Tales of a high-altitude coffee and tea dispenser

by hiigaran

2: Something Stinks!

So, you want to be a flight attendant, huh? Alright...Flitter, was it? Well, let’s clear up a few things first. Whatever glamor you think is in this job is likely highly exaggerated. Don’t get me wrong, you get paid to see the world—quite well, I might add—and there are many perks to the job, but there are also plenty of challenges faced when you need to take on the role of a chef, bartender, doctor, firefighter, psychiatrist, nanny, mechanic, plumber, safety inspector, mind reader, and much more, all at the same time. Some of these challenges are rarely faced. Others may be a more common occurrence.

I’ll give you one such example. More often than not, you’ll find one sense in particular being overpowered as you’re walking down the aisle. You could be slowly making your way down with your meal cart, row by row, slinging a choice of hay-bacon or scrambled egg breakfast trays towards passengers in the early hours of the day, when all of a sudden, you become the next victim to some businessmare’s flatulence; be it the silent-but-deadly that resulted from the regretful burrito they ate the day before, or the result of altitude causing gas to expand and give way to a series of tunes that sound as if they belong in Princess Celestia’s fanfare.

That being said, most by-products of questionable diets are thankfully short-lived, like those open-top garbage carts passing you by in Ponyville. One can merely hold their breath and move on, or pretend they can’t smell a thing, while their eyes water with more ferocity than a cook chopping a bagful of onions. But if you’re stuck operating in the galley and discover that the stench of rotten eggs and exotic cheese is not emanating from the sub-par airline food we force feed to everypony, and is wafting instead from a passenger in an adjacent row, you’ll soon find yourself seriously considering ramming a meal cart through the fuselage, so that the oxygen masks can drop with decompression.

Back when I was still a junior, mere weeks after finishing my probation, I had operated a flight from Appleloosa to Fillydelphia. I was preparing the pre-departure services, which included setting up a few trays of hot towels, as well as some menus for distribution, when a married couple confronted me, shouting “We refuse to sit next to these ponies!” Naturally, my first reaction was to ask what was wrong with the passengers in question.

“It’s that group of Earth ponies,” the wife responded, trying to find words for the next part. “They have—I mean—It’s their—”

“They reek!” her husband stated bluntly.

As I asked the couple for their seat numbers and headed out into the cabin to investigate, I stopped dead in my tracks, as if I had run face-first into a brick wall. Sure enough, an aroma more pungent than the wonderbolts’ locker room assaulted my nasal cavity, coming at me like a Manehattan mugger in broad daylight. It was brutal. Unlike anything I’ve smelled before. Taking a few steps back, I could see the surrounding passengers leaning away from the source. Fillies and colts were visibly smothering themselves. A couple were fanning their surroundings with one of the magazines from their seat pockets. One attempted to use a sick bag as a respirator and promptly fainted.

From the opposite end of the aircraft, I spotted one of my colleagues leading a passenger to his seat. Drawing nearer, she hit that invisible wall and froze, her face contorted into one of absolute horror. The kind of expression she would make if she found her husband in bed with another mare, or perhaps a stallion.

Following the crop-circle pattern of leaning passengers to the center, I reluctantly approached a group of sixteen laborers, seated in four rows of the D, E, F and G seats located between the twin aisles of the plane. They chatted among themselves, either oblivious to the fact they smelled as if they came fresh out of a mine, or under the impression that they emitted a soothing lavender fragrance.

Deciding to abort at the last moment, I instead communicated with the seniors, and we consulted the holy book of flight attendants, the operations manual. We came across a particular section detailing the conditions for the acceptance of passengers. Here it outlined the types of passengers that we have a right to refuse, such as those who are intoxicated, carry a communicable disease, those without a doctor’s certificate for health conditions that may pose a risk during flight, those behaving inappropriately so as to offend other passengers...I could go on and on. Anyway, among the points in this list is one that allows us to refuse carriage of any who may have offensive body odor not caused by a disability. Those with low or nonexistent standards of personal hygiene are therefore a no-go.

Naturally when confronted, the laborers were offended, throwing their hooves in the air and becoming argumentative. However, when told that we would not depart until the issue had been rectified, they thankfully left the aircraft promptly, met by a member of the ground staff at the bridge who had somehow procured a sufficient supply of soaps and deodorants. After a fifteen minute delay—the first I have ever seen appreciated by the rest of the passengers—the laborers returned, clearly enraged, but no longer causing the orchid cuttings hanging from the bulkheads to wither away.

...Which was quite odd, since they were plastic...

Unfortunately, it’s not always as easy to rid an aircraft of those who are nasally offensive. More often than not, it ends with the passenger trying to sue the airline for discrimination, or loudly proclaiming to the crew that they will never fly with us again and storming off the aircraft with an escort, blissfully unaware that the rest of the passengers cheered and applauded for all the wrong reasons.