Free My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum Page A

by examining the ebb and flow of life on an airplane. Just as air pressure will make one martini in the air equal two on the ground, the malaise of modern life extends its claws in cartoon-like proportions on an airplane. It’s a sickness aggravated by tiny bathrooms and recirculating air and laptop computers that allow no excuse to take a break from work. “What I hate is when passengers won’t put the computer away when I try to bring them dinner,” Theresa, a sinewy Mexican-American flight attendant for US Airways, tells me. She is in the first-class galley eating chocolate syrup out of a plastic cup. “They never look up, never take a break to enjoy the flight. They never just look out the window and see how beautiful it is.”
    This is a disease of plastic and its discontents. It is what happens when sleep becomes a greater novelty than gravity defiance. It is what happens when the concept of New York to London seems more like changes in a movie set than a journey involving thousands of miles of empty sky, five degrees of longitude, an ocean. It is what happens when the miraculous becomes the mundane, when we are no longer amazed by flying but bored by it at best and infuriated by it more often than not. And it is this hybrid of nonchalance and aggression that has largely come to define the modern air traveler. It’s what causes passengers to punch, slap, spit, swear, make obscene gestures, grope, and fling food at flight attendants and each other. It’s what makes people dismantle smoke detectors, throw tantrums when they don’t get a meal choice, and threaten to get a crew member fired over such infractions as not having cranberry juice. That the flight attendant must act as an agent for the big, impenetrable aircraft as well as for the small, vulnerable passenger is both a corporate conflict and a metaphysical conundrum. As boring as the airplane may be at this point, its technology remains distancing and unnerving, sometimes even terrifying. And whether the flight attendant is aware of it or not, her duty is to bridge the gap between the artificiality of the cabin and the authentic human impulses that play themselves out in that cabin. She has to shake her ass yet still know how to open the exit door.
    The more tangible reasons for her condition have to do with numbers. Every year more seats are squeezed on to planes, seat width has become narrower, flights are oversold, and cheap tickets attract passengers that would otherwise be taking the bus. Flight attendants blame the overcrowding on federal deregulation, which occurred in 1978, and essentially legislated that airlines were allowed to spend as little money as possible per flight as long as they did not violate federal safety standards. This introduced significantly lower ticket prices; it costs an average of twenty-four percent less to fly today than before deregulation.
    Out of this was born the era of the $99 ticket. It also meant an abrupt end to luxury air travel; the pillbox hats were traded in for unwashed hair. “We’re taught in training that people can’t get on board if they have curlers in their hair or no shoes on,” said Tracy, another US Airways flight attendant. “And if they have to publish that [in training manuals], that’s frightening.”
    “They show up wearing jogging suits,” Carl says. “And I doubt that they’re wearing any underwear under those things.”
    “I hate it when people in the exit row put their feet up on the bulkhead,” a Delta flight attendant told me a few weeks later. “If you were a guest in someone’s house, would you put your feet on the wall?”
    It seems like such a small complaint, but then again this is the sort of gesture that shapes the psyches of those who work in the air. This is not her house. And yet it is. This is not a house at all, and yet it’s the place where a huge number of people spend a huge amount of time. As more and more Americans carry the detritus of earthbound life to this