Fucking Bitter, Angry Guy

Fucking Horizontal Stabilizers

I don’t know what it says about me or my character but I find myself speculating about the final minutes and seconds of peoples’ lives just before they’re killed in some sort of horrifying accident. Am I the only one?

Take a plane crash.

Some of you might remember an Alaska Airlines flight in January 2000 that crashed into the ocean near LA. Something like 90 people died in the tragedy and the fucked up thing about it was the pilots knew they had a SERIOUS problem when they discovered the horizontal stabilizer had jammed shortly after takeoff.

I’m no aviator but apparently the horizontal stabilizer is very important because it keeps the plane stable in flight. Nothing worse than being horizontally unstable at 25,000 feet.

Well, while the pilots were fucking with the controls trying to keep the plane in the sky, they were also talking to mechanics and other experts on the ground in the hopes of figuring out some way to either unstick the stabilizer or use other means to stabilize this fucking MD-83 on the fly. Literally.

At one point, the stabilizer got jammed in such a way that the plane suddenly went into a nose-first dive for several thousand feet before the pilots were able to correct the problem (somehow) and level the plane off. Temporarily…

OK. So there you are in seat 22A and all the sudden the fucking plane goes into a dive straight fucking down for 10 or 15 seconds. Do you have any idea how long 10 or 15 seconds really is when you’re inside an airplane hauling ass at about 500 mph straight down? Count it yourself. A thousand and one, a thousand and two…

Holy Shit! That would have been enough for me. I would have been dead from a heart attack on the spot. At least, as we soon found out, I would have hoped to have died from a heart attack at that point. It only got worse.

Imagine what’s going on inside that jet during this abrupt descent. People not in their seats tossed around like rag dolls. Even those buckled into their seats are suddenly looking DOWN at the fucking cockpit door. Think about that for a second. The MD-83 is about 147 feet long.

If you’re in the last row and the plane suddenly goes into a complete nose dive, you’re looking down at the cockpit door from about at least 70 or 80 feet. That’s about 7 or 8 stories above the cockpit. And you’re fucking pinned to the back of your seat, assuming you haven’t fallen out of the fucking thing and bounced off the floor, ceiling, seats or other passengers all the way down until you slam into the cockpit door.

Who really tightens their seat belts to the proper tension on an airline flight? Everyone sort of half-asses it. I imagine a good five or six people, either up walking to the bathroom or sitting in their seats without their belts tightened, were immediately tossed around and ended up in a heap either at the foot of the cockpit door or the bulkheads in the front of first class. Just a pile of fucking injured bodies.

What else is going on? Well, the fucking oxygen masks have come fluttering down from the ceiling but chances are you can’t even fucking reach them because the force of the descent has you pinned to the back of your seat. Lights are flashing. Alarms are surely ringing. Shit is falling all over the place. With any luck, a fucking laptop or a heavy carry-on bag has clubbed you into unconsciousness in the melee.

Not a good time to have a window seat, by the way.

What else do you hear? Oh, only about 90 people screaming their fucking heads off. Panic doesn’t even come close to describing what’s going on in that airplane. You’re probably screaming so loud you don’t even notice how loud everyone else is screaming.

Again, this is going on for 10 to 15 seconds. No warning. No fucking explanation from the flight deck. Nothing. Just nose first.

So now that everyone has shit and pissed themselves or feinted or fucking been tossed around the fuselage, the pilots miraculously steady the plane, level it out and, I would assume, make some sort of announcement to the passengers. Maybe not. Come to think of it, the pilots know they’ve got such a serious problem, they probably figure it might be best to just say nothing at all at this point. They’re pretty fucking busy upfront anyway.

But at some point, the pilots did announce they would be making an “unscheduled” landing in LA and they proceed to try to dump fuel, reduce their altitude and get the fucking ground crew at LAX ready for what’s sure to be a messy landing.

It’s at this point, if you’re unfortunate enough to still be alive or conscious, that the real panic begins. I don’t know about you, but after a nose-first descent of that length and the subsequent announcement, I know this isn’t going to end well. No fucking way.

The plane continues to turn and descend, turn and descend and then all of the sudden, the final nose dive begins. This time it’s for roughly a minute and a half.

A minute and a half!

