Gig: Americans Talk About Their Jobs Part 12

Eric Bowers.

I work for some people who go to my church. They own a tire store and a tow company in Kingman, Arizona, and they own this gas station on the freeway outside of Kingman. I think they own some other stuff, too. We're all Mormons and they asked me to work at their tire store, and so I did that, and then, well, I broke my arm in a car accident driving home one night and I couldn't work on tires anymore so they put me out here at the station. It's like a little Indian trading post, smack out in the desert. I've been working here three months.

It's an okay job. It pays okay. It's a heck of drive-thirty miles to work, one way. Comes up to about sixty miles a day. But it's okay. It just depends how many days I work. Right now, I'm here four or five days a week, which is too much. At least, five days is too much. I wish it was always just four, that's okay. Three would be better. But five is just too much. I'm still in high school and I can't get any homework done or anything when I'm working five days. I get too tired. See, I work graveyard. Late night. This place isn't twenty-four hours. I close it up at eleven-thirty, but I don't get home until past midnight. And I need my sleep.

You meet a lot of strange people doing this, a lot of good-looking women, and a lot of really gross-looking women with no teeth, all kinds of crazy stuff. And you meet crazy people, guys who want to trade their watch for a pack of cigarettes or whatever because they're desperate for anything. They lost all their money in Vegas and they stop in and trade ya, try and get money off ya. "We need some gas. We ain't got no money, we need a trip to Kingman." [Laughs] I've driven people to Kingman and helped them get a hotel room for the night, you know, even helped out with the money sometimes-used my own car, my own gas. And they promised me they'd pay me back. They'll say they'll send money in the mail. They never do, but I'm a nice guy so I do that stuff.

I talk to people sometimes about Mormonism. It's a little like preaching. You just tell them about your religion. And, you know, you don't force it upon them. If they don't want to know and they've got a religion, it's no big deal. But people that don't have a religion and don't really go to church, you can tell them what the church is about and if they like it and they accept it, they start coming to church. If they don't, don't talk to them. Just leave them alone. You can only bug a person so much. It's just something to share to the people that don't know. Because a lot of people out there really don't even know what Mormons are. They hear things, like we're bad people and we have a lot of wives and whatever, but it's not all true.

I've had some nice conversations with the people who come in here. And not all about religion-I'll talk about anything usually. It's fun. I don't have much to do. I don't pump the gas myself. So I have time to talk.

And, like I said, I have had some nice talks, but there's not really anything I like about this job. Nothing's really exciting about it. Busi- ness has been slow. Weekends are busier, but not that busy. There's cute girls that come in here sometimes, driving nice cars. Their tops are missing, pretty much. [Laughs] They come in in their bikinis and I'm just keeping an eye on them, making sure they're not lifting anything! [Laughs] That's kind of fun. But other than that, there's nothing really that good out here. I do it because I know the family that runs the place through my church. That's really the only reason. If it wasn't for them I'd be working somewhere downtown in Kingman. [Laughs] There's cute girls there, too.

It's lonely mostly, that's the thing. Just lonely. I listen to the radio. I eat. Sometimes somebody from the family that owns this comes by and empties the safe or we do inventory together. Usually the husband. He's a nice guy. We joke around a bit. But a lot of times, he comes during the morning shift so I don't see him.

I get deliveries sometimes; we sell snacks and sodas, too. But I think a lot of that comes during the morning. There's lots of nights I don't see anybody except the people off the freeway. There's nights I don't talk to anybody.

Out where this place is, it's just all desert, and there's a lot of weird people that live out around here. They're kind of scary. They actually scare me more than the freeway people do because the main reason anybody'd live all the way out here is because of drug problems and problems with the government. Most of them are like that. Not all of them-there's nice ones, but there's a lot of weirdos that do weird things, they drive really awful-looking cars. White trucks with blue doors. No teeth. I try not to get involved with them. I'm polite. I smile, take their money, bag what they're buying, but that's it. I'm scared so I try not to get personal. That's probably the worst part about the job. The drive is no fun, but the scary people, they're the worst.

I have to say, though, I've never had a violent encounter here. This place has never been robbed. People ask me all the time if it's been robbed, and I say no. It's been robbed at night, after we closed, but no one's ever come in with a gun and tried to take the money when someone was working. And if they did, and it was me standing here, I'd just put it in a bag and take it to their car for them. I wouldn't have any problems with that. I'd even probably give them my wallet, because there's nothing in it. [Laughs]

I was raised in Kingman. I was born in Kingman. So was my father, so I'm second generation. I've never been out of the country, except for Tijuana. But I'm going to get out of here. I'm hoping to go to college. I'm going to be an engineer. In ten years, I should have a job and a million dollars! [Laughs] That's what I want, but everybody wants a million dollars.

