Free My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum Page B

tube in the air, measures must be taken to make them feel at home without allowing the frontier to become lawless. “When the door closes, we must play every role,” said Britt Marie Swartz, a Delta flight attendant who began her career at Pan Am in the late 1970s and actually cooked eggs to order in 747 galleys. “We’re doctors, lawyers, travel agents, therapists, waitresses, and cops. No one would demand all of that from a normal person.”
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    The first thing aspiring flight attendants learn when they attend a recruitment meeting at the American Airlines training school near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport is that, if hired, they will make a base starting salary of around $14,000 a year. The second thing they must do is fill out a lengthy questionnaire designed to give recruiters an idea of their basic character makeup. When I visit the training facility, I am not allowed to see this questionnaire, although I am told that the nature of their answers will lead to what interviewers call “probing points,” wherein candidates are asked to talk about themselves in ways that may or may not indicate personality traits incompatible with airplane social dynamics. “There was one grammar outburst,” a recruiter says as he emerges from an interview. “I think I detected a double negative.” Although I must sign a release saying that I will not print or repeat any of the questions asked of candidates, I am allowed to print the answers they give. And as I spend an hour watching a sweet and painfully sincere twenty-four-year-old from Arkansas hang herself on the basis of about two answers, I am amazed at what an art the recruiters (all of whom are former or working flight attendants) have made out of selecting their coworkers. The candidate, carefully outfitted in an Arkansas version of a power suit, complete with Fayva-type pumps and a neckerchief, seals her fate based on the following responses:
    “I would say ‘I don’t find that type of humor funny’ and walk out of the galley,” and, “If nothing else worked, I wouldn’t lie. I guess I would say, ‘Your feet seem to be causing an odor. Can you please put your shoes back on?’”
    The woman is sent back to Arkansas with the promise that she will be notified by letter within six weeks, which means that she most certainly will never be hired. Though the recruiter, who looks and speaks almost exactly like the weatherman on my local ABC television affiliate, cannot put his finger directly on what turned him off to her, he tells me it has something to do with apparent inflexibility.
    During the week that I observe training, I spend most of my time with a class of sixty students. They have been selected from an original pool of 112,000 applicants, all but 4,000 of whom were eliminated via an automated telephone screening system. American has one of the most rigorous training programs in the industry—flight attendants from other carriers frequently refer to them as the “Sky Nazis”—but it is also among the most sought-after employers, both for its reputation and its pay scale, which is high by industry standards.
    The training facility is an awe-inspiring complex. Occupying a large building next door to the flight academy, it contains a hotel, conference center, and salon, as well as a multitude of offices, lecture halls, and several life-size cabin simulators. The simulators, which fill up large rooms, look like movie sets of airplanes. They hold real seats, real galleys, and real doors. The windows are filled in with painted renderings of fluffy white clouds. The flight attendants practice serving real food to their classmates and are observed closely by their instructors. Part of their training involves getting accustomed to erratic hours and last-minute schedule changes; their day can begin as early as 3 A.M. , and individual students often receive telephone calls in the classroom from a mock scheduling unit, which informs them that drills or