Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Boarding Nightmares

I started my five days on call this week with a 6 am ready reserve couch sit. I was enjoying a nice quiet sit with two of my classmates when the three of us were called out for an Indianapolis overnight.

We quickly decided who would work what position, and I ended up with the "C" position - working the main cabin during boarding. Both flights were uneventful, for the most part, but this morning's boarding process was one of those inexplicably crazy ones where anybody and everybody needs something, usually while standing in the middle of the aisle, blocking everyone else.

First, I had a pregnant lady who needed me to lift her bag into the overhead bin (which was too fat, by the way). I explained about my recent shoulder surgery, but told her we could lift it together and share the weight, after we had taken a couple of things out of the front pocket, making it actually fit into the overhead bin.

Next was a lady traveling alone with three kids, one a lap child. Her seats, naturally, were not all together, and she wanted to know could I ask someone to move so she could sit with all three. I explained we would try, and she could ask her fellow passengers as she got to her row. Five minutes later I realized boarding had bottle-necked and saw some discussion taking place over boarding passes. It was the same Mom with those 3 little ones, and it looked like we had a seat dupe, only we didn't. In her frazzled state, she was looking at the boarding passes for her next, connecting flight and had seated them (with all their various detritus) in the totally wrong row - 6 rows back from where they should be. Of course. I finally got that mess straightened out, by letting them stay seated and asking pax assigned to those seats to simply switch with her (hey, how would you like to sit a lot closer to the front of the plane? wink, wink), then dealt with a lady who had spilled coffee on her white shirt while juggling her carry-ons, and checked into why the gate agent had asked another woman to gate check her bag - it, too, was way too over-stuffed to fit into the bin.

Next, I tried to soothe the couple in one of the exit rows who were very irritated that their seats didn't recline. Even though we had a few open seats and I invited them to move to one that did recline once the seat belt sign was off, it didn't help. They oozed an annoyed, put-upon air the entire flight. Darn that safety stuff, interfering with our 2 extra inches of comfort on a 2 hour flight!

Lastly, I worked with the last two rows, re-arranging a large family traveling together who had two lap children, and who were both assigned seats in the same row of 3. Can't have that - that would have been five folks with only four air masks. Luckily, they grasped the problem very quickly and one of the teenaged sons piped up and said, "Oh! I'll trade! No problem!"

By the time we closed the main cabin door, I was frazzled and exhausted myself. But no moment to dwell - time to arm doors, do the safety demo, and then compliance for take-off! Whew! Thank goodness for those few thousand feet of climbing time to take a deep breath and re-group!

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