So I don't know what'll happen. I'm going to see a lot of things someday I've never seen before, that's for sure. I'm going all across America. I'm going to go to like Africa maybe. Go everywhere. I don't know where I want to live eventually. [Laughs] I might go to Africa and find a wife and live in Africa. [Laughs] I don't know. Probably Oregon or Washington. There's a lot of rain up there, but I like the rain. I've lived in the heat all my life, it would be kind of nice to get somewhere cool and nice.

You're always dealing with teenagers,

people, drunks, drug addicts, or

prost.i.tutes.

BUS DRIVER.

Lupita Perez.

I'm a "bus operator." They don't like calling us bus drivers, they like to call us "bus operators." I have no idea what the difference is. "You're not bus drivers, you're bus operators." Okay, no problem.

I'm thirty-eight years old and I've been doing this for three years. I used to work at an elementary school as a teacher's a.s.sistant. And I liked that okay, but the money wasn't there, you know? And I was looking for a part-time job for the summer and a neighbor of mine told me, "Hey, the Transit Authority is hiring for part-time. What have you got to lose?" So that's how it all started. And it turned out to be a career! [Laughs]

It's not a bad job at all. It really isn't. I mean like anything, you have your good days, you have your bad days. But it's a good opportunity for me and my family. The benefits. The insurance. I'm a single mom so I have to think of this stuff, you know? This is just a good opportunity. I'm going to stick it out for the long haul, and take advantage of this good retirement. When I hit sixty, it's gonna be beautiful.

Right now, my average day is between twelve, thirteen hours. I'm supposed to work only five days a week, but if I get ordered to come in, I work six days. During a shift, they try to have the operator driving at the most eight hours straight, but it all depends-there's days where you get an hour or two break. It all depends on the manpower on what you get. And you never know when those breaks are gonna come. Sometimes when you get to one end of your line, you might have only two minutes before you have to turn around and start again-just enough time to walk to the bathroom and then walk back. You never know what's going to happen.

I drive all different routes, all over the place-don't have a specific one. Tonight I'm driving the 94, San Fernando all the way to Simi Valley. The one-way trip is almost three hours. I've been doing that since five-thirty this morning. I went there and back.

The route I prefer-everybody thinks I'm nuts-is the 81. The 81 is the Figueroa and it goes from Eagle Rock Plaza all the way to 117th and Imperial-the middle of Watts. You go through some interesting parts on the 81. It's one of the busiest lines in the country. I like the ones that are very heavy and busy. They're always on the go. Always. And before you know it, your day is done. I hate the routes that drag-that you hardly pick up anybody and you got to go really slow-and it's so boring! I don't like those. Not at all.

I really like the people on the 81, too. Because let's face it, the 81, basically we pick up the poor people. The 81 is basically what they consider the low-cla.s.s pa.s.sengers. But for being low cla.s.s, they pay. And they don't give me any ha.s.sles. And they always say, "Hi, how are you?" Or "Good afternoon," or "Good morning." They don't ha.s.sle you like on the 401.

The 401 starts in downtown L.A., off of Venice and 17th, and it goes all the way up in the hills by Altadena and Pasadena. The people who ride that line are always complaining about us. We never do anything right. If we're even a few seconds late or a few seconds early, they're complaining about us. Even, you know-we can't help the hazards on the road-and if we hit a pothole, if it happens to be a b.u.mpy road, these people are like, "Oh, well you hit that too hard. You should have gone around it." I mean, we go through the middle of downtown on the 401, okay? And during rush hour? Forget it! I mean it's b.u.mper to b.u.mper. And these people, they know this. And they still complain. They just complain about every little thing. You really have to baby the people on that line.

But you get used to it. You can get used to anything. That's one thing I've found driving a bus. [Laughs] You learn to adapt. For example, some of these old buses don't have power steering. So it's like, uh! uh! uh! trying to make the turn. And at the end of the day you're kind of sore up in here. Your muscles in your shoulders and your arms. You're tired. You sleep real solidly. Or like the bathroom, okay? If you have to go in the middle of the route, it's not easy, especially for a female driver. So you tend to judge how long your run is going to be. And you kind of know when to drink and when not to drink, so you can make it to the other end. But if things get really bad, then you stop at the nearest Burger King or Jack in the Box. Those are the easy access ones to get in and out to the restroom. You just tell the people, "I'll be right back." And then you park the bus, you secure the bus, and definitely take your transfers and your belongings when you go. [Laughs] And you learn the hard way-knowing if you're going to make it. That comes along with experience.

