The flight attendant from hell

An hour before departure, I burst through the flight operations door and rushed toward a kiosk of some 20 company computers. Each was occupied by a flight attendant who was "signing in" (the computerized equivalent of punching the clock). When a terminal finally opened up, I hurriedly signed in for my trip.

After reading 20 pages of e-mail about the introduction of an Egg McMuffin-like sandwich on flights from South America, new milk containers, Styrofoam cup shortages and a system-wide crackdown on flight attendants suspected of stealing liquor money, I entered a code that called up the names of my crew.

I tore the sheet from the printer and saw that Rick, Jake and Bob would be our pilots. I wondered why so many pilots take on one-syllable names: Chuck, Ron, Rich, Dan, Dick, Don, Skip, Pat, Bud ... the list is as long as a layover in Odessa, Texas. Walk behind a trio of pilots, call out one of the aforementioned names, and chances are pretty good at least one of them will turn around and say, "Huh?"

Following the pilots were names of the cabin crew: Daniel, Samantha, myself, Bertha. Bertha? Big Bertha? No, it couldn't be. The word was she never flew three-day trips on narrow body aircraft. Not enough room in the galleys. No place for her to hide from passengers. No, it couldn't be Big Bertha.

I broke out in a cold sweat.

Most flight attendants -- young or old, black or white, male or female, straight or gay -- are good-natured people. We have to be. But every so often, a malcontent creeps into the ranks. It's difficult enough to deal with the demands of passengers, but when you're working a three-day trip and a member of the crew creates problems, the job becomes twice as difficult, the days three times as long.

As I tramped toward the departure gate, the inevitable clash with Big Bertha weighed heavy on my mind. Would she be as bad as everyone says? Would her uniform be matted with cat hair? Would her breath smell like fish gone bad in the refrigerator? I fought the urge to call in sick, to hop into my Civic and drive home.

I approached the gate, waved absently to the agent, walked through the sliding door and stepped onto the jet bridge. Like the majority of flight attendants, I've had occasional altercations with other crew members, but the bad memories are foggy. But as I moved closer to the aircraft door, a slew of images came at me in Technicolor clarity: the lazy galley guy we caught reading Cosmopolitan when he should have been serving drinks; the smoker who crawled into an empty meal cart to puff on a Marlboro every 30 minutes; the sky princess who slept in a row of seats during every leg of a three-day trip; the kleptomaniac who stole from the duty-free cart; the neurotic who sprayed insecticide in the pilot's sleeping bunk because they denied her request to cop a few Z's; and the hypochondriac who caused a health scare when she insisted upon wearing surgical gloves during the meal service.

The few times I've been forced to work with difficult souls such as these, words were exchanged, sides were taken and feelings hurt.

And now I was about to work with Big Bertha, the most difficult flight attendant in the skies.

Next Page: Would Bertha really be a monster?

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