Well for those of you who follow me on Twitter, or Formspring would know, it was my Birthday yesterday. One of the downsides of this job is that since planes take off 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, you do not get Christmas off, nor Easter, not even Eid, and it’s inevitable that you’ll have to work on your Birthday. I’ve been lucky in the past, I’ve either had the day off in Dubai, been on a Perth layover, or had a great layover with crew, but this time I was lumped with a Red Eye turnaround flight to Hyderabad. And of course, it was paired with a Geneva that I didn’t want to swap (nor could swap – it was the inaugural flight!) and a day off, and my roster was so packed that giving away that one day off would make my roster ‘illegal’. I was operating the flight whether I wanted to or not.


In hindsight, the circumstances weren’t too bad. The crew were amazing and did their best to cheer me up - they even bought me a bracelet from the On Board Duty Free. Our cabin was actually booked to be a Business Class cabin, which made the turnaround service for us in First Class much easier. The timing of the flight was such that it was completely dead inside the Terminal, and even more dead in the Business Class lounge, so many of our passengers tend to eat there in preference to stomaching the aircraft food and spend the flight sleeping instead. So it wasn’t that bad. In theory...

The most horrific part came much later. It didn’t really affect me – I barely went down to the Economy Cabin. As the Birthday Girl I was spared the trip to Economy to help out, and we were full up the front so I couldn’t have gone down even if I wanted to. Whilst on ground in Hyderabad the Purser told me that there were 12 Economy seats that passengers had urinated on. They just...peed in the seat. And not told the crew until we all found out on ground and everyone had disembarked. Grown adults, who were very likely intoxicated, who were happy to walk off the aircraft with urine-soaked pants. Unbelievable. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so mortified in my life.

I guess I could understand it if there were young kids who had done this that had a history of bedwetting. Or even someone elderly who may have been suffering from incontinence. Or even if it was turbulent and the constant shaking of the aircraft made this more likely, and possibly prevented people from reaching the lavatory for long periods of time. But this was not the case. These men (and after asking the door operator that was there for disembarkation, it was grown men who had the tell-tale crotch patch) had started drinking at one of the airport bars, gotten semi-sloshed, asked the crew for another drink and couldn’t handle anymore. I find it hard to believe that they could walk onto the aircraft completely sober and become so drunk in such a short period of time purely from what was served from the aircraft bars – the flight simply isn’t long enough, nor the service quick enough for that to happen. What would be most likely is if they bought their ‘Walking Johnny’ in the Duty Free in the terminal and drank it on the plane. This is what happened on my infamous Moscow flight, which was 1.5hrs longer and even then we saw only one guy walked off who had peed his pants. But 12 grown men urinating on the seat mid-flight must be an industry record surely...

It should be noted that we do carry seat covers on board. I mean, we have passengers who are motion sick and stain the seats every now and again, so this would need to be changed for the next sector, regardless as to whether it’s a turnaround or a layover. But we only stock 10 seat covers on the aircraft at any one time, so 2 seats on an overbooked flight were still wet by the time the cleaners were finished. We asked the ground staff to block the seats from sale but after the boarding had finished I looked at our passenger list and it said 54 in Business Class and 183 in Economy Class – Not a single seat was blocked from sale and every seat on the aircraft had someone’s behind on it. The strangest part of the whole day, for me anyway, was that neither one of the 2 passengers made a complaint of a wet seat. Simply unbelievable.

Aside from that, the flight wasn’t too eventful. The Captain said he was going to hire a Hyderabadi stripper for me for my Birthday, which made me laugh a little. I’ve never been one for strippers, so I had to pass. After hearing of the horror occurrence in Economy all I really wanted for my Birthday was to chill out at home for the rest of the day, complete with a VERY long bath. With a shower in bleach to start off with.

Image from here.

Labels: Airline Stuff, Galley Gossip, Work

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