Of course, the biggest thing is learning about how to deal with so many different types of people. You deal with different nationalities. Different kinds of everything. You gotta know the rules. In this part of town, they treat me good. Maybe because they see me as the same nationality. But, like, when I go to South Central, umm, it's okay for them to treat me like garbage, but I can't go around and treat them like garbage. That's the way it is. And then like when I go into San Marino or Beverly Hills, I get treated different and I have to treat them different, because hey, I'm nothing compared to what they are. You learn to read and you have to adjust yourself to whatever area you're driving in. Because each area is different and people act different. And every day is something new. Fortunately, for me, I enjoy that aspect. Most of the time, I love these people. They make the job for me.

Of course, I do encounter problems. You're always dealing with teenagers, people, drunks, drug addicts, or prost.i.tutes. Sometimes it does get dangerous. I was on the 81 line one time. It was a Baby Owl. This guy got on and I don't know if he was drunk or he was high or what. I mean it was hard to tell with this guy. But he just started going off and off and off, like, verbally abusing me. Finally, by luck, an LAPD car happened to pull up next to me, and I stopped and had them remove this man from my bus. And when they got him down, they found a machete on him. You know, he had it in his pant leg. And he had taken the pocket out of his pants, so he could reach down and pull it out real fast. If I hadn't come across LAPD, G.o.d knows what would have happened. I just got lucky. I just-that's all it was. Just luck.

But those situations are rare. More often it's like, well, there's always couples making out on the bus. Always. Sometimes they try to do more than that and you got to kind of stop it, you know? I remember one time on the 33 line, there was a young couple, teenagers. And I guess they didn't want to wait until they got to where they were going. I kind of had to tell them, I said, "You know what guys? Cut it out." It wasn't a crowded bus, but it wasn't empty, either. And the guy kind of says, well, you know, "You're not my mother." I said, "Look. I may not be your mother, but don't disrespect me or the other people on this bus by what you're doing." And then he goes, "You're just jealous." And I said, "Jealous of what?" And he goes, "Well, you must not have a man in your life." And I said, "Oh boy," I said, "Look, it's not that I'm jealous, it's just, what are you doing? You guys probably don't even know what you're doing or know what you are getting into. But if you want to, at least wait until you get her home. Do it behind closed doors, you know?" So they calmed down. And then when they got off, when they got to their stop, he goes, "Oh, I have a big brother for you." I said, "No thanks, I can find my own, thank you." [Laughs] There's a lot of stuff like that.

There are some days it's hard. It really is. Because you're constantly getting abused. People sometimes think we're a machine. That we're not human. You know, people calling us stuff, or "Why were you late?" and "What happened!" It's always the negative. I mean, basically drivers are my friends now. People that understand my work. And you know a lot of drivers that were married lost their spouses because they don't understand us. Like they don't understand the hours we work. I was in a relationship myself recently, and he thought I was always lying to him. "No, you're not going to work. How could you be going to work at this hour of the night?" And so there went the relationship.

Civilians do not understand this job and especially all that we put into this job. I had a lady tell me once, "You get paid to do nothing. You don't do nothing but drive!" And I'm like, "Okay." I said, "Madam, it's not just sitting here driving." I said, "Do you know how much stress it is?" I said, "Not only do I have to take care of you and everyone else on the bus, but I have to take care of the bus, myself, people crossing the street, people driving their cars." I said, "Madam, I'll gladly let you take this shift, and hey, I'll sit back there and relax." She said, "Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't know." So I kind of opened her eyes.

So that's a lesson, you know? That needs to change. People got to realize that we're human beings. You know, we have our bad days. We have our own problems, not only the job but we have our own personal problems. So they got to give us a little bit of a break. Realize that we're not perfect. I mean, sometimes we're sick as a dog and we're out there working and people see you-and they can see that you're sick, they can see that you're not feeling good and they still-people just got to realize that we're human, that we're not a machine. We do break down, you know, we do. But we should still be valued.

I wish I had more good days than I do. Because the good days are very good. And it's a good job, overall it is. It's just kind of up and down sometimes, you know? So when you have a good day, you save those days. You hope to have more days like them than you do. My last good day was about two weeks ago. n.o.body said anything. Everybody paid. I didn't get cussed at, n.o.body tried to pull a fast one over me. Everything went real smooth. No traffic, no accidents, no hazards. That was precious.

If you're going forty miles an hour,

then you probably can't stop.

TRAIN ENGINEER.

David Younts.

