While some people are shocked by the current attacks on flight attendants — the biting, the spitting, the punching, the threats — this behavior doesn’t surprise me. When I became a flight attendant back in the 1990s, I didn’t realize I’d end up in one of the most-hated professions in America.

In my airline interview, I talked a lot about how I liked to make people happy, the simple pleasure of that.

I said something about hot dogs, the joy of giving people something delicious and simple. A little sauerkraut. All the fixings. However you like it, tell me and it’s here for you, an offering, from my hands to yours, from my heart to yours, enjoy.

My life at that time was a mess. I was 29 years old, floundering, with a master’s degree in poetry (dear God), and no steady path, career or otherwise, a scorched-earth trail of bad relationships and wrong turns.

I spent a huge swath of my life in restaurant work. Working-class, Pittsburgh-born, I believed in service, in kindness. I felt work made both the world and me gentler, grounded, no pun intended. I believed — still believe — that any work that helps others and offers joy, however fleeting, holds value.

Here’s a hot dog just how you like it. I wish you every happiness and so.

I always thought people loved flight attendants, flight attendants being in the business of kindness and service and snack-bringing. I grew up hearing stories of heroic flight attendants who talked down hijackers, braved horrifying accidents and saved lives. I thought they were angels in pillbox hats.

Neerja Bhanot from Pan Am, who died at 23 in 1985, shielding three children from the terrorist hijackers’ bullets as the plane was stopped in the Karachi airport.

Barbara Jane Harrison, who died in 1968 while saving a disabled man who couldn’t evacuate a British plane engulfed in flames.

Uli Derickson, who protected 152 passengers and crew members during the hijacking of TWA Flight 847 by Lebanese terrorists in 1985 (and who went on to work for my airline).

I believed in beauty. In heroes. In flight.

And then I was hired.

Flight attendants, I quickly learned, were up there with dentists and tax collectors, paparazzi and people who torture cats when it comes to incurring the wrath of the American public.

During the seven years I flew — from 1994 up until 9/11 — I had encounters with passengers who did not wish me a good day. Passengers told me to stick peanuts where no one should ever stick a peanut. Imagine the possibilities. A fight broke out between senior citizens who used their canes the way Jedis use lightsabers. I broke it up. I wrestled a beverage cart from a Russian mobster who was angry about being cut off from vodka.

I intervened before a malfunctioning Furby spouting a stream of Furbish caused an onboard riot. Furbies (fur-covered robotic toys) can only be stopped with a screwdriver, and screwdrivers are considered weapons and not allowed on board.

I’ve had leaky diapers and airplane meals thrown at me. Meals on airplanes, even in first class, aren’t great, but there’s no reason to throw sea bass. I can’t even talk about the diapers.

One time a man took a swing at me at 5 a.m. in Tampa, Fla. I remember this because I am not a morning person and hadn’t had my coffee yet. I asked the man for his boarding pass, and he responded with a nice roundhouse. I ducked. The red coats — which is what we called our customer-service people — let him board anyway.

I’ve been groped by passengers, including one man who was maybe 80 and who I thought was charming.

The weirdest thing: I was licked by a passenger in business class. He was wearing suspenders and no shoes and his tongue hit me right between my regulation scarf and blazer.

The warm drip of saliva is tangible even now.

Also, people — put your shoes on.

People do crazy things at 30,000 feet, when there is no one with a visible weapon to make them stop.

Lately, these kinds of crazy are happening at an alarming rate.

People are stunned to see a passenger duct-taped to a seat, even though the passenger was biting and spitting, and had tried to pop the exit. What would you do if you were in the air, no police, no one to call, 30,000 feet in the sky? Duct-tape, that’s what. The time for wokeness works better when no one is trying to crash a plane.

In the news, it looks cruel to duct-tape a person to a seat on an airplane, like a scene from a Quentin Tarantino movie. But it’s a sane option.

Of course, masks are uncomfortable. Flying is scary. Booze makes it worse, sometimes.

But we’re all just trying to get from here, to here, to here.

In the metaphysical, spiritual sense, we’re all just walking — or flying — each other home.

Flight attendants are trained to save lives and make people happy. Kindness is our way of making it through our day, not the low pay or the odd hours. Kindness keeps us going. Kindness keeps us believing in people.

I say us because even though I’ve been on the ground for years now, I will always feel like a flight attendant in my best spirit and heart, oblivious to the gravity of the world.

Airplanes are test tubes and we are all experiments. I want to believe, always, in people’s inherent goodness, even now. Breathe in. Breathe out.

Be kind, babies, my dear Kurt Vonnegut wrote.

Vonnegut, a German prisoner of war in WWII, lived through the bombing of Dresden. He made it through that horror and believed in people, even so.

Trafford resident Lori Jakiela is an award-winning author and poet (lorijakiela.net). She directs the undergraduate writing program at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, where she is an English and creative/professional writing professor.

---

Copyright ©2025— Trib Total Media, LLC (TribLIVE.com)

---