Go get ’em, Vicki!

Stick with me for a second, here:

This summer — in just a few weeks, actually, on Midsummer’s Night — I turn forty.  I am inspired to do a “Forty Things” blog post to commemorate this occasion, and I have decided to do it in four parts, so that I might create something like a Mister Stewardess Feature (and to buy time to think of forty listworthy things).  Because I strive to make this blog more than a clearing house for Things Flight Attendants Complain About (at which I am a skilled practitioner, and of which there are way more than forty), and because I do myself, from time to time, lose sight of precisely why I stick around this gig, I am going to take this opportunity to celebrate some of the wild and wacky highlights from my flying career.

Airlines in general (I do not work for Southwest) are blood-sucking executive-bonus-factories that care little for their employees and even less for their passengers.  But this is a job that I wanted, that I worked hard to get, and one that has afforded me many opportunities and many years of amusement.  Life takes us unexpected places, and it is entirely possible that in a different life I could have saved up for a trip to China or frequently visited France — it’s not like only airline people do these things.  But it is for the opportunities (and the laughs) that I am most grateful, and thus do I bring you Part One of Mister Stewardess’s Big Summer Feature,

Forty Things I (probably) Never Would Have Gotten to Do If It Wasn’t For My Airline Job:

40. Watch the Space Shuttle take off from the cockpit of a 777

39. Get hit on by the drunken boyfriend of a (female) soap opera star

38. Exfoliate with champagne and sugar

37. Meet Chris Isaak after one of his concerts in New York’s Central Park

36. Get bitten black-and-blue by an Englishman

35. Learn that “You’re Welcome” in Japanese is best-remembered with the phrase “Don’t touch my mustache”

34. Try caviar

33. Respond to a call light to be asked by a self-proclaimed addict for morphine

32. Restrain a psychotic passenger with flight attendants’ pantyhose

31. Sell Duty Free to Whitney Houston

OK, that’s ten.  Check back next week for ten more.  I’ve been doing this for fifteen years — surely there are ten more.  Hopefully there are thirty more — we’ll find out.