She also knew more about me. The time spent together during our little Shannon investigation, we had quietly sustained a deep conversation. We weren't quite at friendship, but it was not not a friendship, you know what I mean?

I remember boarding the return flight and seeing Bridget differently. Not less competent; if anything, more competent. Do you know anyone who would go to another country to get at the truth of something? Because of that trip, I understood for the first time that being capable and being certain are not the same thing. You can know exactly what to do when an airplane is on fire and have absolutely no idea what to do when your marriage is.

Let me know in the comments if you want to hear more about this story.