I was in law enforcement for eight and a half years, working at the police department in Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina. And I enjoyed it. The schedule was great, the people were great, the benefits were good. But the salary, you know, you work and work and work-and you can't chase the American Dream and have a house and a car and all these nice things on twenty-eight thousand a year. I mean, that's just ridiculous.

So one night, the area supervisor for the Norfolk Southern Railroad, he lived in my town and we were acquaintances-and he just drove up one night while I was pumping gas in the police car, and he said, "We're going to hire some people. How would you like to come work for me?" And, I mean, I always loved trains. I got my first train set when I was five. And I always wanted to work on the railroad. What kid doesn't? [Laughs] So I told him, "Well, that'd be wonderful. What's it pay?" And we talked about it, and I talked about it with Kristen, my girlfriend-who's now my wife-and I took the plunge.

Four years down the road, here I am. I started out as a brakeman. Did that about a year and a half, then they sent me down to Georgia to engineer school. That's a month. And it's great. They teach you everything you need to know. They have full-motion simulators with laser disc technology, laser projection on three walls. It's about as realistic as it gets. Then I came back and they trained me for about ten months with a working engineer. Then they turned me loose, marked me up as a full engineer.

I love it. I mean, the hours are kind of odd. We don't have a regular set schedule of any kind at all. And anything that you could possibly conceive about how people normally get paid, you can just forget all of that. Between the union, and overtime, and different pay rates depending on how many miles you go and how many hours you work, it makes no sense whatsoever. But I make three times what I was making as a cop. I own stock in the company, which split three for one two years ago, and we get bonuses if the company makes a profit, which it does. So the money's great. But more than that, I enjoy what I do. I mean, I enjoy it. It's fun. Now, I'll bet most people you ask, the word "fun" won't even come into their vocabulary when they talk about their job.

Of course, it's not as simple as just sitting in the seat and blowing the horn. There's a lot more to it than that. I mean, say you have a hundred-and-fifty-car train. Well, that's about nine thousand and seven hundred feet long. At any point in time part of the train might be going uphill and part of the train might be going downhill. So you have to know the lay of the land. You've got to be thinking in your mind where the rear of the train is at, and what's going on in between. You know, gravity works one hundred percent of the time. It never fails. So if you have a very heavy train and you start downhill, it's going to pick up speed. You might find your back cars slamming toward the front. So you're always thinking about a mile ahead. "Well, let's see-this train's nine thousand tons, and I know I start downhill here in a little bit, so I better start putting the brakes on now so that I don't go over the speed limit at the bottom of the hill." Sometimes you even brake going uphill because the rear of the train is still coming downhill. Just because the head is going uphill, the rear end is still somewhere else. It's pushing you. You gotta balance it out. You know, if you've got two-thirds coming down and only a third going up, then you need to still be braking. It's just very simple geometry. Common sense.

But it's not easy. I hit five cars as a trainee. I've not killed anyone-they all walked away-and I haven't hit a car since, but it happens a lot. Every engineer, you know-a lot a cars get hit. People drive around the gates all the time. They're nuts, man. They think, "I'm going to take a chance against a train." Hmm, let me see, who's going to win? You know? It's not very bright. I hit a tractor-trailer truck one time. He ran around the gates. I tore his truck up into pieces. Just little pieces. As far as the train-he scratched the paint off a bit. [Laughs]

It's dangerous stuff-no joking-the only injuries we've had at Raleigh in the last ten years have been as a result of having crashes with cars. We had two guys down in Kinston one time hit a gas truck. Wasn't fun. The engineer and the conductor jumped out the window of the engine right before impact. They hit the ground running, and they said when the train hit the truck, the gasoline ran out into the storm drain, and when it exploded it blew manhole covers off the streets for like seven blocks.

And that's not preventable. If you're going ten miles an hour, you know, you can probably stop. If you're going forty miles an hour, then you probably can't stop, and you need to decide in a split second-well let's see, if I put the train in emergency am I going to stop right in the middle of the burning gasoline? Am I going to stop in the middle of the flames? If I keep going, and hit the gas truck, will I pa.s.s through the flames and come to a stop where it's not burning?

Fortunately, that sort of thing doesn't happen very often. I probably-I don't know, I could probably figure it up. I probably worked a total of five or six hundred thousand miles last year and didn't have any incidents at all like that. Which is a pretty good testament to our safety procedures-to the safety of the whole railroad-especially if you think about how busy we are.

