*Note: Please do not confuse with The Different Kinds of Passengers Cabin Crew Hates Most - which I may write in the near future...This post refers to people in general, friends/relatives/strangers/passengers/RonaldMcDonalds...
1) People taking photos of us without our permission.
What I hate most when I was flying was that people would just go snapping photos of us in our uniform, without the basic courtesy of asking us for permission to do so. (I'm not talking about taking a photo of Starbucks and we happen to be in it kind of picture here.)
We may look like a walking exhibition and indeed when we don our uniform, especially the signature SQ Kebaya, we may look Instagram-worthy...but we are not Zoo animals (even at the Zoo you pay admission fee to go in, gawk and take photos of the animals, and NO, the air ticket you purchased isn't bundled with unlimited photography of the cabin crew).
Point is, I'm very sure that if you actually have the courtesy to request for us to be in your photo, we will most definitely oblige with a big smile - albeit fake.
Mainly cos nobody wants to get caught (especially in our uniform) with weird non-camera-ready faces like this:
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And if any of us happen to be in our less glamorous self, PLEASE BE NICE, at least censor the face.
(I'm not censoring this face cos this photo has already been circulated online since 2009. Poor girl!)
www.dailymail.co.uk
We will love it if you will just censor all our photos like this, however mundane.
2) People taking photos of us when we are working, i.e. in the midst of a meal service.
Cos we will most likely look like this:
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And even if you do ask us for our permission...
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We have only 8 legs and a face, there isn't a free one to entertain your photography request ya?
3) People ask us the million dollar question - where do we fly to.
And when I reply "Oh all around the world, you know, wherever SQ flies to...we would get to fly to!" and they go "SQ got fly where ah?" Hello, SQ flies to 65 international destinations in 35 countries (as of December 2013), you really want me to go through the list with you??
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4) People assume and envy that we have a lot of time when we layover at each country.
Now let me list you the few stations that SQ flies to (before I quit) that we actually have more than 72 hours (3 days) from the point of landing to the point of departure:
1) Moscow/Houston - certain patterns give us a long stay in Moscow but a short stay in Houston, while certain pattern gives us a short stay in Moscow but a short stay in Houston. There are a variations of pattern for this flight, sometimes, 1 and half day Moscow, 3 days Houston, then back to Moscow for 1 day.
2) Barcelona/SaoPaulo - well this is a pattern I have never done before cos I opted myself out of the route as crew are required to take the Yellow Fever jab to go on this route. But it is something like Moscow/Houston pattern, I think.
3) 8 days Rome - very rare flight to get roster-ed, I was only roster-ed once in my entire 6 years flying and I had something important that week and had to change the flight away.
4) Milan/Barcelona - Barcelona is a shuttle flight in this pattern, so we don't get to alight in Barcelona, thus making Milan a more than 72 hours layover in the summer.
Hm. I think that's about it - unless there are new patterns that came up that I don't know of (or I may actually be wrong about the above since I have quit flying for a year...some things are getting fuzzy now). The rest of the stations... let's put it this way, if it's more than 10 hours flight time, then our layover there will be around 48 hours (usually not more than 48 hours) from point of landing to departure; and for flights with less than 10 hours flight time it varies between 15 hours to barely hitting 24-26 hours most of the time.
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And yeah maybe you think 24 hours is a lot of time, please consider that most passengers take their smelly ass own sweet time to disembark most of the time and by the time we clear customs, get on the bus and travel to the hotel, we're usually 2 hours short. And then personally, unpacking and showering takes up a lot of my time cos I usually have to shampoo 2-3 times to remove all the hairspray from my hair ARGH. And then it's time to hit the sack...cos you know it's so much hard work just walking around in the plane to look pretty. By the time I wake up I have barely 5-6 hours (sometimes 3-4 hours, depending on how many whales were on board, ordering all that cocktail non stop like happy hour - I'm talking about YOU AUSTRALIANS!) before check out.
SO yeah, envy much still?
5) The amount of hairspray, lipstick, nail polish we have to use.
SQ is very strict with cabin crew's grooming. We even have a color chart that we have to conform to. Hm, maybe I should say most airlines are, cos after all we are wearing the uniform of a job which is highly stereotyped as 'you not pretty cannot be stewardess' right?
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But when you see all those advertisement of SQ girls with their hair down and flying around like this, it's a April Fool's Joke.
None of us are allowed to have our hair down like that if the hair is touching our shoulders. And for the ones with short and untied hair, they have to make sure that the hair doesn't get blown around when there is wind or doesn't fall to our cheeks when they bend over. For the ones who bun/french twist/plaid their hair, they have to make sure that the bun/twist/plaid wouldn't come loose in the mid of the flight or have baby hair sticking around, etc. SO how do we make sure of that? We spray our hair with loads of hairspray until it's like wearing a helmet on our heads.
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Same goes to our make up, we have to have the very same look when we first welcome you on board till the moment we bid you goodbye, which means our lipstick needs to be touched up almost every time we eat/drink.
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And by the way, if you didn't already know, blue eye shadow (or brown for the warm tones ladies - like me) and cherry red lipstick have been the colors of SQ girls for a bloody long time.
And they recently -finally- changed the palette colors, when the cherry red lipstick is starting to be in again. Duh.
I don't think other airlines are as strict as this? I don't know, I may be wrong. But sometimes we will have an irritating senior crew coming to me and point to the grooming guidelines and say, "Hey how come your fake eyelashes look longer than 1 cm? Your red lipstick also not the approve red on the color chart! You have 2 strands of baby hair near your side burn you need to spray more hair spray. Or I can write you in."
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6) Seniority isn't like how it used to be anymore.
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So when I first joined, the culture is all about seniority. If my senior colleague have not had their meal, I shall not have unless I'm dying of gastritis. If there's only 1 beef meal left, I shall not touch it in case my senior colleague wants to have it. If I'm the most junior on the flight, I shall volunteer to call everyone on the flight to arrange for a meal together. If my senior colleague says the coffee has to be served on plastic cup, I will not argue that the black and white says that coffee has to be served on a mug. If my senior crew wants me to clear the entire cabin myself, I will do it without him/her even asking me to.
But 6 years later when I got senior in my rank, everyone start getting scared of the junior crew. Cos the junior crew are very vocal now.
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They are not afraid to rant - rant on blog, rant on Facebook, rant to other crew, rant to management...got a lot of people into trouble.
So I basically went through all that shit for that 6 years for nothing.
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7) People like to say you complain so much about being a cabin crew then don't fly la!
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Oh so you love you job so much you don't complain and whine about anything?
Why don't you quit your job then?
We all work because we need money, because we have a house to pay for, because we have a family to feed; we don't work cos we bloody love it.
Every job has its ups and its downs, we may stay for the ups but that doesn't mean we can't whine about the downs.
If you are so zen and don't whine about shit, you wouldn't even be bothered with my whining. So why don't you go live in the Himalayan mountains and be by yourself.
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Lastly, my disclaimer: I'm no longer a crew, thus no longer am I upholding the image of Singapore Airlines. I'm a blogger and sometimes there's a need to exaggerate so please don't take my word as it is. In other words, don't sue me OK!
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