A pilot of another plane in the vicinity later told investigators that “the aircraft was twisting, flying erratically, nose rocking.” And then “tumbling, spinning, nose down, continuous roll, corkscrewing and inverted.”

It’s the “and inverted” part that really captures my imagination. Inverted means upside down.

That’s how you spent the last minute and a half of your life. Upside, nose first, corkscrewing into the ocean at several hundred miles an hour.

Now, I ask you, how many of those 90-odd people were still conscious at impact? This is what I need to know. Is it possible to survive the first nose dive for 10 to 15 seconds and then the minute and a half eternity of the second freefall? I hope not but something tells me the survival instinct would stubbornly kick in for a good number of the passengers.

I’d like to think the sheer terror of the situation combined with the rapid drop in altitude would render everyone onboard unconscious long before the impact. But maybe not.

And then at impact, what really happens? Is it just one big crushing explosion that just pulverizes all your body parts or does the bulk of the plane provide enough cushion that you actually survive the impact for a few seconds before the flames or the water or the twisted metal snuff you out?

These are the type of things that keep me up at night.

   

Fucking Sky Girls

Of course you hate your job.

You’re a fucking stewardess.

That’s right. A stewardess. Not a flight attendant. You don’t attend to anything whatsoever to do with the flight. You attend to passengers.

Or at least that’s what you’re supposed to do.

It’s fucking easy.

Make sure people are sitting in their assigned seat (unless you’re on Southwest). Assist the odd elderly, young or handicapped passenger. Sit down. Serve food and drinks. Sit down. Bring the headphones for the movie. Sit down. Collect garbage. Sit down. Clean the fucking plane. Exit.

And do those few simple tasks without pissing off the passengers.

Most stewardesses with at least two years of experience are paid between $50,000 to $75,000 a year. Some make upwards of $100K, especially those who work long, international routes.

Despite all the bankruptcies, reorganizations and labor battles, these (mostly) women get very competitive health and retirement benefits and the considerable perk of free airfare (more or less) anywhere their airline flies.

On a five-hour flight, a stewardess typically spends a grand total of one hour (maybe an hour and half tops) actually out of her seat doing something for the passengers.

So insignificant to the process are these witches of the wind that most airlines now just play a video explaining how to buckle your seatbelt, open the emergency exit doors and attach the oxygen masks to small children before putting on your own mask. I miss watching the half-assed game of charades they played while trying desperately to avoid eye contact throughout the whole presentation.

When you think about it, the whole air travel experience stacks the deck against the passengers.

Want to talk about a conspiracy? Why the FUCK is it that every bar in every fucking airport encourages (practically begs) passengers to upgrade their cocktail to a double or get a shot with their beer for “just” $2 more?

What is that? Is there any other place in the world where the bartenders actively market additional booze at a discounted price? You fucking feel like an idiot if you DON’T get the double for another $2. Even in Vegas, where they have a vested interest in liquoring you up, they won’t serve you a free double or a beer and a shot. It’s one or the other.

What a shocker that some passengers will be drunk and others will have had just enough to say things they otherwise wouldn’t or do things they otherwise wouldn’t.

Maybe that’s why most of these bitches have such a lousy disposition. They realize that their chosen profession essentially consists of opening soda cans and passing out peanuts to a bunch of drunks or fools who didn’t cough up the extra eight quarters for a double.

I know I’m the bitter and angry one here but whenever I have to deal with waitresses or valets or retail clerks or any other service employees, I go out of my way to be polite and respectful. It wasn’t too long ago that I was working in some kind of service job.

More than most, I can appreciate why it’s so frustrating and aggravating to deal with human beings all day long. It sucks. And because air travel has become such a clusterfuck, passengers are more bitchy and aggressive than ever.

But here’s the deal: You knew all this when you went to your little stewardess training school. You had to know what you were getting into. I doubt anyone has ever applied, been trained and hired as a stewardess without ever stepping foot onto a commercial airplane.

You don’t become a mortician and then get pissed off because you have to embalm dead bodies. You don’t become a bartender and then get all indignant because you’re around drunk people all the time. It’s like these stewardesses just wake up one morning and have an epiphany that people aren’t always happy to be on the airplane, that they’re not doing it for fun.

To have a chip on your shoulder, to go out of your way to be a nasty cunt to people who are already short on patience and looking for someone to unload on is a recipe for disaster.

But that’s what you want.