Business right now is booming. Things have been so heavy for the railroads-I mean, they've been hiring people left and right for probably ten years now. Everybody's into shipping bulk commodities by rail these days. Coal, grain. They want to run one hundred car trains. And these are hot trains. You know, we haul UPS trains, J. B. Hunt, Ford Motor Company trains. New York to Atlanta. These are the hottest trains on the railroad. And what I mean by a hot train is it doesn't stop for anything. In the hierarchy of trains you have Amtrak, general freight, and then your hot trains. And they don't stop. The contract we have with UPS states that if the train isn't there on time, UPS doesn't pay. So that's the railroad's incentive to get that train here on time.

We haul car parts. We haul rubber. We haul trains of anhydrous ammonia. We haul trains of acid. We haul sulfur trains. PCS Phosphate is a big customer of the railroad as well. I spent the last six days in Chocowinity working on a local down there, moving mostly anhydrous ammonia, phosphate, acid, copper cars. They also manufacture phosphoric acid down there, which goes to Pepsi and Coca-Cola. Soft drinks-that's where that goes. In very minute amounts it's probably okay for you. But we move it in twenty-thousand-gallon tank cars. If you spilled it it would probably change the map dramatically. [Laughs] If it spills it burns the lining out of your lungs and kills everybody within thirty miles. But other than that it's really pretty good stuff. [Laughs]

We haul one-seventh of what's on the road. For every trailer van that you see on a Norfolk Southern train, there are seven more on the highway. Meaning we've got too much truck traffic on the highway. Because you can haul-well, say for instance, on a fifty-car piggy-back train, you can haul maybe one hundred trailer vans with one or two locomotives, and you might burn one hundred gallons of fuel from, say, Washington to Linwood, North Carolina. A truck would burn a hundred gallons to haul one trailer van the same distance. So it's horrendously efficient. And you can move it faster, too. A whole lot faster. Because the trains don't stop. They don't stop. And they run every day.

The railroad don't care about holidays or special things. The railroad is ruthless. They don't care. When the train's ready to go, they need somebody. And interpersonally, that's a little bit inconvenient sometimes. [Laughs] Say like if you're trying to get married and they don't want to let you off work. Which is what almost happened to me. As it was, we got no honeymoon at all. We got married, and I went back to work that same day. Because they said, "Well, we're really short-handed, we really need you to work." [Laughs] I said, "I'm getting married today." "Well, yeah-we understand, but-you took the job. Either you're going to work or you're not. What's it going to be?"

That wasn't fun. And you know, when you've got to go work on your birthday, that's not fun either. Or when you get caught in a hurricane, that's not fun. But it's what it's about-working on the railroad. You get used to it. It's a different kind of life, but you just accept it and kind of work with it. Like, they run-I don't know if they plan it like this, but it just kind of seems to work out that they run a lot of trains at nighttime. I work probably more at night than I do during the daytime. I'm a real night owl. I'll stay up until three, four o'clock in the morning and sleep till lunch.

Now my wife's got to go to work at like nine o'clock in the morning. So she's up at six-thirty and getting ready to go to work, eating her Cheerios, and I come home and-to me it's seven or eight o'clock at night-so I'm drinking a beer. I've just worked twelve hours. I've worked all night long, and I want to go lay down and go to bed. You drink a couple of beers and go to bed. That's how you do it. [Laughs] That's literally how you do it. Somebody calls on the phone. What are you doing? Well, I'm drinking a beer. It's seven o'clock. In the morning!

That's railroad life. [Laughs] And most of the people I work with are the same way. They're all-well, some of them are pretty gruff and profane. But they're all funny, I think. Fun to be around. Tell good jokes. Eat bad foods. Have high cholesterol. And they're good folks. I mean, everybody I work with, they're really great people. They are really hard-working professional people too. They get out in the rain, in the summer heat. It's a hundred and ten percent humidity and it's a hundred degrees outside, and they're out there flailing those cars around.

I could never, ever work behind a desk. I don't know how people do it. I swear I don't know. I get to go outdoors. I get to see the countryside. And I don't know how people-they don't know what they're missing. They have no idea what they're missing. It's like going to the zoo. Working on the railroad is like going to the zoo. When we go down to the middle of the woods at night, we see more animals-deer, possum, bears. You name it, we see it. I mean, it's incredible. I've seen bobcats with their kittens walking across the track. I've seen bears eating corn out of cornfields. I've seen bears riding on hopper cars- they climb up on top of the covered hopper and eat the corn off the top that they've spilled out the side when they loaded it with corn. We carried a bear to Raleigh one night. Man, he was having a buffet on the way. [Laughs] Deer. Thousands and thousands of deer. And rabbits. It's neat. It's really neat. And then you've got the humans, too. You see some of those. But they're expendable. [Laughs]

It's a good job. There's really nothing more exciting than going down the rail at forty-nine miles an hour with your head out the window. Watching the tracks go by. A guy asked me the other day, he said, "Man, don't you want to come back to the police department?" I said, "There's no way!" [Laughs] Nine to five, Monday through Friday. That pretty much sums it up. Inside. You're not outdoors. You can't feel the wind blow. You've always got somebody coming through. The phone ringing. I don't have a phone at work. They can't get me. No one can get me at work. We don't have phones on the engine. The d.a.m.n thing doesn't ring.

