Flight Attendant School prepares you for the next step, becoming a Flight Attendant. Your Flight Attendant Career will bring you ever changing scenarios, and experiences.

It has been over 14 years that my Flight Attendant Career has spanned. I have seen people at their best, and at their worst. I have had life and death medical experiences. I have flown with some outstanding and not so outstanding crew members. I have learned, sometimes the hard way, know your limitations, and pass the monkey whenever it is an appropriate time.

The “Monkey”, can be many things. The “Monkey” could be an unruly passenger while parked at the gate. The “Monkey” could be seat duplications, or meals not arriving to the aircraft before departure time.

The “Monkey” will cause you stress, will adjust your attitude, and start or end your day in a nasty way.

Know the chain of command. Know who is ultimately responsible for what.

It’s 3 minutes before departure, and we are still boarding (the airline industry is rated by a few factors).  One of these factors is on time departures and arrivals. It is now 11 minutes past departure time, we now have a family of five rushing on the aircraft. Three of the five passengers are under the age of six years old.

The parents have been assigned separate seats, middle seats of course. The children were separated in their own middle seats, with the youngest in the emergency row.

Our first instinct is to immediately try to re- seat this family together. However, our full flight of Newark passengers didn’t seem to want to cooperate.

The “Monkey” is going to be this, which work group will be tagged with the delay, because of the seating madness.

That is where we take a breath, call the Captain, inform him of the situation, and request a Gate Agent Supervisor come down to the aircraft to correct this seating issue.

We tried, time was not our friend, and sometimes those tricky Gate Agents will tag this kind of delay on the Flight Crew.

The Gate Supervisor appears. He ends up offering first class vouchers for the next flight. A couple of passengers take him up on the offer. The seat problem is fixed.

The Flight Crew will not be visited by their friendly In-flight Supervisor when we get home. All is well.

The banana goes to the Boarding Agents. Things happen; follow procedure and most times it will work out the right way.

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