Because then you have a golden opportunity to be more than just a second-class waitress and usher. You’re praying that your shitty attitude will get the desired reaction. If you piss someone off, maybe JUST maybe he or she will get right the fuck back in your face and tell you to go fuck yourself.

And when that happens, you couldn’t be happier. Then you have some power. One phone call and security will yank that passenger right off the flight. There’s no time for sorting out right and wrong. This you know. You’ll just say whatever you need to say and the passenger will be shit out of luck. That’s just the way it is.

All I want to do is get on the plane, be comfortable and get to my destination as fast as possible as painlessly as possible. Anything and everything else is insignificant.

But you still pressed my buttons, didn’t you, you fucking 25-ish-year-old bitch with your flat ass and your turkey tits. You wanted me to lash out at you. You assumed that just because you threw up your hands in my general direction and yelled for me to STOP! RIGHT THERE! (while you pulled out a drink cart and moved it around and then it put it back in the same fucking place as I was boarding the plane) that I was upset.

Truth is, I didn’t give a shit. Another two minutes on a five-hour, red-eye flight across the country wasn’t going to make or break my night. Yeah, I was watching you but there wasn’t much else to look at considering you were right in front of me and I couldn’t go anywhere.

Perhaps I should have turned around and faced all the other passengers lined up behind me while you did whatever task you had to do at that very moment. Then when you were done you could have yelled GO! RIGHT NOW! and I would have resumed boarding the plane.

Either way, you clearly were pissed off before we ever crossed paths.

What you didn’t know, what couldn’t have known was that I saw you walking to the gate with your pizza box and a pissy look on your face.

I overheard you bitching to your colleague about how you were paged at the last minute to work this red-eye and that sucked because you and a friend were waiting at a restaurant for your pizza to arrive so you could finally eat after spending the past eight hours handing out peanuts and fucking sorry-ass blankets to passengers. You said you would be damned if you were going to leave your pizza behind after all this. Thus, there you were with your shitty attitude and your half-eaten pepperoni pizza.

Back to the boarding process. I’m waiting patiently for you to switch around your little drink cart. I’m not thinking about anything really. Other than whether or not I’ll be able to sleep during the flight and if I’m really interested in the book I just bought in the concourse.

That’s it. I wasn’t mad or annoyed or anything other than bored and numb. I wasn’t angry with you, even though you were pretty abrupt with the two-handed stop sign and your authoritative STOP! command. The sad truth is I didn’t give you or your little task any thought whatsoever.

You finished your little beverage cart switcharoo and motioned for me to resume boarding. I did.

I got about three or four rows past you and then I heard it.

“You weren’t going to get very far anyway, sir. You didn’t have to give me that dirty look.”

Or something like that. That was the essence of your communication.

I just sat down. About 30 seconds later, I wanted to get up and come back into the galley area and grab you by your short, unevenly cut fucking blonde hair and redecorate the interior of the fuselage with your fucking brains.

Honestly, I wasn’t upset about having to wait a minute or two. Did I have a dirty look on my face? Maybe? I don’t know. It’s possible. It’s possible that subconsciously I was put off by her fucking prison-guard-style orders. But I really don’t think so.

Either way, what fucking difference did it make? I didn’t say anything. I just walked to my seat. Why the fuck would you go out of your way to accuse me of giving you a dirty look? What’s going to come of that?

So when you came around to practice your craft, that is, take my drink order, I asked for a soft drink. But you weren’t pushing the cart. You took the order and then went back to the galley to get the drinks.

While you were away I got to thinking and realized that I had made a huge mistake. A cunt of your type would surely fuck with my beverage. No doubt in my mind. Spit in it. Toss a couple dirty ice cubes in it. Something. Why wouldn’t you?

You gave me my drink and I let it sit there. I was thirsty. But I wasn’t giving you the satisfaction. When your colleague came by with the beverage cart, I watched her pour my new drink and then it was bottoms up. And then I waited and waited until you made your garbage collection.

You made note of the fact that my drink was still full. Why would you mention that? I know why.

And even if you didn’t fuck with my drink, it was great to watch you gingerly pick it up and put it in your little fucking garbage bag. Something about that three-second scene reminded me of why I’m me and you’re you.

It’s something that never would have occurred to me had you not been such a fucking snatch from the get-go.