I'm like the boss on the airplane.

FLIGHT ATTENDANT.

Carrie Warren.

I never thought I'd be a flight attendant. I was bartending in Denver because, basically, I didn't know what else I wanted to do. I was twenty-six, you know, and my Dad saw an article about a cattle call for United Airlines. So he calls me and says, "Why don't you apply to be a flight attendant?" I was like, "Are you out of your f.u.c.king mind?" I thought it was totally demeaning. And he goes, "Well, you're already a bartender. What's that? At least you'd have benefits." I was still like, "No way!" But then he goes, "I'll pay you a hundred bucks." [Laughs] So I went.

The interview was this huge thing-all these girls looking so nice, standing up straight, going, "Oh, I've always wanted to be a flight attendant. I love people. I love flying. Blah, blah, blah." And I sat there thinking, yeah, I'm here because my dad paid me. [Laughs] I was literally sitting there laughing. But then I started asking questions, and it actually sounded good. You know, I love to travel and do different things. And I really needed health benefits. [Laughs] So I started taking it seriously, and they hired me.

Eight years later, I love it. I really do. I wouldn't have said that at first. Starting out was really tough. The training was awful. Seven weeks of Barbie Doll Boot Camp. A lot of, you know, learning how to talk right and walk right and act right and have your makeup right and your hair right. It was intense. One time I got pulled into the coordinator's office because I wasn't smiling enough. [Laughs] They made me change my lipstick color because it was too brown. They wanted me to wear reds or pinks-which actually look terrible with my coloring. They made me cut my hair. I even got in trouble because a bunch of friends who played in a band came to visit me at the training center, and they were pretty raunchy-looking. The coordinators saw me with them, and they told me that as a representative of United, there were certain standards that I had to uphold, blah, blah, blah, I couldn't have those kind of people around, blah, blah.

We did learn stuff, though, too. They gave us a pile of books like two feet high, all these books on procedural c.r.a.p. You get trained in CPR and first aid. They put you in a mock-up airplane, and they simulate a crash. They have a fire out one window so you can't get out that way, and you have to jump, like, three stories into a pool. It's really scary. But you're pretty knowledgeable in the end. You learn a lot. So, whatever, I just tuned out the bulls.h.i.t and focused on getting through it.

In your last week of training, they tell you where you're going to be based. The choices my cla.s.s got were San Francisco or New York. I chose New York because I liked it better. When I got there, they gave me five days paid in a hotel. You have five days to find an apartment-and that's it. So basically, I'm staying out at this dump, at like, the Quality Inn at La Guardia Airport, and there's a group of us, and we're, like, how are we going to do this?

And there's real estate agents that prey on the new flight attendants. [Laughs] Who would ever think such a thing existed, you know? They're like, "We've got this great one-bedroom apartment, ten minutes from La Guardia, ten minutes from Kennedy Airport! Nine hundred bucks! You'll never find anything cheaper." The normal price of a one-bedroom in that neighborhood at that time was four-fifty, maybe, but of course we all get suckered.

So we got a group of about ten of us together. We're all flat broke. Starting salary was like, fifteen grand, so n.o.body could afford two months' rent for a damage deposit. And we rent this one bedroom apartment in Kew Gardens, Queens-which they call Stew Gardens because all the stewardesses live there. We've got no furniture, we're sleeping on the floor with blankets and pillows that we stole from the hotel [laughs], and there you are! You're a stewardess!

It was very hard at first. You're on reserve. They give you four hours' notice. Call you up at, like, two o'clock in the morning for, like, six A.M. check-in. And you know a lot of these people have never been in New York before. So it's pretty wacky. Just to figure out how to get to the airport and wherever you need to be. [Laughs] A lot of the girls were crying.

Also, when you start, you're junior man on the totem pole. It's all based on seniority, so [laughs] basically you're just a piece of s.h.i.t. They get you to do whatever n.o.body else wants to do, and you get thrown into totally uncomfortable situations where you don't know what to do or how to do it, but because n.o.body else wants to do it, you have to.

