A job like no other… for better or worse.
BY KRIS VELDHUIZEN
At the age of thirty-one, after ten years of working as a flight attendant for KLM (a major Dutch international airline) I could already be considered a semi-veteran. A full-fledged veteran if your definition is someone who has been around long enough to have accumulated an arsenal of crazy and outrageous stories. It was these stories, captivatingly narrated by one of my father’s oldest friends that initially gripped me and my twelve-year-old imagination. The prospect of working for an airline seemed to be very romantic indeed. Travel far and away to exotic countries, meet people of different cultures and coming home with not only the stories but the pictures to back them up.
Excited, wide-eyed and innocent, nine years after I had first heard the stories, I was thrown into the adventure myself.
THE DESTINATIONS
It isn’t that my father’s friend lied. It’s true: The sea around any small Caribbean island is beautiful, calm and just the right temperature. The New York skyline looks amazing during a final approach while sitting in the cockpit with the pilots. The bike-rides through the back-alleys of Bangkok are unforgettable, enjoying ice-cream at any piazza in Rome will make you wish they served the same in heaven and visiting any local market in Mumbai will make you never want to shop in the western world again.
THE PASSENGERS
Being a flight attendant isn’t all about the destinations, though. There are passengers to deal with and deal with them you do indeed. There was this posh old American lady who was ready to sue if you were not willing to ignore the other two hundred passengers sitting around her at her every whim. There was the odd crazy person who would leave the washroom in a state that puts the average New York subway toilet to shame, the old Indian couple who, used to having servants back in India, treated us as such and the mother who put her infant, seat and all, in the luggage bin. Upon being asked about it she replied, “he just kept crying. What was I supposed to do?”
LIFE ISN’T PRETTY
The amazing destinations and the interesting people do make for great stories, but the one part of this crazy life that I never heard from my father’s friend about was the not-so-glamorous side of the story. There is the almost constant feeling of being out of sync as a result of living in different time-zones throughout most of the year, the frantic struggle to try to get some sleep in before a thirteen hour flight, knowing you’ll be looking at yet another night of night-time Japanese television, waking up in the middle of the night having no clue where in the world you are and wondering why your wife isn’t next to you.
This is the less romantic, less talked about part of the job, but then, what job doesn’t have its drawbacks? All in all, the past ten years have been an incredible experience that I wouldn’t and will not trade in for any other job. It’s an experience like no other. iT!
Kris Veldhuizen is an avid flight attendant who has many stories to tell. He lives in the Netherlands with his wife, Rachel.
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