Flying by the Seat of My Pants: Flight Attendant Adventures on a Wing and a Prayer Read Online Free PDF Page B

there’s a reason they call it that,” she told me. “It’s for people who are too blind to see the way.”
    “Grandma, it’s better to be lonely single than lonely married.”
    “Rubbish,” she said. “Now get out there and get yourself a husband.”
    When I met TomI had almost given up on waiting for God to bring me someone. I was thirty-three years old and felt 103. I was working for my second airline, West Coast Airlines. (When I was a little girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest, we used to watch commercials that said, “West Coast Airlines, the Only Way to Fly.” And now here I was working for that airline.)
    My fellow flight attendant trainees (all ninety-nine of them) and I were in Los Angeles to begin six weeks of training. Each airline has a unique training for its flight attendants. On our first night in town, before we started the official training, three of us talked the hotel van driver into taking us to Ralph’s grocery store in the Manhattan Beach Village Mall. We wanted to stock up on food so we could save our per diem and use it for more important things—like getting our nails done.
    It was in the fresh fruit section that two of us noticed a good-looking guy across the aisle, staring at our friend Mary. He seemed to be lingering around us, listening to our conversation, and falling in love.
    Finally he spoke to us. “You girls are in flight attendant training?” He said it with a reverence usually used to address a movie star or something.
    “Yes, it’s our first day. We’re starting six weeks of training.”
    “That’s cool.”
    “Yeah, there are one hundred of us staying at a hotel in town, near LAX.”
    “That’s cool.” He looked at Mary, and then he said to allthree of us. “Listen, you guys, I’m a sales rep to aerospace engineers who work at companies here in Los Angeles. Why don’t we get a party going? I mean, I’ll get all the guys together, and you can get all your flight attendant friends, and we can meet at the restaurant in this mall on Friday night.”
    This was still in the days when flight attendants were hired, in part, because of their looks. All the flight attendants were actually told that they had to be tall and thin, have no blemishes, and have straight teeth. So I guess this engineer-sales rep felt the airlines had already done the visual screening for him. Or maybe he had heard our motto: “Marry me, fly free.”
    His suggestion struck us as weird. We thought he was nuts or blowing smoke. But Mary liked him, so she gave him the number to our hotel.
    The next Thursday night, the guy called our room and said, “I’ve got twenty-one guys for the party tomorrow. How many girls did you recruit?”
    Mary and I had each picked up a different phone, and a third roommate was listening in. We all looked at each other and said, “Just us.”
    We weren’t stupid. Three girls, twenty-one guys—we’d have our pick. Plus, if the guys turned out to be odd (enginerds instead of engineers), we wouldn’t be responsible for telling any other trainees about some boring party.
    The truth was, I didn’t really want to go to that party, butI was afraid of these L.A. types and went to keep my two girlfriends from getting involved with anyone who might be something worse than boring. Once I got there, I immediately started to hate the whole party.
    In my old personnel job, we used to say that the decision to hire is made in the first four minutes. I felt the same way about looking for Husband Material. It wasn’t that I could decide if he was the one for me in four minutes, but I could certainly decide if he was someone I wanted to get to know. And I had already eliminated everyone at this party, or at least everyone I’d met.
    After thirty minutes, I wanted to leave. I went looking for my girlfriends to tell them I was outta there. I was almost out the door when I saw him.
    Across a crowded room, he stood talking to two other guys. He was tall and so good-looking he