Like setting up the galley. One of my first trips was on a DC-10 with what's called a lower-load galley. It's a galley below the seats, where you set up all the carts and send up the food. I had no clue [laughs] what to do. So it's like, you're sending up the wrong carts- and they're sending them back down. You're supposed to organize everything, and you just have no clue. People are calling you names and yelling at you, and you have a lot of people really mad at you at the end of the flight. And through it all, you're supposed to, like, smile!

I kept thinking, I'm never going to make it. Because I don't fit into the traditional flight attendant role. Most of the women around me were kind of sorority girls. Not that there's anything wrong with sorority girls, but-I don't know, I just didn't necessarily fit in. I was lonely. But after about a year, once I got into the groove of the job, I met a clique of people. You know, we sort of found each other, and we all moved into a normal neighborhood together, and-it's just really fun. I work twelve days a month, so I have a ton of time off. I get travel pa.s.ses. I have excellent dental and health benefits. I've also merged to a much higher pay scale. And it's just-I don't think I could have fallen into a more perfect job for my personality type. I love it. I can fly anywhere I want. I'm going to Paris in January. I'm going to a little island in the Caribbean in March for a month. You know?

But, I mean, it's still a job. People have this idea like, oh, you're a flight attendant-like you're going to be wild and crazy because you fly here and you fly there, so you're just looking for a good time with no commitment. I think there's still this stereotype of that seventies flight attendant, which-it's just not that way anymore. It's a career now. People do it for thirty years, you know? And a lot of nights-I mean, you're stuck somewhere like, I don't know, Madison, Wisconsin, in some Travel Lodge, and you're hungry but all the restaurants have closed. So you just sort of sit in your room and watch TV. That's more the reality than like the s.e.xually loose girl who's up for whatever. I mean, I know there are some girls who date guys they meet on the plane. But I think it's more like, maybe they're looking for a rich guy to marry, you know? But whatever. If that's what you're looking for and that's what they're looking for and it works out fine, great. But that's not me.

I'm focused on the career stuff. I'm at a position now where I mostly fly first flight attendant. I'm like the boss on the airplane. I fly first cla.s.s. So I get not necessarily a better caliber of people, but people who fly more frequently. They know what to expect, so they're a little bit better behaved. Whereas in coach you get people who, a lot of times, don't know what to expect. A lot of times, they don't think they're getting what they should, or they should get more, and they can be a little demanding.

Lately there's been things on TV and stuff about pa.s.sengers getting really aggressive. And I've seen in the last few years, there's been a definite change. I think that people are under so much stress these days with their home life, their work, just the stress-we have a lot of situations where people just-they're unbelievably rude to you. They're outright mean. They get physical. They get abusive. I mean, in coach, I've had situations where I've been hit, I've had pop cans thrown at me, I've been spit on. I had a hamburger [laughs] thrown at me. I'm a vegetarian, so that was pretty gross. But that's a very funny story, actually, the hamburger story.

It was close to Christmastime, and I had been working eight days in a row. I'm working this flight. It's my last leg home, from Denver back to New York. And there was like tons of skiers, people from Long Island coming back from taking their kids skiing, going to Aspen, and just very irritated, because there wasn't enough room for their bags. So they're stressed out and you're stressed out. Anyway, this guy comes...o...b..ard with his two kids, and there's nowhere to put his bag. He's one of the last people on. He's very upset, and I try to help him out as much as I can. But there's just nowhere for his bag. So I had to say to him, "Well, you have two choices. Either you leave your bag here in Denver, or we put it down below. That's all I can do for you." So I think he was kind of annoyed at me to start out with there.

So we start the food service. My flying partner, she's doing the beverage cart and I'm doing the meal cart. At the beginning of the service we had had turkey salad and cheeseburgers. But we only had, like, twelve turkey salads. By the time I get to his row, all I've got is cheeseburgers. So I said to his two kids, "Would you like a cheeseburger?" Yeah. Yeah. I get to him: "Would you like a cheeseburger?" And he said, "Well, what else do you have?" And I said, "Well, I don't have anything else. I just have a cheeseburger." [Laughs] And he says, "I heard you had turkey salad." And I said, "Yeah, but they only gave us twelve of them. So I'm really sorry, but all I have is a cheeseburger." And he goes, "Well, I don't want a cheeseburger." So I said, "Oh, okay!" And I turned to the next people, and said, "Would you like a cheeseburger?"

And he's like, "Hey, wait a minute. I want to eat!" And I said, "Okay. But all I have is the cheeseburger." And he's like, "I don't want a f.u.c.king cheeseburger." I said, "Well, all I have is a cheeseburger, you know? So you have two choices. You either eat a cheeseburger [laughs] or you don't eat." And he goes, "Well, I want to eat." I said, "Okay, fine." So I put the food down on his tray. And I go to help the next person. And he goes, "Hey! Hey, you!" And I turn. And he goes, "What the f.u.c.k is this?"

At that point, I had just had it with him. It was like, I've just had it. I leaned over and I pointed, and I said really nasty, "That, sir, would be a cheeseburger." [Laughs] Just like that. And he picks it up, and he goes, "You can take your f.u.c.king cheeseburger and shove it up your a.s.s." [Laughs] And he throws it at me! And it hits me in the side of the face! [Laughs] And just-oh, it was so greasy and hot.

And it flies across my face and lands in the woman's lap across the aisle from him. She's got on this red suit. It lands right on her crotch. So she's got this huge grease stain. She sits up immediately, spilling her drinks off of her tray onto the guy next to her. And she starts yelling at me. And I just lost it. It had been eight days on. You know, I was just hanging on a thread. And I said, "That's it!" I started screaming. "This is inappropriate behavior! n.o.body else is getting lunch until I get an apology from this man!" Because, you know, he threw the cheeseburger at me! It wasn't my fault.

I took that cart and I went to the back of the airplane and I stood there. And the girl on the beverage cart, she's like dinging away, calling me with the b.u.t.ton, because she doesn't know what's happened. She's like, "Come on, come on!" People are, like, looking around. I'm not coming out. So this guy comes back, this friend of the cheeseburger guy, and he says, "Listen, I'm really sorry. I know he's being an a.s.shole. But we've had a really bad trip. They lost our reservations, and-" Blah, blah, blah. All these excuses. I said, "I don't care. I don't deserve that kind of treatment. He's been mean to me since the minute he got on this flight. I want an apology." He goes, "I'm apologizing for him. Will you please come out and serve lunch?" I said, "No. Absolutely not. [Laughs] He's got to come back here."

I'm just steaming. I can hear my heart beating in my chest because I'm so mad. So finally he comes back there, and he's like, "Look, I'm really sorry." And he's like kicking his feet around. "But you were really disrespectful to me. And you were this and that. And you've just been nothing but a b.i.t.c.h this whole flight." And I'm like, "That is not an apology. And I have not been being a b.i.t.c.h. I've been helping you the best I could. You're all upset because you don't want a cheeseburger. Big deal. Eat when you get home." You know?

So we sort of went back and forth, and he said, "All right, I'll apologize, I'll apologize. Will you just come out and serve lunch?" And I said, I want an apology over the PA. [Laughs] And his buddies are, like, "Come on, just do it. Let's just get this over with." So finally he apologizes into the PA. He's like, "I, Rick So-and-So, apologize to flight attendant Carrie for throwing a hamburger in her face." And then he throws the mic down and says, "All right, is that good enough?" I said, that's fine. So [laughs] he goes back, and he sits down. And I come out, do-do-do-do, with my little cart, "Would you like a cheeseburger?" And people are, like, "Oh, yes, yes, we would love a cheeseburger!" [Laughs]

It ended up, I had to write a letter for my file explaining what happened. And, you know, because United felt that that really wasn't-that being an employee, I should have risen above this guy, which is true. I mean, it really is true. But sometimes you just lose it. So I got a week off. [Laughs] Unpaid. [Laughs] But you know, it was okay. It was Christmastime. I didn't care. I mean, at the time I maybe cared a little, but now I don't care. I wish people would relax a bit more on the planes [laughs], but I don't really care.

I love the job. I absolutely love the job. Nothing anybody does on the plane could make me feel differently. A lot of people feel-I've come across flight attendants who feel it's beneath them to serve people. You know, "What do they think I am? A servant?" And it's like, you know what? Yeah! You are! For this amount of time, while you're on the airplane, yes. I mean, you're there for safety. That's really what you are there for, if anything happens, is for safety. But, come on, you're serving drinks, you're serving meals. You're a waitress! And I have no problem with being a waitress. I have no problem with serving people, because I think I feel really secure with who I am.

I mean, in any job somebody is serving somebody. That's just the bottom line. It doesn't matter what you do. What it comes down to is, you know, it's a job. Some people like their jobs, and some people don't. And I really enjoy it. I really do. Sometimes I don't want to go to work. You know, sometimes I'm, like, oh, G.o.d, I just don't want to go to work today. I really just want to stay home and be in my own little environment. But there are other times where I can't believe I'm getting paid to do this, because at times it's so easy. Like, you'll go to San Francisco and you'll have a nice downtown layover. And you go out for a great dinner or go partying with friends, and then just fly home the next day. And that's really fun. So it's easy for me. I really like it. I'll probably be pushing carts when I'm seventy. [Laughs]